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Navigation

Coming back from a long trip that involved writing a book, preparing a person and changing my soul (and most of my soles), I'm thinking about navigation. This was one of the main characters of the accelerationist plot brought up in the HKW summer school in Berlin early this month. Navigation is what we are enabled to do when we acquire concepts and become able to traffic in reasons. Navigation is also what habits give us for rhythms entrain so that we find paths in time and space. Reasons and habits have these in common: modulation, antennas, broadcasting and receiving signals. The space of reasons is a space of navigation - and as such, concepts make us see what they make us see, the rest i blind. Concepts are like compasses, they provide maps, grammars, they leave paths ready as they offer ready-made thoughts. Everything has to navigate around, it is a way to negotiate their spacing and their timing - their territories and their rhythms - with everything else they find. It is a good image in the sense that it cross through both the human, agent-based, reasoned search and the instinctive, intensity-based, configurational search. The danger, I think, is to model navigational cartographies on the more familiar space of reasons and to overdo unnecessarily the anthropomorphic colors.

Navigation is ampler. It can only be captured speculatively. It is always multi-spatial as even search within the boundaries of the space of reasons simultaneously drag us into intensity spaces (rhythms, passions, mimics). Reasoning when move agents is always affected by all sorts of other location variable - even if the notion of reason is construed in a broadest of ways. There are other interference because no navigation can afford to work its way only with one map - we often bring in a calendar together with a road map to plan a trip. To follow the route is not only one of the possible ways to arrive somewhere but also it is one of the navigational dimensions that is involved in finding one's way towards anywhere.

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