Abstract
The paper presents four conceptual modalities of the relationship between the city center and the periphery in general (off - crack - decay - dependency) as conditions for the rhetoric of the potential of peripheral areas (revision, revitalization, etc.) which draw back and respond to them. We understand these modes as based on discursive processes and strategies of peripheralization and centralization (Henri Lefebvre, Mustafa Dikeç) on a vertical line within the partage du sensible (J.
Rancière) where the periphery is always related to the center, which is the guarantor identity. Thus related to the center, the rhetoric of potential is guid ed by the logic of scarcity and remedy.
We do not intend to address this logic at the level of social reality and politics (and to question or affirm it at this level), but rather at the level where "forms separate from causes and purposes and create a self--sufficient system of values" (Roland Barthes) when it enters the field of aesthetic, discursive analysis. Opposite (or next to) we build the potential of autonomy.
In this case, we were inspired by concepts such as Off-modern (Svetlana Boym) or peripheral aesthetics (Fredric Jameson), etc. By developing autonomy, we want to open up / find a horizontal plane that reflects those peripheral aspects that are not center--dependent, and thus escape the logic of scarcity and remedy.
We will try to demonstrate problem on a concrete example of Ústí nad Labem.