The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 425-437, May 2022.

At the centre of theories of film form is the idea that the montage of different scenes produces cinematic time. Montage creates a conflict between different shots, and time (as a purely functional relationship between shots) arises out of montage as an abstract element.

Despite striking parallels between their philosophies and artistic work, there have been no prior dedicated studies of the reinforcing ideas of Siegfried Kracauer and Andrei Tarkovsky. I contend with other interpreters that Kracauer’s philosophy of film is best understood as a form of revelationism, with strong sociological and ontological theses about the nature of modern psychological life and the medium specificity of film. Essentially, Kracauer felt that certain films which adhere to what he called “truly cinematic” content by (...) depicting the naturalistic “flow of life” have the potential to awaken in viewers a psychological reconnection to the concrete material world, in contrast to the experience of abstraction characteristic of modernity. Having presented Kracauer’s philosophy, I outline strong convergences in the philosophy and aesthetics of Tarkovsky, and illustrate these parallels through close analysis of Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. In the third section of this article, I further explore the converging revelationist philosophies of Kracauer–Tarkovsky by confronting them with critiques which were levied by Theodor Adorno (against Kracauer) and Fredric Jameson (against Tarkovsky). The reconstructed debate between these four critic/practitioners touches on central issues for film criticism, including methodological approaches of ontology versus dialectics and the question of how to represent utopic impulses in cinema. (shrink)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 masterpiece Nostalghia allows us to rethink our ordinary notion of nostalgia and move beyond the idea of nostalgia as sentimental longing for the past, the fruitless yearning that allows us to avoid living in the present. The film suggests that nostalgia can help us notice that which is not a part of our current situation and to introduce new threads into the fabric of our world. Because of nostalgia, we become aware of perforations in the (...) existing order of things and, as a result, become capable of altering the status quo. The protagonist of Tarkovsky’s film, Gorchakov, a Russian poet visiting Italy, shows us that nostalgia is a violent voyage that never leads home but only helps us find and found a new–and always temporary–dwelling place. Nostalgia, then, is a journey to the home that never was, but to the home that might be. The final sequence of the film beautifully confirms this by placing Gorchakov next to his Russian home that turns out to be inside the ruins of the Cistercian abbey of San Galgano in Italy. This cinematic merging of two very different places and cultures creates a new world for Gorchakov and asks us to continue creating the places in which we happen to find ourselves today. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a reconsideration of the complex concept of mimesis, as it is deployed in the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno, which, I argue, provides some interesting and original avenues through which we may interpret some of the infinitely engaging if enigmatic films of Andrei Tarkovsky. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first, I explore Adorno's development and usage of the concept of mimesis, as well as the latter's fall into disfavour (...) since Habermas's influential 'communicative turn'. In the second part, I undertake to read some of Tarkovsky's work in an Adornian vein, with the hope of reconfiguring mimesis as a valuable and fruitful concept in understanding the somatic and extra-discursive elements within communication. What I call Tarkovsky's 'mimetic method' can be seen to follow Adorno's epistemological principle of the 'preponderance of the object', while testifying to the mimetic potential of non-discursive communication. In so doing, Tarkovsky's filmic work - with Adorno's critical theory - refutes the purely linguistic/discursive grounds of Habermasian communication. This implicit refutation works on two levels. It enacts forms of mimetic construction, at the first level, and calls forth acts of interpretation and mimetic reception, at the second. I argue that these features are in need of greater attention and elaboration. The works of Adorno and Tarkovsky, in my view, provide useful grounds for challenging and enhancing existing understandings of aesthetic and philosophic communication, by more fully appreciating their interconnectedness and complementarity. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that the films of Andrei Tarkovsky are particularly suitable for inducing feelings of the numinous. This suitability is a formal rather than semantic feature of his films, and is tied indelibly to what film scholars call ‘suture’. I with a summary of what film theorists mean by ‘suture’, before providing a principled defence of the Merleau-Pontian suture theory outlined by George Butte. Second, I will demonstrate that, in spite of the strength of Butte’s (...) formulation, the numinousness of Tarkovsky’s films pose an analytical challenge to his suture theory. Finally, I will then provide my own extension of Butte’s suture theory, arguing that, by virtue of the formal properties they possess, we encounter Tarkovsky’s films more like religious objects than ordinary films. The tenor of these encounters is why Tarkovsky’s films are appropriate loci for feelings of the numinous. (shrink)

The science fiction films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1973) and Stalker (1979), are complex responses to the repressive atmosphere of Brezhnev’s rule, after the 7-year delay in seeing Andrei Rublev (1971) released publicly. By using science fiction—a genre that Tarkovsky openly maligned—he was able to fly beneath the radar of State censorship, and develop a nuanced response to the application of Marxist theory of religion in the Soviet experience. Arguing in these films (and in others in (...) his oeuvre) that humans still need the affective dimension of religion (though not the hierarchical, institutional elements of it that Marx had identified with sedation), Tarkovsky hid within his science fiction films a thoroughgoing critique of the Soviet application of Marx. This article uses the concept of “war machine” from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to analyze how Tarkovsky did this, and demonstrates that Tarkovsky’s engagement with Marx’s philosophy in these two films shares much in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s way of understanding human meaning making. (shrink)

En su libro The Cinematic Footprint (2012), la teórica de los estudios sobre el cine Nadia Bozak propone un análisis de la producción cinematográfica basado en su relación con los consumos y los recursos naturales de los que ésta depende. Desde este punto de vista, este artículo parte de tres escenas de la filmografía del realizador ruso Andrei Tarkovsky para examinar, desde las condiciones materiales de su producción, un campo de interacciones entre imagen y transformación del paisaje más (...) allá de la representación. El trabajo de Tarkovsky es entonces analizado en este texto desde el marco de las relaciones trabadas a lo largo del siglo XX entre imagen, extractivismo y crecimiento vegetal. En particular, los planos examinados son puestos en relación con programas de colonización agraria, agricultura de precisión y técnicas de reforestación como el bombardeo de semillas. El contraste entre la naturaleza extractivista de la mediación por la imagen en estos casos y el carácter de "práctica de cine vegetal" con el que ha sido descrito el cine de Tarkovsky (Uhlin 2015) invitan a rearticular la diferencia entre imagen y crecimiento vegetal en términos de los llamados "medios elementales" introducidos durante la última década en el ámbito de la teoría de los medios. (shrink)

En la película de Andrei Tarkovski _Sacrificio_ el mundo vive una amenaza de III Guerra Mundial apocalíptica, a la vez que las relaciones familiares del protagonista se hallan en una crisis que parece definitiva. Pero un último ritual tal vez invierta la situación. El artículo argumenta que el planteamiento y la cosmovisión de este gran clásico del cine pueden interpretarse según los códigos simbólicos de la alquimia, empapados de teología cristiana y de la mitología y la cosmología de la (...) Antigüedad, con Hermes como patrón, aunque el director lo lograra de una manera probablemente involuntaria, debido a sus intereses poéticos y espirituales. (shrink)

