prologue          catalytic events of disorientation          turning through oneself          a disorienting repetition          articulating uncertainty          doubting the original          catalyzing immanent critique          bibliography

Prologue

It is with some chagrin that I confess to having sat contentedly in my temporary office at the Canadian Centre for Architecture for no less than two months looking at the wrong street out the window. I was looking east onto rue St. Marc. But I was seeing north onto rue Baile. I am sad to report that there is no resemblance between the two scenes. Something that was seriously disorienting me was happening in the time it took me to get from the side entry of the building to the door of my office. But that’s just the half of it. The something seriously disorienting that was happening as I snaked my way through the corridors overpowered the evidence of my eyes. It was completely overriding the clear-as-day visual cues available to me out the window of my office. The sudden realization that my north was everyone else’s east was jarring. True, I hadn’t paid much attention to the scene. But I wasn’t just not paying attention. When it hit me, I had the strangest sensation of my misplaced image of the buildings morphing, not entirely smoothly, into the corrected scene. My disorientation wasn’t a simple lack of attention. I had been positively (if a bit vaguely and absent-mindedly) seeing a scene that wasn’t there. It took a moment's effort to replace what positively hadn’t been there with what plainly was. When you actively see something that isn’t there, there is only one thing you can call it: a hallucination. It was a worry.

- Brian Massumi

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