The art of tracing VIII: I move, therefore I think

Who was this 'I'?
It is something everyone knows, unemotionally and as a matter of fact. You only have to pass through a small opening,a blocked corridor, to swing over a handrail or on a balcony high enough to provoke vertigo, for the body to become alert. The body knows by itself how to say I. It knows to what extent I am on this side of the bar, and when I am outside. It judges deviations from normal balance, immediately regulates them and knows just how far to go, or not to go. Coenaesthesia says I by itself. It knows that I am inside, it knows when I am freeing myself. This internal sense proclaims, calls, announces, sometimes howls the I like a wounded animal. (Michel Serres, The Five Senses, p. 19).

Like the body, the mind needs movement, especially subtle and complex movement. (Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations, p. 107).

The cartesian cogito has tantalized metaphysicists for quite some time now. To trace is to investigate into what the 'I' may be(come). 'Metaphysics begins with, and is conditioned by, gymnastics', Serres tells us. To careen is to enable thinking. Speed is not the product, but the method. The multitude of conceptual athletes and gymnasts, that has emerged from contin(g)ental philosophers like Nietzsche, Deleuze, Bergson, Badiou, and Serres, bears witness to that.

As Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, by way of Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze, inform us: to move is to elude being caught in nodes of pre-formed identities. The 'I' is the sweet uncertainty that is produced when one traces. I trace therefore I think.