In this article I examine Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1962 film Ivan’s Childhood. The film tells a story about a twelve-year old Russian boy, whose family was killed by the Germans at the onset of WWII. Orphaned and dispossessed, Ivan began to scout for the Soviet troops. Eventually, he was captured, tortured and executed by the Gestapo. Using a wide gamut of mythopoetic “articulations,” in this film, Tarkovsky shows how Ivan’s victimization affected him beyond repair, leading to the erosion (...) of his child identity and the emergence of a traumatic duality. The film therefore is not only a poignant condemnation of the war, but a disclosure of the victim phenomenon carried out by mythopoetic means. In my analysis of Ivan’s Childhood, I approach this phenomenon by focusing on the effects of trauma on the child, with a special emphasis on dreaming. For my theoretic, I employ the phenomenology of the child. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to outline a Spinozian-Deleuzian analysis of audio-visual experience and to combine this account with an embodied cognitive perspective on cinema. Thus, film experience integrates affection and intellection and is not a passive and contemplative phenomenon, but a constructive interaction that involves a creative encounter between the screen and the viewer. Furthermore, I will address the role of sad passions and the problematic relation between creation and resistance, also by drawing upon Primo Levi’s work on (...) memory and on the shame of being human. Consequently, I will argue that my Spinozian-Deleuzian perspective involves an idea of cinema and art as ethically productive events since they allow a creative opposition against all those forces that mortify and enclose existence. Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Andrei Rublev offers the possibility to develop this discussion; in this biopic, the life of the famous Russian painter is pervaded by problematic questions upon the nature of God, the necessity of Evil, the role of art within a world of violence and misery and, at the same time, the tension and the marvel in the discovery of the real. Following the ideas on spectatorship outlined by Deleuze and combined with Spinoza’s thought, we can say that the film makes us perceive these issues through the embodiment and the engagement of the relations it describes. At the same time, the movie gives us the possibility to re-discuss these terrible questions revealing the active and productive nature of art, as different sequences (like the enigmatic prologue) demonstrate. A further aim of this article is, then, to show how this assemblage of different concepts is possible through the vivid and interactive dimension of film experience. (shrink)

'Simulation, Simulacra and Solaris ' examines and contrasts the 1971 science-fiction film Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky with the 2002 film Solaris by Steven Soderbergh. Our text argues for the significance of simulation and simulacra in relation to the conceptual framework of Solaris, adapting as our primary model Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and simulacra.

This article proposes an ecophilosophy of the cinema. It builds on Martin Heidegger’s articulation of art as ‘world-disclosing,’ and on a Whiteheadian and Deleuzian understanding of the universe as a lively and eventful place in which subjects and objects are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming. Accordingly, it proposes that cinema be considered a machine that produces or discloses worlds. These worlds are, at once, anthropomorphic, geomorphic, and biomorphic, with each of these registers mapping (...) onto the ‘three ecologies,’ in Felix Guattari’s terms, that make up the relational ontology of the world: the social, the material, and the mental or perceptual. Through an analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), I suggest that cinema ‘stalks’ the world, and that our appreciation of its potentials should similarly involve a kind of ‘stalking’ of its effects in the material, social, and perceptual dimensions of the world from which cinema emerges and to which it returns. (shrink)

Cet article s’inscrit dans le prolongement d’une recherche que je mène depuis une vingtaine d’années sur les rapports entre cinéma et pensée. En m’appuyant en particulier sur les réflexions de Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Edgar Morin, j’ai ainsi pu créer les concepts de « complexité esthétique », « noosphère filmique », « cinématographie des flux ». Suite à l’évocation de créateurs-penseurs du cinéma muet d’avant-garde, sont ici abordés des films d’Amos Gitaï, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais et Andreï Tarkovski. (...) L’intitulé, « Les métaphores filmiques du cerveau » indique que l’approche de la relation cinéma-cerveau est d’ordre philosophique, mais également d’ordre poétique. Si le cinéma est à même de donner forme à la pensée, il invente aussi des circuits cérébraux — sonores et visuels — qui lui permettent de devenir forme « pensante ». This paper is a continuation of my research over the past twenty years on the relationship between cinema and thought. By relying in particular on the reflections of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Edgar Morin, I was able to create the concepts of “aesthetic complexity”, “filmic noosphere” and “cinematography of flows”. Following the evocation of creative thinkers coming from avant-garde movies of the silent era, here I discuss films from Amos Gitaï, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Andreï Tarkovsky. My title, “The brain’s cinematic metaphors”, indicates that my approach to cinema-brain relationship is philosophical, but also of a poetic nature. If cinema is able to shape thought, it also invents metaphorical brain paths—audio and visual—that allow it to become a “thinking” form. (shrink)

