Classical Predictive Analytics: The Semiotics of a Tarot Reading for Mr Trump; Mr. Biden; and the U.S. in 2024

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In these tumultuous times, one can always appreciate a moment of semiotic comedy, even when, as with much comedy, something more profound lurks beneath the laughter (or the laughter s merely the sign of that profundity missing from the more more dreadfully direct pieties of insights with so much clarity that they strip themselves entirely of meaning). It is semiotic precisely because of its layering.Comedy, the object, is meant to signify something more profound, the meaning of which can only be extracted from the inherent juxtapositions (dialectics) inherent in the comedy itself. In this way it differs from the more bourgeois impulse to teach, or the more theological expressions of orthodox anthem (whether that theology is exogenous to humanity (traditional religions) or endogenous (traditional political and cultural ideologies ). 

And, indeed, this is an era of the most profound comedy--of the sublime to be extracted from the burlesque of human interactions meant to be taken either more seriously--or to entertain.  It is at its height of course, when it is spontaneous. At the same time, the impulse reveals the ways in which the forms of predictive analytics, and their intimate connections with the ordering predilections of those who code them, continue to inform the way that humans seeks to externalize data based analytics for informing their choices.

The Fox News apparatus (Jesse Watters Primetime) describes the show and its host this way: itself as "Each night, he’ll speak with newsmakers from across the country and give Americans a show where straight talk is the only talk, and the obvious will never be left unsaid." (here). On January 2, 2024, joining other networks perhaps, in a moment of lighthearted entertainment, to host a segment entitled "What's in store for 2024? Psychic joins Jesse for tarot card readings". Hosted on the segment was Paula Roberts, a well known practitioner for many years, resident in New York. As part of the segment, she was asked to engage in ancient analytics for Mr. Trump; Mr. Biden; the show host; and the U.S. This was to be undertaken by drawing a single card for each from a Tarot card deck. 

 

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She was asked to start with a reading on President Trump. She obliged

And she drew the 5 of Cups.

"Oh, oh" exclaimed Paula Roberts; "oh, oh, oh," exclaimed Jesse Watters. Who then asked, "What is that?" To which Paula Roberts replied, "I mean, I recognize that I am on Fox TV" pausing then to exclaim that the card might suggest "a sense of loss; a sense of loss; but it is very specific." She avoided an interruption to explain further between nervous giggling: "It is a sense of loss, it's as if he may be thinking more about what he has lost and not still taking full advantage of what he still has."  The host, pausing for an instant, then responded, "That is a great interpretation, Paula." Paula then said "It's true, I don't make it up."

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 They moved on to President Biden. She drew the 9 of Pentacles. Her first interpretation: "Lots and lots and lots of money." to which Mr. Watters asked, "From China?" to which Paula Roberts answered: "Oh you are cheeky!; I didn't say from where." Paula Roberts then provided contex: "For whatever is his normal, it is way above."

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Then after some banter and a quick look at the future in store for the host, Mr. Watters asked "What should America be looking for in 2024.Here Paula Roberts drew the 9 of Cups and exclaimed: "Great happiness, I mean that is just full of joy, happiness, contentment, great happiness; . . . its as big as the money card is. . . it is big, big, happy."

It appears that Tarot Has become a popular signifier of politics in current times. A quick look reveals  any number of variants. Mr. Trump is particularly popular, perhaps because  the popular sense of his elemental manifestation lends itself to the reductionist of Tarot card descriptions--especially of the characteristic inherent in the Major Arcana--each able to project the holder's political views of Mr. Trump expressed through the card.

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 And press outlets tended to take this at face value, but without valuing the tarot cards themselves, except to the extent of a plausible interpretation that advanced their own constructed narrative of the object of the card reading (eg here, here, here). It was fun, and silly, but always with the hint that an advantageous reading might be put to use. And, indeed, the West's relationship with Tarot Cards, like other peoples engagement with their own systems of divination, are both complicated and historically contingent. The traditional approach, of course, has been either to dismiss the impulse to Tarot systems as mere rubbish; the other approach has been to elevate the power of Tarot but to adjudge it the work of demonic forces (and thus, in some critiques, always corrupted even if powerfully valid). )Jonathan Jones recently provided a quite readable explanation (Dr Terror Deals the Death Card: HowTarpt was Turned into an Occult Obsession). He is quite right, of course, about the transformation of games to oracles; at the same time the semiotics of games has always suggested that they operate simultaneously on a variety of levels.  Consider the simplest of the semiotics of game playing in the age of the computer--the use of the solitaire game to entertain, to enhance memory, and to teach the user how to use the mouse or trackpad on a computer. 

