Stars—They’re Just Like Us! On astrology
From n+1
Published in Issue 24: New Age
..What critics of astrology have in common—whether they come
from the anarchist left or the Christian right or anywhere in between—is a
tendency to see astrology as a form of therapy. What bothers them most is not
astrology’s irrationality, but its use as a substitute for something older or
truer—monotheism, freedom, the demos, the political — that is both
the salvation and end goal of progress. To them, astrology is an ideology of
the depressed, a politics of resignation: a balm that, like therapy in general,
treats the individual symptom of a larger social illness without acknowledging
the disease. Look at someone reading a horoscope and you may see hope: someone
looking toward the future in a way that suggests a desire for a future at
all. What the critics see, however, is someone giving up…
….But there are other reasons to love astrology —
therapeutic ones. Queers are no strangers to structural critique, but some
might relax their standards, like a lot of people do, for palliative and campy
alternatives to existing theories of subjectivity—alternatives so reliably
unreliable that they at least feel honest, and less likely to trick us than
those that arrive in the guise of religion, theory, or politics. Compared with
“our existing systems of organizing identity,” which often fail us or worse,
astrology, contra Adorno, is a safe bet. It’s an alternative “at once intricate
and unconvincing, a kind of cheap fiction lacking the force to supplant our
current world order.”
We trust it because it corresponds to nothing; it doesn’t
pretend to be true, or demand our belief. Unlike the pernicious pseudosciences
of the past, or the scientism and pop neurology of the present, astrology poses
little threat of getting serious. Being a Pisces will never be sufficient
grounds for getting thrown in prison or denied public benefits, because the
category transcends all the forms of identity that matter to society: familial
ties, ethnicity, religion, race, class, sex, age. And whereas Adorno suggests
that to read a horoscope is the same thing as to enact its prophecies, we know
from experience that one can very well do one and not the other.
Our friend the painter, who refers to astrology often, says
that this is what he likes about it: that it’s another symbolic system, another
transparent overlay, through which to read the world. He finds any single
explanatory language insufficient, he says, and astrology is a second layer to
others—Marxism, psychology, nutrition theory—as he tries to understand
everything around him. It’s also, he says, a handy go-to in emotional situations.
“Why is this person acting this or that difficult way?” he asks
rhetorically. “Maybe because he’s a Scorpio, he’s just like that. He has
other good qualities.”
“Whence has fantasy acquired its bad reputation?” Carl Jung
once wrote. In a world in which irrationality is seen as a correctable flaw
rather than a fixture of human life, fantasy has no place. But this is not our
world, and Jung, whose dabbling in the occult did taint his reputation as Freud
warned it would, was right when he said that astrology’s “value is obvious
enough to the psychologist, since astrology represents the sum of all the
psychological knowledge of antiquity.”
The archetypes one finds in the zodiac
belong to the collective unconscious, and the importance of such symbols is
that they figure into our thoughts whether they ought to or not. A common
concept in therapy is projection: the tendency of a patient to imbue impersonal
symbols with personal meaning in the process of interpretation, be they dreams,
inkblots, or slips of the tongue. Whether the source material is in itself
“true” doesn’t make what comes out of it—the reading of one’s self through that
material—false. One might say the same of astrology.
The painter may look at the Scorpio and see Scorpio traits,
another instance of confirmation bias. But the color-filter overlay of any
deterministic language, be it astrology or psychoanalysis or anything else, can
shed some light from time to time. Taken alone, the filter is reductive:
dialing up the contrast, blasting shades of gray into patches of black and
white. But as a supplement to other points of view—what’s visible on first
impression, say, or what you know of someone from experience—it adds another dimension,
pulling some features into the foreground and pushing others to the back,
reminding you of a person’s complexity.
As skeptics have long argued, part
of what makes astrology appealing (and so easily proven “true”) is that
each sign of the zodiac has a cluster of traits assigned to it that may be
found in nearly any person. Astrology could thus be seen as a humanizing
corrective to other, worse stereotypes. To consider that the shy person is
sometimes wild, the considerate person sometimes duplicitous, is to practice
something rather like empathy… read more:
