Materiality is not a discursive fiction, a virtual image, or always falling back to its referential nature. Instead, materiality is formed by the processes of becoming, which are part of its nature entangled—the micro and macro entangled nature. The birth of a child, delivery of the world do not determine each other but are entangled within one another. A weaving of narratives that allow shimmers of destinies to dance with time shake loose the seeds of the agency. Karen Barad’s unique mixture of realism and poststructuralist theory creates a jumping off point to embrace an idea of becoming one’s self through a birth, that is material, in every sense of the word. The body, the womb, is, in fact an apparatus of self. We make and are made, in the world’s history, mothers do matter. Her highlighting of the sonogram’s technology and its possibilities for articulating a space of be-coming that honors the mother while no longer denying the fetus in an entangled manner. Not to say the fetus exists as its own, thus has the rights of an individual, or that the mother is simply a carrier to a fetus floating to be measured on its own, separate, but to speak to the very necessary mixed nature of agency and self. The cuts between time, self and becoming are not so easy to define. We must become the apparatus to see where such a theory of be-coming may go. To dig deeper into the stories, of which there are many, erased from the surfaces of philosophical discourse, we go to the exiled. The birth itself. The astrologer. The midwife and astrologer, hiding in our discourse, ghosts of forgotten ways, forgotten ways of understanding the collaboration of qualitative becoming. 

“The fundamental premise of astrology is reflective: that the earth is a mirror of heaven, in the sense of the celestial realms, and vice versa.” (Campion p. 13)​

When examining a text or an object or a piece of art, representationalism has been critiqued by 20th century continental philosophers. Representationalism has its roots in Platonic theory which views language and ideas as always representing a true object. Neo-Plutonists continued this school of thought. Representationalism sees images as of thought. The subjective turn looks at language as a reflection of an image, separating the image itself from its source, recognizing it as illusory. The mirror stage as used in psychoanalysis represents when the individual sees themselves and begins to individuate from their mother. This process happens through seeing oneself as different and separated from others. 
Donna Harraway proposes a diffracted method to escape the domains of reflection and reflexivity to move the critic away from returning to an absolute truth. Each reading creates new meanings, and its own pathways upon which one can read. Following Haraway, Karen Barad connects diffraction to physics and uses this method to read authors and productions together as a way of creating new meanings and paying attention to the co-productive status of the meanings interactions. “Diffraction patterns are a characteristic behavior exhibited by waves under the right conditions. Crucially diffraction patterns mark an important difference between waves and particles: according to classical physics, only waves produce diffraction patterns; particles do not (since they cannot occupy the same place at the same time). Indeed, a diffraction grating is simply an apparatus or material configuration that gives rise to the superposition of waves. In contrast to reflecting apparatuses, like mirrors which produce images — more or less faithful — of objects placed a distance from the mirror, diffraction gratings are instruments that produce patterns that mark differences in the relative characters (i.e., amplitude and phase) of individual waves as they combine," (81) The physicist Neils Bohr is significant to our understanding of diffraction apparatus. The inability to separate the observer from the observed not only in an experiment but also in the apparatus of measurement shows the complexity of entangled states and the complexity of power formations. 
These methods of analysis all borrow on an optical metaphor, from mirroring, to reflection, to refraction, to our use of diffraction. The optical paradigm is useful in understanding our work with how space and time are directly related to our visioning of them, and the historical time and spaces in which they are formed. In 1608 Hans Lippershey built the first refracting telescope, later to be used by Gallileo in 1609. Kepler, in 1611 wrote a blueprint for a telescope that could be made with a convex lens and a convex eyepiece. Later Newton made a telescope that used a reflecting telescope. The light was reflected by a. Concave mirror onto a plane mirror because it was less likely to produce differential images. Its simplicity became what all modern telescopes use. Newton’s clarity of vision held the key to other oversimplification and drew towards a desire to accurately reflect images and ignore the spaces of chance and chaos in the cosmos. Newton came to observe the orbits of the planets, and they were in an ellipse. Newton took some time to ponder the question and came back with the fact that the ellipses are sections of cones. Armed with calculus, he could describe exactly how those sections behaved. Cambridge, where he worked, shut down due to the plague. He had a lot of time to think, leading to differential and integral calculus
(Bhāskara possible 1200 bc precursor).
Ptolemy Algamast examined refraction in the atmosphere. In his book Optics, he articulates a psychological vision. The eye always looks to the horizon, and its extension is naturally in front of the person, the image extending horizontally. To look vertically is unnatural, and thus the eye couldn’t similarly perceive depth. This is why when a planet is farther away, we see it as more significant. Aristotle also recognized this but with less description: ““So promontories in the sea ‘loom’ when there is a south-east wind, and everything seems bigger, and in a mist, too, things seem bigger: so, too, the sun and the stars seem bigger when rising and setting than on the meridian” Thousands of years before refraction was understood, Ptolemy appears to be arguing for such a possibility. 

“The exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, continued a warning of what was to come. The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance [Rausch]. For it is in this experience alone that one gains certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remote from us, and never of one without the other. This means that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard these experiences as unimportant and avoidable and to consign it to the individual as the aperture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neighbor nations nor generations can escape it, as was made clear by the last war, which was an attempt at new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers….” Walter Benjamin p. 58

“As language astrology speaks in symbols. It relies on metonymy, using one word to mean another, so that when modern Western astrologers utter the word ‘Mars,’ their colleagues hear the words ‘anger,’ danger,’ and ‘energy.’ (Campion p. 17)


And then we can enter ethics. Finding oneself on the borderlines of self and other, mother/child, we start to feel an uneasy space. The space of demanding that any becoming requires a response is where we arrive. We find it in the face of Levinas other, Derrida’s hospitality, but what of the possibility of an uninvited guest in oneself. To give birth to another provides us a pathway to understanding what it means to hold within oneself the hope for a future, the chance of becoming, and a future untold. Simone De Beauvoir's second sex imagines a coming woman who will be left to give luck a chance on her own terms. Ada Lovelace imagined a world where the computer could speak; she exceeded, they all exceeded the terms of their limits. Imagining a world where one can talk about the birth itself, and reclaim the hidden territory, is the work of a specific haunted space. 
Astrology here is as personal as it is timely. As is any woman’s writing. Astrology is a method of viewing the self that works with chance to provide another chance to provide pathways of choosing and becoming—refracting a singular notion of self into a series of historical and mythological possibilities. Like any method, it has its failings, but it holds something in its hands as a possibility. I make no claims or hold to any truth that I can make the birth of the world accurate by speaking of my birth. Or that one birth is the same as another, precisely in that my delivery is unique, and the birth of my three children are amazing, and the birth of every child is unique. We see the ultimate possibility of difference as experience and memory as an image - materiality as evolving variants of creative creation. 




There are as many interpretations of one astrology chart as there are points of view on one's birth. We will work to create an arrangement that helps one articulate oneself to provide emancipation in terms of agency - freedom. Not by abolishing the necessity of the world, or its materiality. But by embracing it. You were born! IN a body! On a day! This is the space where we can begin to get honest about being natural bodies. Not bodies without organs, but bodies within organs, the subsequent unfolding. What this has to say about a future of time and writing is yet to be discovered.


As we explain the conceptualization of the houses in the astrology chart, we will begin to understand further how Greek conceptualizations of self were understood. This birth chart says something of the essence of an individual's life and the directions they will go in life. As the God’s wandered through one’s charts, they could see each other, to be at home, to be in detriment or to be in an angular relationship to another planet. These placements called on notions of identity that were tied to an assortment of mythological and cosmological images of the Gods and humanity's role in the eternal drama of the soul. Charting the soul onto paper was honored for its predictive power and damned for its inability to place each person within the narrative of the perfect society - why does the chart not state the nature of all “Asians'' (Rhetoric - the Egyptian)? It was too individualistic to fit into a larger political and social structure, searching to gather people and type them to further the nation-state perfectly. If each person was genuinely individual and two people of different races could have more in common than two neighbors, it overly complicated essential notions of difference and othering that were essential to creating powerful dialogues used by the estate and religion. 


The astrology chart is an apparatus of the soul. It is a means of placing the individual in a subjective relationship with time. 
"I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions. or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore. Prisons. Mental institutions. The panopticon. schools. Confession. factories. Disciplines. Juridical measures. and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy. Agriculture, cigarettes. Navigation, computers, cellular telephones and-why not-language itself. which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses-one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face."  
--Gorgio Agamben. The Apparatus 
And what is thrown was once held. The throwing from, the falling into, the handholds, the apparatus and the astrologer images an ancient data that exceeds its form.

