Bodies of Stars Meeting in Outer Space

NavMind, Walter Benjamin & Constellatory Cognitions: an evening walk through the navigational approach to mind

Jul 08, 2026

Holding paradox means letting opposites be, then exploring what constellates with each point beyond that binary tension. It is part of being able to consider mind navigationally.1
I write about this in different ways. My next book, Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness (and other Gifts from the Hippocampus ) tells the story via neuroscience and philosophy. Today, in this off-the-cuff2 Wednesday walk I will discuss one part of it via the ever great and ever tragic philosopher Walter Benjamin, specifically through his Konstellation.
If you’ve listened to many episodes I’ve hosted for the project Love & Philosophy, you’ll know I talk of this idea i have of ‘constellatory thinking’ often (exploring what connects to the points we had been considering in their binary tension alone). That idea is inspired by Benjamin in part, and it is one of the guiding ideas of the navigational approach to embodied science.
I will write about it a bit below, but I am also linking an unscripted video about it. Before I do, I want to also share with you that I will be teaching a class in Brooklyn soon and if you happen to be around, I would love to see you there in person! Here are the details:
Now to the constellation…the writing and video and transcripts below are a bit dense. So, for those who would rather something lighter, here’s a practice that has been helpful for me and others who’ve heard it via various versions of talks I’ve given. I would rather it have been a real walk (as these are supposed to be Wednesday walks) but it was hard to go for a real walk because the city was so loud.
I also took this walk though, if you want a poem instead.
For others, scroll down to the main post. It’s probably too long to see in email, so go to the web version for the full experience.

Transcript:

Hey everyone. This is just a quick note about constellatory thinking, or constellatory cognition. If you have an intention about something and it feels oppositional, as if there are only two choices, the one thing you want and the thing someone else wants, or some idea or answer you have to give that seems like an either/or — try thinking of it as two points. Then imagine that each of those points is itself a constellation. There are many other points in relation to the two you are focused on, many other points that you’re not looking at, that you’re not seeing or sensing, because you’re focused on the single point opposite you, or the two points in conflict.

There always is an opposite; that’s a real thing. There is something opposite from you. Wherever you happen to be sitting right now, for instance, there’s an opposite point of the room. But imagine that other people were in that room, sitting in different places. Then you’d have a whole constellation of points.

So that’s one little trick to get yourself out of thinking you have only an either/or choice. You do, but you have other possibilities, too. Zou can start to think of points as constellations, even when they’re in opposition. At the very least, this gives you another way to think about what it means to be in relation, in communication. And it’s the same when you’re in conversation with yourself — when you’re having some kind of problem with yourself and you feel stressed or pressured.

So I hope that helps. Constellatory thinking whereby “constellatory” comes from constellations, like the stars in the sky.

“His capacity for continually bringing out new aspects, not by exploding conventions through criticism, but rather by organizing himself so as to be able to relate to his subject-matter in a way that seemed beyond all convention—this capacity can hardly be adequately described by the concept of ‘originality.” —hannah arendt on walter benjamin

And now to the main post….

Walter Benjamin and the Konstellation

As with most books that were not part of my philosophy degree, I first came across the work of Walter Benjamin when working at St Marks Bookshop in the East Village of New York City.

Something about the yellow book above and pensive gentle-looking man made me need to read it, but what really drew me in was the preface by Hannah Arendt, who was a and still is a philosopher of the sort I felt closest to becoming (and indeed, ended up doing my PhD in the same department she did), which is odd, as she rarely called herself a philosopher.

Benjamin was a man after my own heart and suffered a fate I can imagine, as I know the perils of being unclassifiable and yet driven. He was a philosopher, a literary critic, an essayist, a translator, and he was also something beyond those. He never quite fit.

Born in 1892, he died in 1940 in a tragic way (suicide while fleeing the Nazis) that Arendt escaped in some ways, but endured her entire life in others. He was born to a well-off family and was part of the heady Weimar intellectual scene. He tried at a traditional academic career and failed by the usual standards when the University of Frankfurt rejected his habilitation thesis and said it was uncomprehensible. Benjamin was friends Hannah Arendt but also with Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno and would later receive patronage from the Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School) which is now more famous than the University of Frankfurt in many ways, or which brought it greater fame when they became deeply connected.

As I am constantly discussing ways to hold tension even when it comes to the hippocampus (Holding Paradox), what I now realize probably resonated most for me at first in reading Benjamin was the way he held seeming contradictions alongside of one another towards new perspective and release. Just a few examples are as follows… he combines Jewish messianism with Marxist materialism, philology with metaphysics, everyday ephemera with the biggest questions in academic philosophy.

And all this forms something of a constellation, as does his last unfinished work (which he had with him in manuscript and refused to leave behind as he literaly trekked across Europe while fleeing death).

That work is the Arcades Project, and even the title shows the constellatory aspect of movement. Most of us know him because his friend Hannah Arendt published an English collection (the same one I bought) called Illuminations in 1968 which was 28 years after his death. He died in 1940 at the border of France and Spain where he was stopped and felt sure he would be handed over to Gestapo, choosing to take his own life rather than suffer that fate.

There are simply not many humans who have lived as he did.

It was likely highly uncomfortable and without much benefit to him personally in any of the usual ways we judge a life, and yet he inspired so many, including Hannah Arendt enough to go through quite a lot to be sure he was not forgotten, which makes me love her even more. His work and her gift are also at the heart of what sparked me to put the constellation at the center of my work. (It is not only inspired by Benjamin. Elsewhere I discuss how it also relates to ‘star cybernetics’, but the word konstellation and the overall feeling are definitly his.)

There would be much to say about Benjamin and his most popular works for those just discovering him (a good place to start) are probably “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (read it here) and “The Storyteller.” For this post, I want to discuss the following quote from The Origin of German Tragic Drama:
“Die Ideen verhalten sich zu den Dingen wie die Sternbilder zu den Sternen.”
John Osborne translates this to:
“Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.”
How lovely. Though even lovelier if we think of objects as dynamic.

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Benjamin goes on to say that ideas are not concepts of things or the laws of them just as a constellation is not a rule that governs the stars. The constellation does not exist in any one of the stars but is a relation of them from some perspective.

The constellation doesn’t absorb the stars. It does not subsume them. It does not dissolve them. And yet, constellations are often how we remember and make sense of stars, even as each remains fully itself with its own unique light. What I would also add is that each star will have an opposite if we look out from its position, but there is no opposite within the constellation unless you have designated a position from which to assess.

The constellation is how we bring stars into some configuration so that this area of our focus becomes more legible and explorable. So we can understand that there is truth from any one of these positions (because we are always taking one when we view them) but there is no absolute position in which to view the constellation.

Truth is not something any philosopher possesses or extracts but it does appear from our position or from some position, if the elements are arranged thus. These stars area also ‘redeemed’ precisely because they are in relation to others and can be understood as a constellation. Also the edges of whatever we are sensing as the constellation are better places to built from than from trying to find and rely on some sort of mean or average to it (which I would add depends on a linear or oppositional framing rather than the constellatory one). In other words, its the eccentric that makes the constellation sense-able.

As I see it, this was Benjamin holding the paradox or holding the tension between two dominant approaches to how we consider knowledge. He was opening a third, but not so as to linger in it, so as to move into the constellatory.

The first way we usually talk about how we come to knowledge is through deductive reasoning or the deductive system. This is about that more linear way that we build up from first principles which is a catchy phrase that I’ve been hearing for many years from tech folks and others who first read PT’s book when it first came out.

Benjamin is offering something much less easy to understand (maybe this also explains why it was so hard for people to understand his dissertation at first) but was still ordered, as constellations are ordered but that order always needs you to consider the position assessing it and the aim of the assessment (again, to add the navigational view). Truth is a dynamic arrangement from some position with some aim. There really is truth and it is also going to look a little different depending where you are assessing it from, even though it is the same movement.

Benjamin also argues against my great love (I did my first philosophy thesis on Hegel) to some extent, or at least to a certain reading of dialectics, but it is one I now embrace, though it took me a while to really get it and see it in the terms in which I am currently presenting it.