Comment le silence agit-il au cinéma? Qu'est-ce qui permet d'identifier ce phénomène? Implique-t-il la disparition intégrale de la matière sonore ou seulement sa minimalisation à l'intérieur d'un film? Son intervention, ponctuelle ou durable, tend à engager une raréfaction, voire une suppression, des paroles et de la musique, mais pas forcément de tout bruit. Des lieux particulièrement silencieux, ainsi que le mutisme ou la surdité d'un personnage, sont également propices à l'instauration de telles situations audiovisuelles. Cet ouvrage analyse, à travers une (...) approche généalogique et herméneutique, la présence du silence dans le cinéma contemporain sur le double principe d'héritages figuratifs et de ruptures discursives. Il s'appuie sur un corpus de films réalisés entre autres par Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras, Andrei Tarkovski, Theo Angelopoulos, Tsaï Ming-liang, Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa ou Sharunas Bartas. Au-delà des considérations esthétiques, le livre interroge aussi les valeurs anthropologiques, morales, sociales et/ou politiques qui se glissent derrière ces manifestations concrètes du silence. Celui-ci nous invite, tant sur le plan éthique que sensible, à repenser notre rapport fondamental au monde."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Matilda Mroz argues that cinema provides an ideal opportunity to engage with ideas of temporal flow and change. Temporality, however, remains an underexplored area of film analysis, which frequently discusses images as though they were still rather than moving. This book traces the operation of duration in cinema, and argues that temporality should be a central concern of film scholarship. In close readings of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and the ten short films that make up Krzysztof (...) Kielowski’s Decalogue series, Mroz highlights how film analysis must consider both particular moments in cinema which are critically significant, and the way in which such moments interrelate in temporal flux. She explores the concepts of duration and rhythm, resonance and uncertainty, affect, sense and texture, to bring a fresh perspective to film analysis and criticism. Essential reading for students and scholars in Film Studies, this engaging study will also be a valuable resource for critical theorists. (shrink)

El tiempo constituye la materia que el director de cine cincela y esculpe para crear sus películas. Así lo atestiguan geniales artistas como Andrei Tarkovski, Yashujiro Ozú o Alfred Hitchcock. ¿Qué relación existe entre la creación cinematográfica y la aprensión del tiempo, esa dimensión escurridiza y fantasmagórica sobre la que han reflexionado a lo largo de la historia filósofos como Platón, Aristóteles, San Agustín, Kant, Bergson o Heidegger, entre otros? El presente artículo realiza un recorrido por las reflexiones sobre (...) el tiempo de cineastas y filósofos y aporta ejemplos concretos de piezas cinematográficas que aclaran e iluminan diversos conceptos. El cinematógrafo fue capaz de registrar la realidad en movimiento, es decir, el paso del tiempo, y desde entonces el ser humano puede moldearlo a su antojo gracias al montaje y a los diferentes recursos narrativos de los que se sirve la técnica cinematográfica. Los cineastas trabajan a partir de un tiempo objetivo, medible y mecánico para transformar e incidir en el tiempo subjetivo e interior del ser humano, en el tiempo que según la filosofía de Bergson se forma en la conciencia humana a través de la intuición. Filosofía, antropología y cine se funden en estas líneas para aportar luz sobre una de las preguntas fundamentales de la reflexión del ser humano. (shrink)

Mapeando brevemente alguns eventos desencadeados pelo período denominado, por alguns cientistas, como Antropoceno, este estudo busca estabelecer um observatório deste período através da ótica do campo das artes, do cinema e da filosofia. Pretende-se compreender como práticas artísticas podem ser concebidas de forma a sublinhar as incoerências referentes à intervenção humana no sistema e na atmosfera terrestre. Para tal, este estudo recruta trabalhos de artistas como Alice Miceli, Andrei Tarkovsky e Jacob Kirkegaard, em suas potencialidades de prevenção, educação (...) e crítica em relação a distintas implicações relacionadas ao desastre nuclear de Chernobyl. Assim, é compreendida a possibilidade de trabalhos de arte em atuar como revisita histórica e análise geo-histórica, bem como meios de potencializar críticas às injustiças provocadas pelo Antropoceno.Palavras-chave: Arte contemporânea; Antropoceno; Energia nuclear; Justiça Climática. (shrink)