If the core insight of semiotics is that objects carry meaning other than that inherent in themselves; and if the semiotics of collective interpretation remind one that collective meaning is invariably projected into objects the signification of which serves as a sort of dialectics among the object, the way it "ought to be seen" and its meaning, then Tarot provides yet another vehicle for practicing (in its basest forms) a sort of "solitaire" for systems of complex meaning making--identifying objects, signifying them, and then placing that signified object within a communicative field from which the object can be put in its place and at the same time used to animate the epistemology of humans in orienting the world around them and their place within it.  Virtually anything will do the job.  The more refined the "types" embedded in the objects of representation, the more refined the utility of that object within the systems of interpretation in guiding people to "sort things out."  Like IChing and IFA, this is not fortune telling, but an objectified system of predictive analytics grounded in the constrained but ordered serendipity of pulling a guiding answer to a query (for Jungians and divination systems including Tarot here). In some ways, generative AI, and predictive models draw on the insights of these oracular systems. Each, then, reduces a known world to a manageable range of data, grounded in the possibility of outcomes that are themselves a function of the interpretive universe (its assumptions, premises, and vision), that define the universe itself. The rest is interpretation.

The point of all of this is to to turn the reader toward any of these divination systems, or to plead their "truth." Both are spectacularly uninteresting pursuits.  More interesting, though, is the way that these means or systems of ordering the world can lend some interesting insights into the structures of that ordering, and the pathways that humans use to guide their understanding of the world around them. . .  .and then use it to impose order in the world in accordance with the way in which they are capable of seeing that world or being in it. It serves as well to expose the structures of human premises about the way thew world "works" (whether it does or not changes nothing about the power of such perception--especially when written into social relations, law, and policy; an example here). In Tarot, any card is, in a sense, as goo as any other to get to a facet of the question that motivated the card drawing. That is so not because the Tarot started as a card game for elites, but because (again like generative A.I. systems), it has now been coded to function in a very specific way.  

So, what might that little exercise in which that Paula Roberts was gracious enough to participate yield beyond the necessarily quite condensed responses of the Tarot reader? Her is where it gets interesting, using the perspectives, premises, and imaginaries of a world reduced to its essence within Tarot; that is, what semiotically rich insight or guidance might one (even if purely by chance enhanced by outside knowledge of contextually relevant facts) might those three cards suggest.

Five of Cups: Paula Roberts quite discretely got to the heart of the matter; the card traditionally pints to a distorted obsession that does the object of the reading no good. Three cups spilled, but two remaining.  Why focus on the spilled wine when there is more wine to drink?  In one sense the cards might be used to indicate the costs of continuing to focus on the 2020 election; though in this case that may not be it, since people other than Mr Trump are driving those  to their own ends (the three spilled cups required spilling; and they remain spilled).  On the other hand, the card also suggests the consequence of obsessing about spilled wine--one never fully takes advantage of the wine that remains. That, in turn, suggests character, in this case of a tendency to look backwards rather than forward; to focus on revenge rather than advantage for one's followers; a backwards looking approach that by focusing on what cannot be undone leaves undone what can be used to better effect. That can be changed, but it requires letting go. And the character of the card suggests that may not be possible. 

Nine of Pentacles:  Paula Roberts again provides the ten word version to good effect. It does indeed suggest lots of wealth.  But the context is important. This luxury is static and again also reflects a way of looking backwards rather then forward.  One enjoys the wealth that one has built in one's fabulously glorious garden.  But what lies beyond might also be worrisome--the people beyond the wall might be itching to take what has been accumulated, and that might be commenced while one luxuriates in the knowledge of rubbing up against one's wealth. At another level it is reminder that there is a small space between luxury and accumulation, on the one hand, and dissipation and decay on the other.  The self absorption of wealth can be as dangerous to the prosperity of the individual as its lack. Left open is the question: while one can luxuriate in one's wealth in this moment, what happens next? It operates at the level of one's office, or a personal level. 