So instead of a thesis and antithesis that dissolve into a synthesis, we can hold the opposition in tension so that the space around them stays open and thus the opposition is not resolved but constellated. That is my navigational reading of the term at least, and it has been very helpful in understanding everything from hippocampal research to how to deal with family concerns that cannot be resolved but must be held.

Andrea Hiott

Jun 26

Walter Benjamin writes about Threshold Experiences.

The German word is Schwelle. Like so many words in German, this one holds potent tension.

It is a space/time flux of transition without a hard walls or boundaries. Not anything as solid as a door, for example. I think of it as a kinetic zone that vibrates and shifts as part of us and our…

Andrea Hiott

Jun 30

Being as I am in the phenomenology department Jaspers founded at Universität Heidelberg (where he supervised Hannah Arendt’s PhD after she fled Heidegger), of course I love reading this (!) … but I would love it anyway…such wonderful writing from Skye Cleary

When the philosopher Karl Jaspers was a child in the late 1800s, his father took him to the Frisian Islands in the North Sea. One day they walked holding hands across the wet sand. Jaspers recalls, “The tide was out, our path across the fresh, clean sand was amazing, unforgettable for me, always further, always further, the water was so low, and we came to the water, there lay the jellyfish, the starfish—I was bewitched.”

Skye Cleary

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That is basically the idea of konstellation as one of the calibrating terms in how I combine phenomenology, pragmatist and operational approaches to knowledge in the navigational approach to embodied cognitive science which yes, is inspired by neuroscience and the hippocampus (maybe now you see how close I feel at times to Benjamin’s mosaic approach). Still, I am not the first to be inspired by Benjamin and so before I go, I would like to list some other readings of this idea of the constellation that have also influenced my path through all this in different ways and continue to do so.

“Everything which fell under the scrutiny of his words, was transformed, as though it had become radioactive.”

Adorno (another writer I first found at St Marks) is the first…

He discussed his debt to Benjamin in a really early lecture (1931) which is just a few years after Benjamin had published the idea. Adorno’s lecture “The Actuality of Philosophy” proposes that we array concepts (or understand them as arrayed) into “changing constellations’ around whatever it is we are trying to better understand (which they call objects, and which I think of as dynamic objects). This is a different approach of course from just subsuming particulars under universals. Adorno develops this over the next thirty plus years and by the time he writes Negative Dialects, it is the constellation that gives him an answer to the habit we have to thinking a concept has exhausted the thing it names.

It never does. What we name something or put any word to is always beyond that. This constellating (I’m making a verb of it) is how we notice and unlock many more layers and potentials that the assumed view gave us. This is where Benjamin’s more myseical or revelatory idea becomes something like a method as well.

Hannah Arendt describes it s a pearl diver who brings little fragements up and instead of remaking the old shape of the pearl creates new arrangments. Historian Martin Jay used the ideas in his historigraphical method and brings in a way of considering it as a sort of ‘force field’ that is quite helpful here as well. There is also a critical theory journal that uses the Adorno via Benjamin idea for its title, Constellations and that has been around since the early 1990s. I have also not seen it used directly from Benjamin by Haraway but I think her idea of situated knowledges in another way to understand this as are many important feminist concepts such as intersectionality, though this is its own inspiration without needing the precursor.

Thanks for reading and please check all this above because I have had a long day and am too exhausted to write and send this but will anyway. Below I’ll include some (mostly) auto-generated, edited transcripts & summaries of the videos/ideas.

& here are the three answers for the subscriber who has requested them:

A living body makes its way through all it encounters. Cognitions are the action by which it does this, or at least it is what we can measure as its doing this (as that measurement is never absolute bc way-making cannot be measured bc there is no outside of it) via different sets of regularities. Cognitions are always movements through some landscape (or state space, if you prefer assessing it that way). We can measure them as navigabilities of bodily way-making. This always requires we determine position, landscape (regularities) and aim.
There is reality and there are not gaps. This is why the pattern depends on where you stand. We all see different patterns but they all also overlap. This is why communication is so potent and why knowledge is always an action. We cannot find and then freeze any knowledge, even that we find via math.
Coherence is a better way of being able to demonstrate the quality of knowledge so long as we also realize we cannot discuss it without discussing the position, aim and landscape of regularities.

Transcript of video two:

Hello again. This is the second video, and it’s about constellation. I actually spell it with a K in my dissertation, Waymaking: A Navigational Approach to Mind. I get that from Walter Benjamin, who talks of the constellation—written in German as K-O-N-S-T-E-L-L-A-T-I-O-N. But you can also spell it with a C, which I often do, and I talk about constellation thinking: moving from binaries to a constellatory approach.

If you’ve been listening to me, I always talk about this. I know it’s very hard to get your head around, but I’m going to keep finding ways to explain it until I find one that works for you—and you’re welcome to help me, because it’s a really important shift. I know that because I’ve felt it and lived it, and because I’ve seen the science and philosophy behind it and helped create it. This is a real shift that we’re in the middle of, and I want to share it in a way that helps you, so you don’t have to go get all these degrees—because it’s not about that at all. We can know it from any place we are, and we need people to understand it from wherever they are, because we all need to help each other. You could understand this in a way that would help me. That’s the point.

Walter Benjamin and the Constellation

The first person to use “constellation” this way was Walter Benjamin, a philosopher, social critic, and writer in Germany in the 1920s. He was strange and brilliant—sometimes a little unreadable for people. That’s a common theme with people trying to jiggle free of binary constraints, because you can’t do that in a language that’s been rutted into either/or ways of seeing the world. When you start trying to get out of that and constellate, you’re probably going to be a little strange, and you might sound a little weird, at least at first. It’s not so much now, because so many people have done it, but it’s still pretty strange. Look at me—I have not lived a typical life, and I know I’m not a typical person. But what is typical? There’s no normal. The point is that it might just not be what you’re used to.

Benjamin wrote in ways that were not what people of his time were used to. In a work called the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to his book on the German tragic drama, he writes about ideas and truth—about what philosophy really does. Most philosophy works by synthesis, or it seemed to at the time: you have two opposites, they come into a synthesis, which then has another opposite. It’s an either/or dialectics. I love Hegel, and I love dialectics, so this isn’t about saying that’s wrong. But Benjamin was trying to go somewhere else, which is what we’re trying to do here too. That doesn’t mean we reject binaries—there are such things as opposites. But maybe there’s another way to turn and begin to see those two points of opposition as constellations.

By the way, it’s pronounced “Ben-ya-min,” though for you English speakers it looks like “Benjamin.” You can call him Walter Benjamin.

Benjamin thought that if you took two opposing positions, you could find a higher concept that contains them both already. I’m always talking about exploring the space, or holding the paradox—this essential tension that seems like two points. What happens if we explore what’s around them? Not try to dissolve them, not try to decide on a winner. Let the tension be, and open up to the space around them. Hegel started doing this rather magnificently, but he was always trying to solve—one position solving the other. Even though the way he writes holds the space, a lot of people take synthesis as a resolving or dissolving. Benjamin was not trying to do that. He wanted to hold it, so he proposed something different.

He said that an idea relates to the phenomena it concerns the way a constellation relates to the stars. The constellation doesn’t absorb the stars. The constellation is just what we call the stars in their particular configuration, and from any star, that constellation is going to look different. If you’re looking from one position, it’s going to constellate differently—the constellation is just that positioning from whatever position you’re looking from. You don’t dissolve all the stars. In a way, the constellation becomes like a bigger star. You could even imagine how, like those amazing videos, the more you zoom out, each constellation looks like its own star—and the closer you get, you see the space differently.

That’s what Benjamin was trying to understand about the way we have ideas, the way we have knowledge, and the way we communicate. He came up with this idea, which I love a lot, so I use it—and I’m adding to it. It was a very small section of his writing, which I’m now expanding into something very different. You’re exploring what’s holding what’s already shared, and through that configuration, something becomes visible that you couldn’t have seen unless you let the constellation be. If you’re still trying to dissolve stars into each other, you don’t actually see all the other possibilities that are there. This was his way of showing us that we don’t store meaning—it’s actually this constellation of conversational interaction that is the meaning. And that’s what I’m talking about here: constellating.

