A zodiacal analytic. The problem of language.

The elaboration developed in this text can be understood as an analytic. This analytic is an examination of what is called the zodiac and, as such, requires some clarifications regarding its mode and its objective. As far as these are concerned, the whole represented by the zodiac can only be presented in the course of its different articulations or, in other words, in the succession of the different zodiacal signs or aspects. Far from presenting itself as a structural totality at first glance, the totality of the zodiac must be extracted, step by step, in the different instances of its development. Only in this way is a final synthesis possible that comprises as a whole what was previously a coherent and cohesive articulation of moments.

On the other hand, the universality of the zodiac encompasses various regions that immediately seem to belong to different knowledge according to our spontaneous and natural consciousness and our representation of the world around us. Hence the need to make explicit, before anything else, the abstract character of the zodiac. In this respect, the concepts in this text are used as signifiers relating to the perspective or function of the zodiacal dialectical moment of the case. Thus, concepts such as space, time, matter, form, structure, etc., can represent different modes of being depending on the zodiacal aspect. For example, the time of the subjective consciousness of Cancer is a particular mode of what we generally call time and is a quite different concept from the time as non-processual spontaneity of Aquarius or the time of the slowing down of the abstract in Taurus. On the other hand, there is a limit to the functionality of words in which they are used as metaphors or as open signifiers. In this mode of language we reach its boundary; words as consciousness must be stripped of their univocal meanings. Thus the subjective consciousness of Cancer is different from the self-consciousness of Leo or the reflex consciousness of Libra. So too, the matter of Taurus, which is prior to the emergence of subjectivity and reflexivity, is sustained by a non-local but necessary mode of consciousness as a holder or abstract observer of every sensible quality of the phenomenal in general.

In this context, conceptualisation is an opening up of an experience in which we always move beforehand. The human already understands the zodiac before conceptualising it. The human is that understanding itself. The point is to be able to see through this natural understanding in order to access the constitutive functions of the world that is presented to human consciousness. The conceptualisation of the zodiac is an analysis of an experience that is given raw and immediate. Every conceptualisation is a map of a territory. This zodiacal map has the same form as our ability to conceptualise and only that. There is an essential echo between the world as it is presented to us and the breakdown and analysis of that world. We can only conceptualise what we are. The zodiac moves in a space located at an intersection, it emerges as an articulation between the immediate, pre-conceptual human experience and its analytical capacity. Caught in this tension, it can only account for what is presented to the human as the world in which he lives.

The zodiac as a concept emerges as an attitude that is a possibility of the being that we are in reference to our deep nature. As a conceptual attitude it is not spontaneous and requires an effort of separation and illumination of a vital experience that presents itself as unified and immediate. Like any artistic practice, like any objectification, in short, like any representation, the zodiac springs from an effort of separation and elaboration of a raw experience. But this separation does not operate on an objective and specifically cut out region of human experience as, for example, the study of the physical world and its laws can be, but on the human experience itself, which contains the various regions on which consciousness can stop and create its own scenario of investigation. It is in this sense that the zodiacal map is a metaphysical map. Thus, the analytics of the world proposed by the zodiac is the reverse side of the coin of the analytics of being for which the world is. Human existence and the zodiac are essentially coordinated.

The map that emerges as a zodiac cannot account for what is not already essentially in the one who draws it. The zodiac as conceptualisation and analytics does not turn to the world to ask it about its structure in the expectation of an answer. This inquisitive demand functions in an already stabilised world and operates horizontally to extract the operational benefits, the guarantees, the pleasures and the ever new possibilities of moving in a taken-for-granted environment. In this context, the being that demands from reality a content for its own development or partial benefit is a being that interprets itself, more or less explicitly, as a being of the same nature as the things that are presented to it. However, the conceptualisation of the zodiac is rather a potential and radicalised attitude that humans operate on themselves. The zodiac is not in the world, the zodiac is what constitutes the world here, in us, where zodiac and human coincide in nature. The conceptual abstraction that shows the structure of this nature is a theoretical attitude. This theoretical attitude is not, however, what uniquely and essentially defines the being that we are, but is rather a turning back on itself of the experience we have or, more precisely, the experience that we are. This turning back on itself of experience, if it is truly appropriate, cannot simply be a theorisation of what we are as just another thing in the world, the object of any discipline that talks about it and surrounds it as if from the outside. If anything, a zodiacal analytic finds its deepest value in a showing of human experience as our experience in each case.