Since early modern times, art has paralleled religion in its response to technology as illustrated by Ruskin’s thoughts on the colour purple. Heidegger also turned to art, especially the poetry of Hölderlin, as an alternative to technology. Against the background of Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’, the question is asked whether the thoroughly technicized art of film can become a focus for such creative counter-technological thinking. A positive answer is developed with reference (...) to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia. (shrink)

During the late Soviet era, science fiction was one of the first zones of its ideological cosmos, registering the exhaustion of the communist utopia precisely within the literary genre aimed at its representation. In this article I consider the history of the “editing to death” of the Strugatsky brothers’ short novel Roadside Picnic as a representative case of the anti-utopian “uneasiness in civilization” of late actually existing socialism. Simultaneously with the censorship taming of the uneasiness, the Strugatsky’s science fiction dystopia (...) underwent a radical interpretation in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaptation Stalker as a Hegelian “good music with text”. In comparison to the censored edition, which is barely a timid emendation, ultimately yearning modestly for a good life during the most consumeristic and moderately repressive years of Soviet power, Tarkovsky’s aesthetically singular re-reading is truly a “Zone” of editing to death. (shrink)

:This article analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, focusing in particular on the film's remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique of rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-italictic allegory of world-destruction. At the same time, I suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds – cinematic but also cultural and natural – that characterises our historical mood, one that might be described as a deflationary apocalypticism (...) or melancholy modernity. From this perspective, Melancholia belongs to a genealogical lineage that links it with two earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar Bergman's Shame [Skammen] and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice . All three films share a concern with apocalypticism, world-sacrifice, and historical melancholia; but they also explore different responses to the imagined experience of a catastrophic loss of world. By examining these films in relation t.. (shrink)

This book explores the shared experiential ground of cinema, art, and architecture. Pallasmaa carefully examines how the classic directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky used architectural imagery to create emotional states in their movies. He also explores the startling similarities between the landscapes of painting and those of movies.

Com esse texto-experimento e como um cartógrafo, aventuramos nos espaços epensamentos erráticos, nômades, liso, de Stalker, filme do cineasta russo Andrei Tarkovski e doconto “O recado do morro” do escritor João Guimarães Rosa. De certa forma, o percurso elaboradopelas expedições, os três homens de Stalker e os cinco homens de “O recado do morro”, guardamalgumas vizinhanças que se desdobram sobre os problemas nos socius em que percorrem. O sociussobrecodifica os fluxos do desejo, buscando determiná-los, regulá-los. Ainda que sejam olharessingulares, (...) filme e literatura, avultam-lhes sensações problemáticas tendo em vista as maneirasinusitadas com que os caminhos se fazem no conto e no filme. Para esse experimento, utilizamosa geofilosofia imanente deleuzeguatarriana. (shrink)

Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out by David (...) Lewis. Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions. He then applies this analysis to explain how conventions work in language, morality, and law. Marmor clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism. Social Conventions is a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct. (shrink)

Some 60 years ago chemicals that intercalate between base pairs of duplex DNA were found to amplify frameshift mutagenesis. Surprisingly, the robust induction of frameshifts by intercalators still lacks a mechanistic model, leaving this classic phenomenon annoyingly intractable. A promising idea of asymmetric half‐intercalation‐stabilizing frameshift intermediates during DNA synthesis has never been developed into a model. Instead, researchers of frameshift mutagenesis embraced the powerful slipped‐mispairing concept that unexpectedly struggled with the role of intercalators in frameshifting. It is proposed that the (...) slipped mispairing and the half‐intercalation ideas are two sides of the same coin. Further, existing findings are reviewed to test predictions of the combined “half‐intercalation into the slipped‐mispairing intermediate” model against accumulated knowledge. The existence of potential endogenous intercalators and the phenomenon of “DNA bookmarks” reveal ample possibilities for natural frameshift mutagenisis in the cell. From this alarming perspective, it is discussed how the cell could prevent genome deterioration from frameshift mutagenesis. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive defence of legal positivism on the basis of a novel account of social conventions. Marmor argues that the law is founded on constitutive conventions, and that consequently moral values cannot determine what the law is.

The book builds on recent work in pragmatics and speech-act theory to explain how, and to what extent, legal content is determined by linguistic considerations. At the same time, the analysis shows that some of the unique features of communication in the legal domain - in particular, its strategic nature - can be employed to put pressure on certain assumptions in philosophy of language. This enables a more nuanced picture of how semantic and pragmatic determinants of communication work in complex (...) and large-scale systems such as law. (shrink)

"As novelist and poet Andrei Codrescu points out in the essay that accompanies this selection of photographs from the Getty Museum's collection, Evans's photographs are the work of an artist whose temperament was distinctly at odds with Beals's impassioned rhetoric. Evans's photographs of Cuba were made by a young, still maturing artist who - as Codrescu argues - was just beginning to combine his early, formalist aesthetic with the social concerns that would figure prominently in his later work."--Jacket.

In this paper I demonstrate that the quantum correlations of polarization observables used in Bell’s argument against local realism have to be interpreted as conditional quantum correlations. By taking into account additional sources of randomness in Bell’s type experiments, i.e., supplementary to source randomness, I calculate the complete quantum correlations. The main message of the quantum theory of measurement is that complete correlations can be essentially smaller than the conditional ones. Additional sources of randomness diminish correlations. One can say another (...) way around: transition from unconditional correlations to conditional can increase them essentially. This is true for both classical and quantum probability. The final remark is that classical conditional correlations do not satisfy Bell’s inequality. Thus we met the following conditional probability dilemma: either to use the conditional quantum probabilities, as was done by Bell and others, or complete quantum correlations. However, in the first case the corresponding classical conditional correlations need not satisfy Bell’s inequality and in the second case the complete quantum correlations satisfy Bell’s inequality. Thus in neither case we have a problem of mismatching of classical and quantum correlations. The whole structure of Bell’s argument was based on identification of conditional quantum correlations with unconditional classical correlations. (shrink)

Some quantitative results obtained by proof mining take the form of Herbrand disjunctions that may depend on additional parameters. We attempt to elucidate this fact through an extension to first-order arithmetic of the proof of Herbrand’s theorem due to Gerhardy and Kohlenbach which uses the functional interpretation.

Extended Abstract This book introduces and develops a new, universal method of the scientific comprehension of reality providing the objective, ...

The purpose of this essay is to explore some of the main pragmatic aspects of communication within the legal context. It will be argued that in some crucial respects, the pragmatics of legal language is unique, involving considerations that are not typically present in ordinary conversational contexts. In particular, certain normative considerations that are typically settled in a regular conversational context are unresolved and potentially contentious in the legal case. On the other hand, the essay also argues that a careful (...) distinction between various pragmatic aspects of language use enables us to offer some generalizations about types of pragmatic enrichment that could be taken to form, or not to form, part of what is actually determined by legal expressions. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the nature of consciousness within the framework of the information concept. The paper proposes a definition of consciousness as an informational environment in which an extended model of reality is realized. The process of realization of this extended model is defined as thinking. The result of thinking is information objects that form a system in the form of information environment. Information objects are reflections of the real world properties, not directly, but by (...) means of translation through a special object – a carrier of consciousness. In the case of human consciousness, such a carrier is a human being (represented in the form of his nervous system). As a result, consciousness can be qualified as a simulacrum of reality, i.e., a model of a model: an information model of the carrier of consciousness, which in turn is a means of physical modeling of the real "big" world. Possible mechanisms mediating thinking are considered. For this purpose, two new concepts are introduced: neural circuit and neurophysical pattern. An approach to the study of self-consciousness based on the localization of the consciousness carrier in the multidimensional space of states of initial real objects, as well as their reflections in the form of information objects is proposed. This localization is ensured by the presence of feedbacks. Summarizing the results of the study, the article states the following connection between consciousness, self-consciousness and subjectness: under certain conditions (when consciousness is localized in the state space of the carrier of consciousness), consciousness acquires the property of self-consciousness, a special case of which (when the initiator of changes determining localization is the carrier of consciousness) is self-consciousness endowed with subjectness. (shrink)