Living as a Constellation

Try to sit with that for a minute, because it’s really different from the way most of the life around you is working. It might be very strange to think this way at first, because everything around you—including and especially technology—wants you to either like or not like, yes or no. There are always dichotomies, either/or choices, boundaries that seem to have only one choice or the other. We often feel panicked when we’re young that we have to decide who we are—how masculine are we, how feminine—as if there’s one answer that applies all the time. Really, we’re all constellations of many possibilities, and in each context, just like shifting positions among the stars, our constellations shift. Sometimes we take different forms. When you look at the sky, you can see many different possible constellations—the same way that when you look at clouds, you can see many different shapes. We are like that too. Depending on the context we’re in, we’re going to see different forms and shapes. Thinking of ourselves as constellations allows us a little more space for that, instead of trying to pigeonhole ourselves into one thing or another.

Those either/or debates can also be exhausting, and that’s another reason this approach might be helpful: thinking of mind as navigational, and thinking of how you’re moving through different constellations. You notice you’re at some position in the constellation, so things look a particular way. Or maybe you yourself are constellating in a certain way within a certain environment, because that environment is bringing out different parts—different stars—in you.

This is where I’m carrying Benjamin’s idea into cognitive science. In the first video, we talked about the kinetic—this navigational approach to mind. The first K is kinetic: movement. Mind is movement. Once we start to understand movement, we understand that we’re constantly in a kind of perspectival potentiation. It’s not just “we have our own opinion.” It’s that in each moment we’re in a different constellation, so there’s always a reality—a real perspective—from that position in the constellation. From other positions, it’s going to be a little different, even though it’s shared. So we can know more about the whole constellation the better we communicate from these different positions.

Thinking of your interactions as constellations, and even yourself as a constellation, can help you stop constantly assuming that if a person acts a certain way, it must mean this one thing. Maybe not—maybe there’s some other possibility in this constellation that’s not quite so stark. It’s usually a little more ambiguous than you thought, and I mean that in a good way, because we’re here to explore this constellation together, and it’s very exciting.

Once you realize you might be seeing partly what another person is seeing, but they’re probably seeing something you don’t, your conversation shifts—because you both have something to give each other. You have something from your position they can’t see, and they have something you can’t see. So how do you find a way to share those blind spots and open them up so that you actually see differently? And not only see—feel differently, sense differently. The world literally changes for us when we’re able to expand into our stars, our constellations.

Situated Knowledge is not Relativism

It’s really important that this isn’t relativism. There is a shared reality, and all these positions are part of this ongoing kinetic movement. The positions are real. They’re not interchangeable. You’re very special because you’re a living, ongoing movement in interaction with everyone else. For that very reason, you have something to share no matter who you are. It has to be like that, because we are all connected and because there is no beginning or end. All of it is unique and special. So how do we bring each other into relation in that way—not through the usual either/or way? That’s basically what I’m trying to introduce with the idea of constellation.

If you’ve ever read Pierre Bourdieu—and if you haven’t, it doesn’t matter at all—there’s this idea of habitus: a sort of embodied history, the way we move through different social fields. That’s connected to this. There’s also intersectionality. There are many different ways to think about this. But basically, according to what your body is and all you’ve been through, you’re inhabiting a different constellation, even though it’s the same constellation as another person’s. They’ve been on a different journey, and they’re at a different part of the constellation, so they’re literally seeing and experiencing the same shared world in a different way. These are situated knowledges. They’re navigating the same world differently, so it seems like a different world. But because we do share the world, we can open those worlds for one another.

It’s like how, until you’ve been introduced to something, you don’t know it exists. Maybe it’s just a word, or a certain kind of ice cream. But once you’ve been introduced to it, you start seeing it everywhere. This happens on so many different levels, and even more sensually. There’s so much around us that we don’t even know we could be or feel into, but others can open us up to that, and we can open others up to it. It’s such a power—such an amazing gift that we don’t really use. I mean, we do use it a lot: that’s what all our art and books and science are doing. But we don’t realize that we have this power and that we could actually focus on it. We could get really excited about opening each other up to different worlds in a way that’s loving—not easy, but really exciting.

