"Such an inquiry requires that one be ready to break out of the coercive restraints of Sociological Truth—the axiom that the social is the ground of being.”
- Talal Asad, Powers of the Secular Modern (2006)
Time is the ordering device through which we make meaning in history. To historicize is to put events and actions into temporal sequence such that we might grapple with an open-ended, uncertain future by contemplating an ever deepening, ever more intricate engagement with the past. And yet, history is only one (historically specific) practice of time for the purposes of meaning-making.
This project engages with unconventional practices of time to develop ways to work with “fate” and “fatedness,” concepts that the social sciences have historically struggled to think with. It acknowledges fate as an ordering device with increasing popularity in the contemporary moment, and approaches divination (astrology, the IChing, the tarot etc.) as centuries-old, lived, community-oriented knowledge systems that organize and distribute materiality and meaning in ways that are unfamiliar (and uncomfortable) to Enlightenment rationality.
Rather than historicizing or sociologizing or psychologizing these practices into the humanities and the social sciences to “explain” them, this project writes the social sciences into forms of reason that presently exceed humanitistic imagination. What might change about fundamental pillars of meaning — our politics of agency, ideas of morality, concepts of truth, and our understanding of history itself — if we allowed fate a seat at the academic table?