Human Lifeworlds by David Dunér Göran Sonesson

Author:David Dunér,Göran Sonesson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang AG
Published: 2016-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

This is an acute observation, as far as it goes, but, to the extent that it offers any explanation for the city being the agent of human specificity, it seems to take for granted that buildings, and artefacts generally, produce behaviour and even states of mind, rather than the reverse. Already in the introduction to this chapter, recalling the tradition from Hall to Hammad, we suggested that, at least in part, the reverse may be the case – and that, also given the artefacts, behaviour, not to mention states of mind, are continuously renegotiated in relation to the artefacts. Another problem with Allen’s observation (as we will see below in Section 8.5) is that cities, at least in some sense of the term, existed well before tenth century Europe.

According to Aron Gurwitsch (1957, 1985), every perceptual situation is structured into a theme, a thematic field, and a margin. The theme is that ← 214 | 215 → which is most directly within the focus of attention. Both the thematic field and the margin are in contiguity with the theme, but the thematic field is, in addition, connected to the theme at the level of meaning. When attending to the theme, we are easily led to change the focus to something within the same thematic field. Changing what was earlier in the margin into a theme, on the other hand, may require some kind of outside incitement. In the margin are normally found some items of consciousness that always accompany us, such as our own stream of consciousness, our own body, and the extension of the Lifeworld beyond what is presently perceivable. But the margin also contains all items that are not currently our theme, nor connected to this theme, but which are still relevant to us in the present. Thus, while several things cannot be thematic at the same time, unless they are unified into one item, they can still be present in the thematic field, or they may appear somewhere in the margin. As Sven Arvidson (2006) has observed, Gurwitsch offers the experiential background on which the study of attention finally makes sense.

If we now return to the boulevard experience, we realise that the boulevard, as a trajectory populated by other people, is all the time present at the margin of the pedestrian’s consciousness, some items of it becoming now and then promoted to thematic rank and then sinking back into the margin.

To every true flaneur, as we have met him (a figure which by default has been thought of as being male) in literature and in the cinema, the boulevard, the crowded and heterogeneous city, is part of the thematic field, although the thematic focus will be continuously shifting. Actually, the boulevard must be at least somewhere in the margin of consciousness already for us to observe the Goffmanean manoeuvre of avoidance, allowing us not to collide with other people in the street. In the particular instance recounted by Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground, this very act of shock avoidance becomes the prominent theme of the field.

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