Far from a knowledge that is already incorporated and gives a static account of reality, the zodiacal analytic arises from that attitude that can be seen as a modification of our immediate everyday life. This attitude is new each time, as a modification of perception that operates while it is in progress and that shifts us from the stable axis of what we believe ourselves to be. Our natural and normalised interpretation of who we are is the result of a compression. In order to operate in a world of objects and meaning, we spontaneously position ourselves as actors on a stage. The zodiac proposes a step backwards, but that step expels us from the coordinates with which we are familiar in that compression. From this modification of perception emerges the zodiac as a structure projected and understood under the concept, the image and the metaphor. Any elaboration that includes the zodiac is elaborated on this crystallisation, but it is important to denounce the risk of objectifying the zodiac as something substantial. Penetrating into the abstract realm of zodiacal analytics is the aim of the aforementioned attitude, but this realm is always guarded. The particular and already stabilised representations of what the world and we are act as a barrier and a brake on this access. The zodiacal analytic is the attitude that wants to go through what is given as a totality and an opaque fact towards its structural logic, but this logic can only be objectified from the experience in which we always move. The concept of the zodiac is a representation.

In this self-reference and self-dissection we can see the meta-objective quality of the zodiac. This is not an analysis of the world - as if it were something substantial outside the processes and dimensions that constitute it - but of the structure of human experience. It is in our experience that the world is constituted, not because we are beings with a power of our own, but because we are the place where the world appears. Here we can see the phenomenological quality of the zodiac. From this quality we can understand that no part of its development is outside of human experience. Familiarity with the different instances of the zodiac redirects us to the sense that they all belong to our experience of the world, and while it is evident that there are different degrees of deepening of their aspects, superficially they present themselves as something known and familiar. What zodiacal analytics is about is bringing to light what is hidden in what we experience as the world.

The possibility of conceptualisation and transmission of the concept of the zodiac is based on the pre-understanding we have of it as our immediate condition as existing beings. The different ways of extracting the hidden from the obvious are varied in their nature: metaphor, symbol, poetics, concept, image, etc. refer to the impossibility of enclosing and defining the different zodiacal instances. In the experience we have of the world, not only the obvious is revealed, but also what is abstractly held in the background, even if we only get reflections and provisional images of it. The zodiac is in this sense a discovery or an unveiling and its importance is not based on its concept in itself, as if it were a mental game, but that the concept is a tool towards an articulate and subtle perception that transmutes our experience of the world, that is, that can sophisticate our being here. The zodiac is an analytical artefact that can operate as a bridge to a transmutation of life experience. The syntactic and semantic articulation of an exhibition on the zodiac has to respect this intention, the sophistication of the exhibition has to allow ambiguity within itself. In the dialogue between the articulate and the free, between the dense and the light, between rigour and its complement, it must not be lost sight of that any exposition is merely a tool and not the thing itself. Thus, any metaphysical exposition should be less a description than a display.

The zodiac is also a map of the structure of reality insofar as it shows the structure of the being that we are. This being cannot fit into the concept of human without undergoing a series of fundamental deformations. Provisionally we can speak of the human as the being on which the map unfolds, but it is necessary to clarify that what is said with human is not that which is the object of anthropology, psychology, nor of any discipline of this type. We could say that zodiacal analytics demands a level of abstraction of a very different nature from all the positivities that are grounded in it and can be characterised, for example, as modes derived from something that is by nature abstract. In the concretisation of these abstractions which we call zodiacal signs, there is a necessary and natural departure from their initial purity as structures of being and of the world presented to us. In this distancing, the metaphor of vibration can serve as a bridge between the abstract and the concrete. However, this does not mean that the last link in the chain, with all its variability and concreteness, is less relevant than those abstract sources from which it emerges. The concrete manifestation is not a lower degree than its abstract source, the ontic does not owe obeisance to the ontological. On the contrary, the zodiac as analytic is possible thanks to the representative faculty that we enjoy and that is constituted in what we call the mental plane, but those abstractions that we mention with the word zodiac must cross the different planes that constitute us (mental, emotional, physical) to obtain the rebound in the concrete and imperfect that seeks the abstract. The existence of the world for us can be thought of as this desire to experience that which is abstract, an experience that is regulated by twelve aspects shown by zodiacal analytics. We seek in the gravity and opacity of the world around us the scent of the functions that constituted it. Thus, we connect heaven and earth, gods and mortals, abstract and concrete.

One of the most cumbersome difficulties in understanding the metaphysical and phenomenological character of the zodiac has to do with our tendency to interpret ourselves as having the same nature as the world of phenomena that appears to us. This difficulty is both conceptual and existential as it obstructs the possibility of remaining in a negative space. This space is a pure and indefinable abstraction to which we refer with the word nothingness. The controversies surrounding the conceptualisation and thinking about this word and the disabling anguish to which human experience is driven when it remains in its realm show the rebound and aversion that intimacy with this negativity generates. However, as far as zodiacal analyticism is concerned, the profound transmutation of raw experience into zodiacal mapping has to be grounded in this emptiness that is within each of us. Zodiacal analytics is only possible because we are already always immersed in experience. The analytic is based precisely on this already being open in the world as world. We start from experience, that is, from a situation of positive existence. Tracing the structure of this positivity implies an effort of abstraction towards negativity. Thus, we always find ourselves in the midst of a positive existence that is always already in progress. The movement of abstraction arises within this design of the real as an extraction from it. The independence of what is already constituted as world presupposes the always already being in the world as an immediate condition. In this sense, the empty space that abstraction opens up does not mean a return to a kind of objectivity; objectivity and subjectivity are in turn modalities of the coming of the abstract into the concrete, they are positions or movements from nothingness to being. This open space is not the foundation of the edifice of consciousness but an abyss.

From the intimacy with this abyss emerges the zodiac as an ontological scheme. As a schema, it is a representation created under the powers that belong to our neurology, our representational, symbolic and linguistic capacities. As ontology, it rests on our given condition as the kind of being we are. Without this abstraction, existence is always positive and the multidimensional complex that we are is operated by forces subtle to our perception, so subtle that they seem absurd mental elaborations, not at all essential to the importance of the positivities with which we are familiar. In fact, these abstractions do not have the weight of the phenomena we consider important, but they create them. Importance is weight and world and, in turn, horizon and anchor of our positive consciousnesses. The delights and horrors of the world play in this realm. The abstract has neither weight nor importance, and yet it is the architecture of this contradictory, terrible and seductive world. How to inhabit the in-between of these two coordinates which are the necessary flipside of each other? On the one hand, the intention or inclination of the particular consciousness to remain in the realm of the abstract is an evasion of the positivities that the abstract itself needs as part of its nature and its joy. On the other hand, the reluctance to approach the realm of the abstract anchors the particular consciousness in positivity. Outside the dialogue and interplay between abstract and concrete, this anchoring in the positive is a position of captivity. Captive in the architecture of reality designed by impersonal forces, the particular consciousness that inhabits us cannot find a way out of a labyrinth that expands and multiplies.

The point which co-ordinates these twelve aspects is pure abstract. This point does not belong to the zodiac and by its very character is veiled. The movement from this point of pure abstraction to each zodiacal aspect or moment may be called consciousness. However, this concept is not closed and is not definable. What it denotes is unrepresentable and unnameable by its very nature. For this reason, a text that wants to present the zodiacal dialectic in its different aspects or modalities must navigate between the precise and the imprecise, between the concrete and the metaphorical, between the logical and the poetic. The rigour of the text rests on this dynamic.

This pure abstract point which is, so to speak, at the centre of the zodiacal mandala, is negative. Negative does not imply a value judgement but the opposite of the positive, of phenomena, of dimensions and dialectics as movement. As negativity, as nothingness, it is the opposite of everything we can think of and yet it sustains everything. This abstract point can be referred to only transversally but it coincides with a space without content that is us not only beyond our particular experience but beyond general experience as possible experience, beyond the logic of reality that zodiacal analytics shows us. In this veiled space, we dwell mute and serene, between nothingness and the being of things, between the abstract and the concrete, like bridges between two shores. Without the bridges, without us, the shores move away until they disappear.