Photo by Jad Limcaco on Unsplash

The main idea: constellation. The navigational mind is constantly moving through these constellations—they are what we move through and what we are. These are situated knowledges, to use Donna Haraway’s idea, or paths, in the sense of Sara Ahmed. All real knowing is ongoing; it’s changing all the time. That’s why we need one another, and why we need science and art and all the endeavors we do—to help each other find different ways of sensing and being in the same world that we share.

There’s no view from nowhere, but there are a lot of different views from within different constellations. The more open we are to sharing those, and the better ways we find to let each other share them and be more fully what we are in our positions, the more exciting it becomes for all of us—because we’re constantly opening up new possibilities for ourselves and for others.

The first video was about the navigational mind in the sense of movement. This one is about thinking of that movement as ongoing relationships that are not either/or relationships but constellatory relationships. That means no matter which way you see something, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong—but you can see it from a different position. That can be overwhelming, but if we can help each other do it more, we start to understand that the opposite was only one way of seeing it. It’s real. It’s right. It tells us something. We need contrast, and we can use contrast in all sorts of amazing ways, but there are also constellations of possibility. That really matters for how we think of the self—the possibility of being more than oneself, more than one situation, and still being authentic, present, and living in the raw reality that is our truest movement.

You can get into a space where you really flow with that movement, even as you’re constantly turning your light of attention to these different, ongoing conversational dynamics—and thus always changing the constellation, seeing different constellations. But you’re doing that in a way that comes from kinetic care, which will be the next and final video.

Looking ahead as we orient the urge of caring that is at the heart of any living body

The urge underneath all of this—the one you’re tapping into that gives you the kind of movement to handle these constellations—is caring. It’s this primordial urge of concern, care, love that is the most constitutive action, and the one with the real possibility for agency, for change, but also for destruction. So it’s the one we really have to understand.

I was watching a video about birds the other day. I love birds, and I’m trying to learn more about how to recognize them. When you watch these videos, you really see that birds care for different things. These beautiful birds will lay eggs and be taking care of them, taking care of each other—and then suddenly another bird, a bird of prey or maybe even a seagull, will come and eat the eggs. You see something like that and you think, “How can Andrea say that the most primordial action of all this is care?” It is. It’s just that caring systems are coming into conflict, and we have to be strong enough to handle that and see it for what it is if we’re ever going to find a way that doesn’t have to be so violent. Because the tension is the care. We can’t get away from it. But what we can do is redirect and reorient all of it in a different way.

How do we do that? Well, I don’t know—and I need your help. I have some ideas, but that’s not for this video. I think the first step is understanding what mind is, which is bodily and navigational. Understanding that what we thought of as binaries and either/ors are actually constellations of possibility. Helping each other hold that, and feeling the life force that is love and care. This is a good way to start.

That’s it for this video on constellation. The next video will be about kedos, or care. Thanks for being here. Oh—and go look for a cool bird. That’s a nice thing to do. Then maybe send me a picture of it, or tell me what you found. All right, bye.

Received Commentary: reading this through the Navigational Approach (put through LLMs to anonymize, then ordered & edited)

1. core gesture is from either/or to constellation

The whole note performs, in miniature, the founding gesture of Hiott’s philosophy: the refusal of the forced binary. Across her work — the podcast Love & Philosophy (formerly framed as “Beyond Dichotomy”), the Embracing Paradox guides, and the book Holding Paradox — the recurring instruction is to move beyond either/or without pretending the poles do not exist. The talk stages this. It does not tell you that your opposition is illusory. It tells you to keep the two points and then discover that each was never a single point to begin with.

This is worth stressing because it distinguishes constellatory thinking from a naive monism. Hiott is explicit elsewhere (see her essay “Beyond Non-dual: Not One, Not Two”) that collapsing a tension into “we are all one” simply installs a new representation — “one” — that still assumes opposition as its starting point. Constellatory thinking is not the dissolution of difference into unity; it is the multiplication of a difference until a two-body problem becomes an n-body field. The note’s key line — “you can start to think of points as constellations, even when they’re in opposition“ — is the whole thesis. Opposition is retained; dimensionality is added.

“There always is an opposite”: difference is not denied

The talk insists that the opposite is real. This matters. Hiott’s framework is often received as a call to soften or transcend conflict, but her actual claim is more precise and more interesting: tension is generative, not something to be eliminated. In her formulation from “Care Is Tension into a New Dimension,” holding paradox is what opens the “portal” to kaleidoscopic or constellatory cognition — the tension is the doorway, not the obstacle. The opposite point is what makes the constellation legible; you need at least two fixed points before the surrounding field can appear as pattern rather than noise.

Here the lineage runs through Gregory Bateson, whose dictum “it takes two to know one” Hiott cites frequently. Bateson’s point — that knowing is inherently relational, that a single term carries no information without a difference against which to register it — is why the talk can say both “there always is an opposite” and “each point is a constellation” without contradiction. In Hiott’s gloss, every act of relation is already a communication among at least three positions at once (self, other, and the relation between them; or past, present, and future). The dyad was never really a dyad.

sensing the room as a literal claim, not a metaphor

The most easily overlooked move in the talk is the spatial one: “wherever you happen to be sitting right now… there’s an opposite point of the room… imagine other people sitting in different places.” Readers tend to treat this as a handy visualization. Within the Navigational Approach it is closer to a literal thesis about how cognition works.

Hiott’s approach — which she has developed since roughly 2017 under the names waymaking and the Navigational Approach to Embodied Cognition (NAEC) — holds that thinking is a form of spatial navigation carried out with the same equipment the body uses to move through a room. Her shorthand is “thinking is steering”: remembering, reasoning, and “listening to the voice inside your head” are of a kind with walking or driving, just conducted through different landscapes. The neuroscientific anchor is the hippocampal literature, above all O’Keefe and Nadel’s The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map (1978) and the subsequent finding that memory, knowledge acquisition, and physical navigation are a single continuous process governed by regularities in an organism’s sensory landscape. So when the talk asks you to locate opposed positions as points in a room and then populate the room, it is asking you to navigate a conceptual problem with your spatial faculties — to recruit the cognitive map for a supposedly abstract dilemma. That is not an illustration of the theory; it is the theory in use.

This also illuminates the closing image. Constellations are not a decorative flourish: they are humanity’s oldest navigational instrument. To read the sky as constellations is to convert scattered points of light into orientation — into ways. The metaphor and the method are the same thing. Fixing your problem as a constellation is, quite literally in Hiott’s terms, making it navigable.

on perception, affordance & the narrowing of the field

“You’re so focused on the single point opposite you” that you fail to see “many other points in relation.” In the ecological-perception tradition Hiott draws on (J. J. Gibson), fixation on a single opposed pole is a collapse of the affordance field — the range of possible actions the environment offers. Either/or framing does not merely feel constricting; it functionally narrows what you can perceive as available. Constellatory attention is the re-widening of that field: the other points were always there as affordances; the trick is a perceptual re-tuning that lets them register.

This connects to two further sources in her “inspirations.” From Michael Polanyi comes the distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness: when we become wholly focal on one term we stop attending to the tacit clues surrounding it. And from Alfred Korzybski comes “consciousness of abstracting” — the recognition that the either/or is a map, an abstraction, not the territory itself. Constellatory thinking is, in this reading, a disciplined consciousness of abstracting: noticing that the binary is a representation you have drawn, and then redrawing it.

conversations with yourself, conversations w others: the self as a constellation across time

The talk’s final turn — “it’s the same when you’re in conversation with yourself… when you feel stressed or pressured” — extends the method inward, and this is where it touches the most technical part of Hiott’s project. In her dialogues with the neuroscientist Lynn Nadel, she advances the idea that memory is a form of communication we conduct with ourselves across time, “experienced as thinking and action at different times and toward different goals.” On that view the stressed, self-conflicted “I” is not a unit in a standoff with itself but a constellation of temporally distributed positions — past selves, anticipated selves, the self doing the deliberating. The same move that de-escalates an interpersonal either/or (populate the room) de-escalates an intrapersonal one (populate the timeline). Internal conflict, like external conflict, dissolves its felt binariness once it is re-perceived as a nested, many-pointed pattern.

