I just finished listening to episode 288 of @AstrologyCast on which @chrisbrennan7 discusses astrology with non-astrologers who repeatedly describe themselves as skeptics.
(a thread) https://twitter.com/AstrologyCast/status/1353439617047924737

I’m really grateful for @chrisbrennan7 + the ways he strives to make astrology legible to people who know little/nothing about the field. in this episode, he gives really thoughtful answers that insist on complexity, refusing to reduce astrology to popular or superficial forms.

That said, this episode also reactivated a set of thought processes that I really need to articulate more thoroughly, specifically about systems of knowledge production + the constant re-centering of science as the discourse with which all other systems of knowledge are measured.

This will very likely be a talk that I give at some point, but for today, here are some observations:

I hold a PhD in Dance Studies and teach across arts and humanities disciplines including dance + performance studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, transgender studies, and environmental studies, with particular investments in feminist epistemologies + methodologies.

All of these disciplines have their own sophisticated ways of generating and valuing knowledge, many of which I find to be incredibly analogous to the work I do as an astrologer.

In other words, whereas discussions of astrology as a legitimate phenomenon tend to center on what is objectively or scientifically verifiable, objective verification is not the priority of all systems of knowledge production.

In fact, many of these disciplines explicitly critique the notion of objective knowledge or objectivity as more significant than subjective or inter-subjective knowledges.

Instead, most of the fields in which I teach and study are concerned in various ways with how meaning is constructed or constituted, what we come to know through processes of enactment and exchange...

...the body as a valid subjective and inter-subjective site of knowing, how power is organized through the production of knowledge or meaning, what can be known differently from another point of view, and so on.

I recently finished writing an article about astrology as a performance art practice of feminist care. I most often think of astrology as an art, similar to choreography or poetry or music or sculpture in which we compose meaningful experiences from available materials...

...and importantly, in collaboration WITH those materials, whether those materials are moving bodies in a dance studio or moving planets in the sky. Like other art forms, astrology takes on meaning in part through inherited traditions and cultural contexts.

We interpret a chart in large part based on conventions of signification that were developed trans-culturally in complex histories of power, conquest, repression, and resurgence—not unlike many forms of dance.

To those traditional significations, we also bring our own cultural backgrounds, our personal experiences, our insights and inspirations, our capacities to recognize or create correlations that hold significance.

As we do when we read a poem or listen to music or move around a sculpture or take part in a dance.

What I’m trying to articulate—what I hope to articulate more thoroughly at some point—is that contemplating the validity of astrology only through the lens of science—which is itself built on disproving itself + laden with colonial power, which is another talk for another day...

...not only reinvests in science as the most important form of knowledge production, but also risks denigrating all the other ways in which we generate knowledge, many of which are also highly academic, many of which might reveal more to us about how astrology works.

To be clear, my position is not anti-science—although I do think we must complicate our relationship to the histories of power consolidated in scientific practices past & present. What I am hoping to amplify are ways of knowing beyond science or so-called objective verifiability.

Perhaps I’ll leave this thread with a question: what else could we know or understand about astrology if we brought to it questions and considerations from many disciplines and traditions, including the arts and humanities and beyond?