The verb, noun and dash of consciousness : on two aspects of the quotidian condition

• Main Author: Pavlovits, Daniel Imre
• Published: Goldsmiths College (University of London) 2017
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.732799

This thesis examines the respective poiesis of two elemental aspects of our quotidian condition as they have come to be assembled in our present modernity. The two aspects under consider-ation are drawn out from two primary pieces of literature. The first piece of literature to be put to use is Georges Perec’s novel Life – a user’s manual from which the presence of the present and related flow of Time and its relation to our quotidian condition is discussed, whilst the second piece of literature put to use is James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from which the poiesis of life forces on our quotidian condition, as derivative of the formative life of the main protagonist of this novel, is discussed. The two novels in question aim to serve as a ‘mirror’ in the Benjaminian mode of an Erfahrung, through which two elemental aspects of our quotidian condition might be grasped. The thesis aims to analyse how these two aspects of our quotidian condition have come to be assembled and constructed historically, culturally, socially and personally, and to examine how our quotidian condition actually is as such in reference to their poiesis. In doing so a poetics of two elemental conditions of our ordinary life is hope to be drawn, and that for the purpose of bringing each aspect’s respective constitutive mechanics to a horizonal level of consciousness. The aimed for purpose of the thesis is for each reader to begin to think through their quotidian condition again for themselves, and that any resultant understanding be put to a political use through a particular ‘art of living’.