Looking at Future Navigation through the Driving Mirror
Luc Mertens
To achieve self-understanding and to socialize men always relied on virtual habitats. The virtual spaces men inhabitated were subsequently structured by storytelling, writing, the laws of perspective/natural law, etc. It is not so much the spectacular aesthetic and ethical changes the migration from one representational environment to another provoked, that we should focus now, but on the structure that sustains representational systems, and in particular on the position that within each virtual habitat was assigned to the individual subject. And finally, we will have to define what remained permanent throughout the succession of representational paradigms.
I will first consider the illiterate or primitive representational habitat; secondly, the advent of writing, and in particular the way in which in our literate tradition this invention was biased or even made to coincide with the Scriptures; thirdly, I will consider how natural law and the laws of perspective supplanted the medieval Augustinian narratio. And finally, to address the question of the domestication of the digital environment, through a.o. navigation systems and agents, I will expand on the heroes that emerged of the nineteenth century in popular literature, comic books, the cinema
Within whatever representational habitat, achieving self-understanding and socializing has always meant to be able to represent oneself. The limits of representation though are mainly defined by the nature of the material support that sustains representation. In primitive societies, alongside artifacts, both human memory and the bodily skin were major recipients of information and knowledge. While storytellers glorified heroes that had triumphed over nature, being bodily marked by wild animals or divine spirits, was ritualized through tattooing, incisions, etc. Through these practices, as well as for instance through name-giving, the primitive subject was offered a finite set of positions, each of which made his age, gender, status, etc. easily traceable.
The advent of writing, i.e. the invention of an external, non-bodily information support introduced the prohibition of ritual tattooing and incisions, and to a considerable extent abolished the permanent character of social and personal differentiation. Being human now meant to be able to insert oneself into the text. Which since Abraham in our literate tradition meant to be receptive to the biblical or koranic message. It was Saint Augustine who around 400 eventually coined pathways for western Christianity to enter into the Text. The navigation system or narratio Saint Augustine proposes to achieve full compliancy with the Text has the structure of a pilgrimage - perigrinatio. The protagonist or the literate subject is promised redemption at the end of the navigational process.
Whereas the Augustinian representational habitat was clearly constructed on a temporal modus - perigrinatio -, the modern representational system that was introduced by artists and scientist in the sixteenth an seventeenth centuries is obviously spatial. The Augustinian idea of narrative progress has been replaced by the deterministic laws of nature, which have condensed time to space. The position human subjects will be able to occupy in this representational habitat is a perspective one. They can move from one place to another and adopt finite standpoints.
The Augustinian and modern representational habitats were still drawn from an external point of projection; the representational perspective that emerges at the end of the 18th century instead, is drawn from the individual himself. The romantic and post-modern representational habitat that is putting itself in place, is not only reversing the Augustinian dynamics of narrative progress, but through the invention of popular heroes, photography, comic books and film, also overcomes the old representational time/space dichotomy.
In the Augustinian narratio beatification and heroism were promised to the protagonist or literate subject at the end of the story or pilgrimage; the romantic narrative representation instead sanctifies the origins of the human subject. (The challenge heroes now have to take up is to remain a virgin, a hero, a saint while they move through time-space.) If the digital perspective definitively re-enforces time-space representation, and the almost godly like position of the individual subject, the narration it proposes significantly differs from the kind of navigation that was made possible by romantic pre-digital heroes.
Within the romantic allegorical representation of the world - habitat -, that unlike the modern was considered to be historical and in progress, popular heroes occupied the unchanging part of the picture. Within a world that as ours yet was considered to be affected by incessant change, they offered the reader/spectator a convenient and re-assuring position to navigate through time and space. As we all know, popular romantic heroes have no memories, no clearly defined identity, no wives, husbands or family, they don't age.
Unlike the heroes that were championed by popular culture, digital heroes will now have to navigate through an allegorical representation of a cosmology - the WWW - which is no longer defined by and structured by a center to aim at, or a teleology that promises the restoration of mankind's original innocence. As even in comic books heroes become vulnerable and die, navigation designers will now have to deal with a representational environment which seems constantly out of balance and with heroes that in order to come to self-understanding, or to socialize have to leave a track of their gender, age, etc. The challenge navigation designers have to face, will be to develop heroes of a more intelligent kind that can both deal with the entropy of the representational habitat and with the anthropy, i.e. with gender, age, etc., and all the imaginable whimsicalities of individuals.