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Nine of Cups. Paula Roberts again got this right in its most commonly understood  meaning.  This is sometimes known as the "wish" card--as in all one's wishes coming true. The implication is one of satisfaction, happiness, and fulfillment. But one ought to be reminded of the trap that wishes pose. Wishes can be a poisoned chalice; or as the old saying goes--be careful for what one wishes. It was the animating trope of that wonderfully produced film, Three Thousand Years of Longing.

Dr Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is an academic - content with life and a creature of reason. While in Istanbul attending a conference, she happens to encounter a Djinn (Idris Elba) who offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom. This presents two problems. First, she doubts that he is real and second, because she is a scholar of story and mythology, she knows all the cautionary tales of wishes gone wrong. The Djinn pleads his case by telling her fantastical stories of his past. Eventually she is beguiled and makes a wish that surprises them both. (Three Thousand Years of Longing).

That surprise, of course, is to free one of the prison of perceived desire.  But in an age of self actualization, that may not be possible.  The United States might well get what it most desires; but realizing that desire may reveal at last the folly of desire. And that desire might well be shaped by the two people whose destinies may themselves be the principal Tarot Cards of the United States--Mr Trump's personification of the Five of Cups type; and Mr Biden's personification of the Nine of Pentacles type. So what might the U.S. desire?: on the one hand revenge (the lists compiled by factions of all political orientations is long and the efforts undertaken in their service already extensive), and an obsessive focus on what has already come to pass--an obsession about history, historical wrongs, and the need to make them right, while blissfully unaware of the way that wastes and ignores potential brimming with wine.  What one gets here is the bitter harvesting from the past and the potential loss of a richer future. On the other hand,what may be desired is to luxuriate in the accumulation of wealth--perhaps of one's own making but more likely passed on by the work and sacrifices of others whose efforts produced the garden of delights in which one might parade around congratulating oneself on living in this moment, while blissfully unaware that though the enjoyment of wealth may be well deserved, its pathway from contemplation to dissipation, and it pathway from the sacrifice that made it possible to the unwillingness to get one's hands dirty to keep or increase it for those who come next (in whatever form value directs), makes it more likely that those who converge beyond the garden's walls will one day (soon) present a challenge about which the garden's resident is clueless. 

These, then, are the imaginaries that might be worth considering, even assuming that playing at Tarot is a game.  "'That card is a piece of cardboard with a painting on it that has no knowledge about you, has no wisdom in your life, has no power to do anything,' she said." (Ex-Psychic Sounds Alarm After Live Tarot Card Reading About Trump, Biden on Fox News: ‘You’ve Opened Demonic Doors’). The ex-psychic saw the cards as a doorway--"Nizza continued, 'So, you have entered into divination. You’ve opened demonic doors, and it’s the demonic entities that are providing the information through … interpretations and the little books that come with the Tarot cards.'” (Ibid.). Semiotics suggests that at least part of that  perspective is not without foundation--the cards, like every instrument of divination--are objects, paper on which pictures or images have been imprinted or rendered. It has no autonomous or animated spirit.What gives it power? Well, nothing. Rather they are objects on which humans imprint themselves, or better put, their imagines of the rationalization of the world in which they live and the imagined extent of the character of their personal and social relations. In this sense they serve as reductions from an abstracted ordering of the human--but they also serve as ikons; images venerated for what they represented through which a connection to a higher wisdom might be attained. And the demonic?: that use of the signification of the object to provide meaning--approaches to questions asked. They serve, like many of the hermeneutical instruments of human relations, as a means for the constitution and framing of ordered systems of interpretation aligned with and advancing the fundamental premises of that social ordering from which they derive. Conceptual intersubjectivity without the human subject, grounded in the phenomenology of the iterative, the drawing of the cards, the casting of the yarrow stick, the casting of the shells, the coding of a generative analytics animated. Humans hardly change their self/construction or the means through which they seek to guide their inter-relations.  In the end, they all ought to converge. But that requires a knowledge of the overarching coding within which a system of interpretation (hermeneutics) can be elaborated. Interesting enough, that is the fundamental point in Fides et Ratio, though the overarching "coding" is vastly different.