My philosophical position is based on a single shift in understanding the metaphysics of presence.
Traditionally, we think of presence in such a way that when two things are in the exact same time and place, they are the exact same thing. If they are in a different time and place, they are different things. However, both quantum physics experiments and Derridian philosophy demonstrate the untenable position of this view.
“If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn’t simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction”
— Jacques Derrida
A better analogy—and the one through which I understand presence—is that of the hologram. If you fracture a hologram in half, each half still contains the whole image but with half as many viewpoints. If you keep fracturing the hologram, each fracture will continue to contain the whole image with increasingly less viewpoints. This notion that every fracture resonates with the whole is why fields such as forensic science can have just a few pieces of a fractured skull and still reconstruct the whole skull with impressive accuracy. It is this understanding of presence as diffracted and dispersed that many scientists in contemporary quantum field theory have taken up to make sense of the increasingly sophisticated experimental results being produced.
“Central to my analysis is the agential understanding of matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than as a property of things.”
In applying this fundamental shift in understanding presence through my studies I have learned diseases, trauma, and political turmoil cannot be localized in mutually exclusive biological, psychological, or sociopolitical domains. Each exists in an extended network that is simultaneously biological, psychological and sociopolitical. As such, these phenomena may also be read on an astrological level. Astrology does not precede or underlie any other aspect of life. The capacities and qualities attributed to astrology are in the natural repertoires of biology, psychology, and society themselves. Each discipline is a fracture that resonates with the whole and simply provides a distinct viewpoint.
Astrology is not some predetermined entanglement you have to the cosmos that you have simply to discover, just as the identity of an electron is not made up of predetermined traits we are simply uncertain about prior to the act of measurement. In quantum physics, the act of measurement itself is central to determining whether an electron behaves like a particle or a wave. The indeterminate electron does not exist as either particle or wave prior to measurement. No entities preexist their relations. Similarly, astrology is a process of building a connection between your own life and the astrological happenings of the universe.
As an astrologer, I serve as a medium to help connect the meaning of your own life to the larger cosmological phenomena at play and give these relations voice.
In producing this theoretical framework, my interest has shifted to be less about the validity of astrology—which presumes the truth about astrology exists outside of our measurement practices—and more about what astrology can do. There is no question with the recent turn to astrology that this form of divination is having an impact on us as individuals and a community. In these precarious times, the astrological turn of our generation is an expression of the dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs and of a desire for something radically different.
Astrology’s disruptive potential lies in healing the wound left behind by modernity’s attempt to create clear-cut distinctions between the individual and their environment, mind and body, culture and nature, heaven and earth. The imagined distance modernity produced in the imagination has been used to justify mass environmental degradation and disregard for the radically Other, which is not-us. We are becoming increasingly intimate with the consequences of this disconnect through rising environmental disasters, immunological disorders, and political unrest. As a response to this Cartesian severing, astrology offers an alternative worldview that refuses any claim of radical individuality. One’s life is always contextualized within worldly and universal ecologies. Astrology as an art and science increases our connectedness to the universe to radically undermine the atomistic, separatist logics undergirding the exploitation of the non/living other.
“A philosophy that says ‘existence precedes essence,’ [...] must be experienced if it is to be sincere. To live [this way] means to accept the consequences of this doctrine and not merely impose it on others.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre