Chapter III
I have spent the past fourteen months watching people walk through corridors.
Not in an institutional or clinical sense. I positioned myself at various locations within corridors — in universities, hospitals, long-stay hotels, airport terminals — and I observed. I made notes. I recorded what I could. What I found was so consistent across contexts that I spent several weeks convinced I had made an error.
The finding: people walking through corridors modify their behaviour in ways that are impossible to explain by reference to the corridor's stated purpose. They slow down without reason. They run their hands along walls. They glance backward more than forward. They sometimes stop completely, stare, and then resume walking as if they had simply forgotten what they were looking at.
"In that empire, the art of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city."— Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science
What happens, I believe, is this: the corridor reads the person walking through it. And then, impossibly, the person begins to read back. The sign-relation runs both ways. This is what I mean by signs without referents — signs that generate their own meaning in the act of being encountered, independently of any system of signification.
Derrida said there is nothing outside the text. But the corridor suggests there is something outside the text that produces the text — something that, when you walk through it long enough, begins to feel less like a space and more like a sentence you are reading. You do not choose what the sentence says. You do not choose to be reading it. You are simply in it, and it is in you, and when you try to pin down what it signifies, you find yourself standing at the beginning again, as if you had never walked the corridor at all.
This phenomenon — which I had not yet named — appeared everywhere I looked. In the data from my first corridor experiments. In the literature, hiding between lines. In my own experience of this very research. I began to suspect that the phenomenon was not something I was studying but something I was——