Bachelard’s thoughts on rhythm, was influential to Deleuze’s theoretical work. D & G write, “The nomos as customary, unwritten law is inseparable form distribution of space, a disruption in space,. By that token it is ethos, bu the ethos is also the Abode.” (Deleuze p. 312).  They go on to explain the rhythm, never takes place on the same site as where the action of the rhythm happens, there is an in-between space where this takes place. This is the milleua…Spatiality occurs - or terorrotilization when rhythm has expressiveness, the terirroty is defined by its qualities. Only through the expression of quality happens with temporal and spatial range or consistently which then creates the territory for which it exists. Expressive qualities may be a style, a mode of be-coming, this work will articulate territory 
    Deleuze writes, “The error we must guard against is to believe that there is a king of logical order to this string, these crossing or transformations. It is already going to for to postulate an order descending form the animal to the vegetables hen to molecule, to particles. Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy…Of course, sorcery always codifies certain transformations becomings…That is how we sorcerers operate. Not following a logical order, but following alogical consistency for compatibilities. The reason is simple. It is because no one, not even God, can say in advance whether two borderlines will string together or form a fiber, whether a given multiplicity will or will not cross over int o another given multiplicity, or even if given heterogeneous elements will enter symbiosis will form a consistent or cofunctioning, multiplicity susceptible to transformation. No one can say where the line of flight will pass…Make a rhizome. But you don’t know what can make a rhizome with, you don’t know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a Rhine , or enter a becoming, people your desert. So expirement” (Deleuze p. 250-251 100 P.)
    The use of rhythm and rhizome throughout this dissertation ask us to not only question the style and echoes from which the objects, however unbounded, they may be are composed, but to think of the rhythm of writing, the modes of investigation. Working to find rhythm, hopes to create rhythm. This is an indeed incredibly ambitious aim, that is surely destined to fail. The greatest authors, if there is a great, the authors that vibrate with the passions that are like melody to my ears, have voice, depth and range that is something one can only dream of. In part the authors chosen here are primarily of this harmonic, I am placing in this cannon, of the Mega-Rhythm Melodians: Deleuze & Guattari, Virginia Woolf, Luce Irigiray, Helene Cixous, Nietzsche. The others are all music of their own, adding to the choras with contributions. I find a thread between them all, voices in the past which echo into the future.
    Since we do not know which line of flight will pass, we will continue to plant seeds, with what we do not know, in the dreams of be-coming cosmic, we will continue to reach, dig and sing the inner/outer of a cosmo-nautical metaphor. 

​Bachelard, Gaston. 1987. On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. Spring Publications.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.

Abstract:
Covid has ushered in an age of anxiety. Mathematical models for mapping the spread of the virus are statistical and lived experiences that both create and effect relationships to media. This paper examines Loki, the 2021 Marvel TV  series about the Norse God of mischief who is caught by The Time Variance Authority, run by mysterious ‘time-keepers,'  focused on protecting the sacred timeline. The production of the show was paused on March 13, 2020. During that time, the director, cutting the show at home, had a creative impulse to further the love story of Loki with the female Variant of himself. Through analyzing the disruptions in the production alongside the text and its intertexts, I consider how disruption affects the convergence of media, through alterations in the spatio-temporal fabric of human interactions enforced by social distancing and the enduring rhythms of lockdown/confinement experience impacted the production, text, and receptions of the show. 
Loki is a variant disrupting the sacred timeline who exists as the inevitable offshoot of the nature of causality, not as chaos, but as possibility. Spatial dynamics between certainty and never ending uncertainty are not only metaphors for the issues at stake in analysis of representation and matter, they are constitutive and circulatory in nature. Media should be analyzed in its constitutive temporality and spatiality. The disruption in production enables us to explore what disruption means for today’s convergent topographical media. Linking post-structuralist theories on being and time through khora, I argue Covid created a surprise event allowing new subjectivities to arrive within and outside media production itself. This collective event creates communal relations to time and space through the Void, which I argue is Khora, the impossible becoming of non-space non-time that defies translation. I explore the concept of the void in the series as a “collapse of form and matter,” exploring the topography of media’s ecological topography towards media khora-voids. Covid and love emerge as khora, at the site of risk, in the face of the unknown. In the void we face ourselves as Other, a space of being with. The surprise of the event returns again and works with this element of risk and chance. Through easter eggs, production disruptions, and intentional playing with time, Loki khoratically weaves threads that help us make sense of our spatio-temporal-verse and what it means for our present and surprising future “to come.”


Bibliography:

Jacques Derrida, On The Name, Translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr, and Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Lorenz Engell, Thinking Through Television, Translated by Anthony Enns.  Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019.

Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, What’s These Worlds Coming to? Translated by Travis Holloway and Flor Mechain. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Michael Waldron, Loki, directed by Kate Herron. 2021: Atlanta: Disney Platform Distribution, 2021, television.

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