Aquarius Retrograde

I'm not even going to try to unpack it. How unsettling it is to think that there is nothing on which to base our arguments about what matters or what is really real. Yoga, Freudian psychology, Marxist communism, scientific management and efficiency, reductive nutritional analysis, the idea of progress in understanding as well as in technological ingenuity--all products of the nineteenth century, all built on sand. The list goes on. Our academic enterprise itself, medievalism and nationalism, every other -ism you can think of. Founded on premises that we no longer accept and yet that are still driving the inquiries we make if only because we keep trying to respond to them. We are wrestling with tar babies invented by modernity, modernity itself a tar baby from which we cannot escape. It's not so much that it's elephants all the way down as that there are no elephants, only phantoms of elephants which we have been trying to ride. I don't even know what metaphor to use.

This is not a happy thought.

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