adorno hated astrology. I mean, if you’re waiting for adorno to like what you’re doing and see hope in it you’ll be waiting a long time. I have to say though that he was Not Wrong, at least about astrology in the culture industries. he attributed its popularity to the fact that “the semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations”, which is snotty as fuck and kind of unfair but like, not entirely unfair? it occupies your mind but doesn’t necessarily challenge it. to me, reading about astrology does indeed feel really really similar to reading tvtropes or a similar kind of pop culture analysis website, or doing five million “which hunger games character are you?” quizzes*, which lets me feel like an “expert” in something without really ever thinking too hard. I’m pretty sure doing much of that kind of thing is bad for you.
Adorno also talks about the reliance of the astrological cold reading on people’s narcissism and consequent ability to make literally anything applicable to ourselves. ouch. but I am, actually, repelled by modern Western astrology’s endless categorisation and recategorisation of the self even as I find it seductive, for the same reasons that I find it seductive. it’s fundamentally individualist, thus useless and deadening, and that’s why it’s so marketable, so consumable, such a narcotic.
but on the other hand, one of the main reasons a lot of people are mad about astrology is that it’s about how you are irrevocably shaped by the astronomical (historical) conditions in operation at the time of your birth, and that’s really threatening b/c what about free will. but isn’t the insistence that the individual is shaped by historical forces central to leftist thought?
and this is all kind of a recent development, astrological predictions used to be less about the individual and more about events, broad historical trends; less about psychology and self-help and more about actual fortune-telling.
modern Western newspaper horoscopes are focused on your sun sign; the sun rules the individual and the personality, and changes rapidly. but the outer planets move through the zodiac slowly, with entire generations under the influence of the same position of neptune (which rules fantasy and idealism), pluto (sex, death, and transformation), saturn (work, limits, hardship) and uranus (revolution).
solar astrology is totally individualist but what would a Uranian or Plutonic astrology look like? it’d be more structural, surely. astrological cold readings of a generation’s attitude to sex and death? sign me up
I mean I agree that astrology often promotes of a sense of powerlessness in the face of an inhuman world, I just think it’s possible to work with that
![this is the first true selfie I took on the webcam on the computer I’m writing on. I was 21. extremely asymmetrical haircuts were In. I thought I should open with some kind of Important Selfie because this is a Notes Toward An Anarchist Theory of the Selfie post.
I used to be really against putting any photos of myself on my blog. partly I didn’t want to be seen as vain, or be judged by my appearance, which, can of feminist theory worms, my god. I think it’s fair to say there’s some internalised misogyny there. but it’s really a coming-of-age-as-an-anarchist thing. When I was eighteen I went to my first global summit protest, the g20 in melbourne. afterwards a lot of my friends were tracked down by their indiscretions and arrested. it was pretty scary. security culture became the buzzword du jour. for quite a while after that I didn’t put my real name on things, I never gave my surname in meetings, I untagged photos of myself on facebook, I changed my phone number every year or so, I took my phone battery out in meetings, I talked in code words, I installed TOR, I put a sticker over my webcam before it could take a photo of me. weird things that didn’t really take me off-grid (I mean, I still had a facebook account and a mobile phone, you know?). I stopped doing that partly because I wasn’t willing to commit to the level of paranoia that would make any of the above worthwhile, but mostly because I realised it was causing more problems than it solved. security culture makes you paranoid and cliquey. it makes resistance movements faceless, grandiose, intimidating, hard to get involved in. for someone with my privileges, living in the society I live in, the risks of political action are very rarely so great as to justify these sacrifices. if I wanted to do something risky that I thought was worth it, I would think protect my anonymity then, sure, definitely. but as a lifestyle — no. Safeguarding your anonymity for pragmatic reasons is one thing, and I want to stress that I totally support this and that there are so so many good reasons why you might want to remain anonymous. But anonymity as interchangeability, as its own virtue, as a liberal universalism even, in slogans like “we are everywhere” and “we are all [victim of brutality]” — that, I find questionable. We are not all everywhere. We come from different places. I lose followers every time I post a picture of myself. immediately, without fail. I sometimes gain net followers but I always lose a few people. I don’t mind, I think it’s fair enough. l don’t think women who look like me (or at least, women who look like the version of myself I choose to highlight) particularly need more visibility, and I totally get it if opinions from or blandly flattering pictures of normatively-feminine cis white women is not something you need more of in your life. the GPOY has often been theorised on my dashboard as a form of feminist visibility or vulnerability/oversharing (see also karaj on feminist narcissism and rgr-pop on vanity). Also, elsewhere, as a form of marketing of the self, girls doing the best we can to get social capital in a paradigm that judges on appearance. That’s not really where I’m coming from. My position on visibility is about two to four drinks away from “everybody stab out your eyes”; my position on self-disclosure has been described as advocating “the right of women to be like Ron Swanson”, which is not all that far off the mark. It’s more that I just want to acknowledge my context, especially when I’m talking about feminism and the body. I particularly don’t want to hide my whiteness. (obviously whiteness is not just about how you look, but like, appearance is a pretty solid clue here.) I like to have a face and a name, I like people to know some things about where I’m coming from, I like to attach myself to things I’ve said in the past and acknowledge them even if I’ve changed my mind. I want to be accountable, and I want the flipside of that, I want a reputation, not necessarily a big reputation, but some credibility. I want to be someone you can have a history with, build a relationship with. I want roots. none of this has to attach to my legal identity or even a friendship with me, my identities don’t have to cohere. but a reputation does need something somewhere to attach to. I follow almost eight hundred people and I have a clear idea of the personality and interests and history of only a few of them. they’re predominantly people who’ve posted pictures of themselves. it just makes them so much easier to remember. you’ll note also that I’ve never changed my tumblr url. I’ve never changed my name, either. while there are a lot of great reasons to change your name and I wouldn’t presume to know the factors going into any individual’s choice in the matter, a lot of people I’ve known change their name so regularly or go by so many names that it feels like shedding history. hunter made me notice that this one scumbag guy we know changes his name every time he burns bridges with another group of friends. lorena has a really hard time taking it seriously when a white cis person changes their name to something more ~interesting~ sounding, it even makes her kind of mad, like, cool, you get to choose to be weird and exotic. I think a name is like a place. there are a lot of potentially good reasons to move town. plus nomadic cultures are a thing, of course, and some people have roots within them. but I’m uncomfortable with the whole anarchist traveller thing, because politically speaking, I’m in favour of roots, history, relationships, accountability.
how many times have women in anarchism complained about abusive guys just going travelling as soon as they get confronted? and I’ve talked a lot about how living my home town is really important to me in maintaining a sense of groundedness and connection to people who don’t share every facet of my politics, not disappearing down a countercultural rabbit hole. isn’t that supposed to be the point of anarchism or any other politics of decentralisation? increasing the weight of human relationships, therefore the power of the community and of social pressure, therefore making hierarchical bureacracies unnecessary. if those aren’t your politics that’s one thing, but if you do want to remove the state and also want to remove social pressure then aren’t you just kind of a brat? absolutely none of this is prescriptive. I’m just tired of safeguarding my own anonymity. that’s my face. you’ve seen it before. my name is liz, if you didn’t know. it’s not an uncommon name. it’s not a remarkable face. it doesn’t matter. it’s a history and a geography.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_md3y93aZMB1qzi4y4o1_400.jpg)
