Teresa de Lauretis Quotes

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.

The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ that changes in relation to the environment.

On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.

Thus the same object may supply a practical perception to one person and a speculative one to another, or the same person may perceive it partly practically and partly speculatively.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.

The first meaning of 'cognitive' for us is that observations of others are made phenomenologically: i.e., by attempting to take the role of the other, to see things from his or her conscious viewpoint.

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive knowledge.

Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don't. Usually I think about my condominium.

Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction.

Concepts are mental images.

When you burn the chair, you suddenly realize that the chair in your mind did not burn or disappear

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

You talk of our having an idea; we do not have an idea. The idea has us, and martyrs us, and scourges us, and drives us into the arena to fight and die for it, whether we want to or not.

The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.

Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.

We invent mind-space inside our own heads as well as the heads of others ... we assume these 'spaces' without question. They are a part of what it is to be conscious. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioural world that do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them.

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition.