As Above, So Below: Astrology, Microprocessing, and the Making of Predictive Time

• In Event: ‘I Contain Multitudes’: Materials of Making Worlds.

Abstract

Emerging as a practice in Babylonia the second century BCE and of undulating cultural significance, astrology occupies a nebulous zone between the esoteric and the popular, the scientific and the occult, the significant and the dismissible. Since first appearing in British newspapers in the 1930s, Modern Western Sun Sign astrology has enjoyed stints of popularity, as well as garnering extensive criticism. While lodged from distinct disciplinary perspectives, including Theodor Adorno’s “The Stars Down to Earth” (1957) and a 1975 open letter signed by 186 leading scientists and published in "The Humanist", critiques of 20th century astrology operate at comparable registers: condemning the practice as devoid of scientific underpinnings and as emulating authority in order to mislead those in need of guidance. Yet as argued by Thomas Kuhn, astrology and astronomy were intimately linked for over two millennia, with the study of planetary movements undergirding the development of modern timekeeping as well as forming an evocative symbolic language. As such, this paper takes seriously astrology as inextricable from the establishment of centralised clock-time, as well as mediating access to different understandings of temporality at the edges of perception. Thinking together slow moving, interplanetary astrology and hyper-fast, networked data collection/processing as epistemologies of prediction, the purpose here is to bring into relief the human as always stuck between different forms of time-making, highlighting the temporally mixed, experiential excess that runs off of modernity’s project of making sense of the world.

Author

• Rose Rowson, Brown University