why it is offered as a practice too

Finally, the register of the note — casual, practical, a “trick” you can use “right now” — is itself doctrinally significant rather than incidental. Hiott practices “philosophy as a verb”: her project is explicitly oriented toward everyday navigation, toward tools that keep people motivated and oriented “in troubled times” (the stated aim of the Embracing Paradox series) rather than toward theory for its own sake. The friendly, low-friction delivery (”it’s reasonable to care”) is the applied face of a framework that is, underneath, a rigorous philosophy and neuroscience of mind.

WIDER CONCEPTUAL CONSTELLATIONs

All this comes with a family of interlocking terms. Naming them helps locate constellatory thinking precisely rather than treating it as a stand-alone slogan.

Navigational Approach to Embodied Science (NAES) / waymaking. The umbrella framework. Its one-line statement: minds are ecological, bodily, and actions — dynamic processes that extend beyond the brain even though the brain matters. Cognition is defined by the trajectories (which are active path dependencies) that an agent traces through its ongoing encounter with the world, those trajectories being nested patterns of whole-body and neural movement.

Waymaking vs. navigability. A crucial precision. Waymaking is the ongoing, ultimately unmeasurable process of a living being making (not merely finding) its paths. Navigabilities are the specific, rigorously measurable aspects of that process. The distinction lets Hiott honor lived experience and computational modeling at once, rather than choosing between them — itself a constellatory move.

Kaleidoscopic cognition. The near-synonym for constellatory cognition, emphasizing shifting multiplicity and the holding of several perspectives at once. A useful way to keep the pair distinct: a constellation stresses fixed points held in relation (structure, orientation, navigation); a kaleidoscope stresses the same elements re-patterning as you turn (movement, multiplicity, the refusal of a final arrangement). They are two metaphors for one practice.

Holding paradox. The affective and ethical core: sustaining contradictory ideas without collapsing them, and treating the resulting tension as a doorway into new dimensions rather than a problem to be resolved.

Nested cognition / ecological memory. The claim that knowledge acquisition, memory, and spatial navigation form one continuous, nonlinear process, with each level of cognition nested inside larger movements of the body, and the body nested in larger movements of life.

Way-ability of cities. An applied extension: reworking Gibson’s affordances and the familiar notion of “walkability” into the cognitive way-ability of an urban environment, discussed via cognitive affordances, relativ eo how a city supports (or obstructs) navigability (the assessment of navigational movement in many spaces, not only geographical).

more intellectual lineage

Constellatory thinking is not freestanding; it condenses a specific set of sources that Hiott names across her papers, her thesis, and her published “inspirations.”

Neuroscience and modeling. John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map (1978), supply the founding claim that memory and navigation are two aspects of one process; Nadel is a recurring interlocutor in her dialogues. On the modeling side, Karl Friston’s active inference and the free-energy principle connect waymaking to the idea that organisms orient by minimizing surprise across both physical and conceptual spaces. Edward Tolman’s mid-century work on cognitive maps and latent learning (”more than one kind of learning”) is an early ancestor.

Ecological and enactive cognition. J. J. Gibson (ecological perception, affordances); Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (enaction); Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo (participatory sense-making); Anthony Chemero (Radical Embodied Cognitive Science); and N. Katherine Hayles (Unthought).

Phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (the lived body; The Visible and the Invisible); Edmund Husserl (The Crisis of the European Sciences); Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind); and G. W. F. Hegel, on whom Hiott wrote as an undergraduate alongside Rorty and Bohm.

The relational and dialogical sources most directly behind constellatory thinking. Gregory Bateson (ecology of mind; “it takes two to know one”); Michael Polanyi (tacit knowing; subsidiary–focal integration); Alfred Korzybski (map–territory; consciousness of abstracting); and David Bohm (wholeness, the implicate order, and dialogue).