#consc

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#freud #horses #lacan #language #post-structuralism

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#confessed #consciousness #courage #display #endurance

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#may #nature #psychical #unconscious #whatever

I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding. ↗

— Jackie Cooper

#dying #good #good work #half-hour #hope

I never studied directing and I never really thought about doing it, and then I just found myself in that situation and tried it. I like to be observing everything else, and I get self-conscious in front of the camera. ↗

— Sofia Coppola

#camera #directing #doing #else #everything

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make. ↗

— John Corigliano

#choices #gotten #i #i think #make

I don't stick to special techniques, conscious techniques. ↗

— Marion Cotillard

#i #special #stick #techniques

Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change. ↗

— Stephen Covey

#change #choose #conscience #creative #every

The years between 1800 and 1825 were distinguished, so far as our domestic development was concerned, by the growth of the Western pioneer Democracy in power and self-consciousness. ↗

— Herbert Croly

#concerned #democracy #development #distinguished #domestic

The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach. ↗

— Aleister Crowley

#always #anything #assumes #been #conscience