Interpretation in Universe
Interpretation in Universe[1]
Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff
Astrology is ascendent, again, with readymade interpretations for the internet era. Refashioned from newspapers to instagram memes, astrology is among the new, New Age solutions that appeal to millenials, a generation reportedly more inclined to seek therapy.[2] A generation also more apt to locate subjectivity in online profiles and the deciphering power of algorithms. The input is personal data. The output is an answer to a desire for a question never asked.
Several apps will send customized notification-interpretations based on the coordinates of your birth. In-between sessions the other day, a notification from my astrology app, Co-Star, popped onto my phone: “If you don’t come to terms with yourself, other people will suffer the same twists and turns of your structure.” Co-Star had astutely suggested that the fantasy of the analyst is the obstacle to clinical practice. Well, I suppose that was my interpretation.
This led me to consider the nature of interpretation in psychoanalysis against the backdrop of app and meme interpretations. The social media-astrology hybrid creates formidable interpretation machines. As a system based on the movements of the heavenly bodies, astrology follows a calendrical logic and invites ever specific identifications based on subcategorization. It is an interpretive mechanism that ascribes meaning to the real of the universe. The question of the old school hysteric, What am I?, gives way to the new instagram hysteric, I am a triple scorpio, and today venus is in retrograde, look out.
2020 suffers from disorientation of excessive meaning, hyperinterpretation facilitated by digital platforms. Has meaning saturation become an impossible to bear of the real? Psychoanalysis shows that this production of meaning-all-over-the-place only fuels a voracious imaginary-real, the black mirror event-horizon that looks back when we gaze into our phones. Accordingly, we must interpret otherwise, against the grain of civilization and its content[3], towards the real void.
[1] Cf, Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Interpretation in Reverse”, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, Issue 2, 1999.
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/the-new-age-of-astrology/550034/