Queer Theory & Futurism

[alice wellintown]

Freud:
It does in fact look as though anxiety-dreams make it impossible to
assert as a general proposition (based on the examples quoted in my
last chapter) that dreams are wish-fulfillments; indeed they seem to
stamp any such proposition as an absurdity.
Nevertheless, there is no great difficulty in meeting these apparently
conclusive objections. It is only necessary to take notice of the fact
that my theory is not based on a consideration of the manifest content
of dreams but refers to the thoughts which are shown by the work of
interpretation *** to lie behind dreams***. We must make a contrast
between the manifest and the latent content of dreams. (Freud, 1900,
p. 135)


Behind or beneath Dreams. It's under Dream. There is a force, in
Marx', under the apparent force that brings about change.

In Nietzsche what rises to consciousness is small and common. It is
what is under or beneath consciousness that is the best of human
thought.

Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it;
the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of
all this—the most superficial and worst part—for only this conscious
thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of
communication...consciousness does not really belong to man's
individual existence but rather to his social or herd
nature...Consequently, given the best will in the world to understand
ourselves as individually as possible, "to know ourselves," each of us
will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not
individual but "average."...Fundamentally, all our actions are
altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely
individual...whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token
shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all
becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption,
falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization.
Ultimately, the growth of consciousness becomes a danger; and anyone
who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a
disease.

This is all very Romantic.