on empty buildings

I’m now sitting in the Brussels Airport. And that reminds me of something about yesterday morning (it feels like months ago) when I was in the Madrid Airport.

I arrived in Madrid at around 3:30 in the morning yesterday. The layover wasn’t quite long enough to go into the city, so I simply went to my gate for the flight to Brussels.

The Brussels flight was in the M wing. And it is no exaggeration to say that, for 90 minutes, I was the only human in the M Wing. No airline workers. All the shops were closed. Not even a janitor walking through, or a security officer. For 90 minutes, I was the only one of the 7 billion humans on earth who happened to be in the M wing of the Madrid airport.

And what I noticed is that it was spatially confusing with no one else there. Everything was perfectly well marked: escalator, toilets, telephones, etc. But despite the markings, geography can be somewhat confusing when there are no other people around. It made me realize that we must regulate and orient our movements at least in part by observing how others are moving. In other words, if you see a crowd moving in a certain direction down the street, you are likely to follow them or at least look in that direction, or orient yourself by how the others are moving, if only to reject it.

Imagine that there were no blogs, conferences, email, etc. Someone simply dropped 50 contemporary books on your desk, with all blurbs stripped from the back covers. You had never heard of any of these authors before, and were somehow asked to decide what you thought about each of them.

Yes, you could do it. But it would be confusing and disorienting, I think. The amount of concentration needed to find the stairs in the M wing at Madrid with no one else around (despite the signs) and the same would probably true of trying to come to judgments about each and every thing without knowing anything about the judgments of others.

It reminds me of a similar point made by Latour, which is that road maps do not refer directly to natural geography, but to the signs that are superimposed on that geography. For example, if all road signs were removed from Alaska and you had to make a tour of the state simply by trying to match the appearance of the landscape to the maps, you would have no hope whatsoever. Instead, you match the names on the map to the names on the road signs, and only secondarily (if at all) do you match up geographical features directly with the map in your possession.