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Lost Dimension by Paul Virilio, ISBN-13: 978-1570270444

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Lost Dimension by Paul Virilio, ISBN-13: 978-1570270444

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  • Publisher: ‎ Semiotext(e) (January 1, 1991)
  • Language: ‎ English
  • 148 pages
  • ISBN-10: ‎ 1570270449
  • ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1570270444

To read these five essays of 1983 is to begin to come to terms with the theoretical cataclysm of the present. In Lost Dimension, Paul Virilio considers the displacement of the concept of dimensional space by Einsteinian space/time as it is related to the transparent boundaries of the postmodern city and contemporary economy. Virilio imagines a coming world of interactive, informational networks offering a prison-house of illusionary transcendence. He pictures global terrorism (perpetrated by and against technological states) filling up the surreal void of an abandoned real. In a multidisciplinary excavation of contemporary physics, architecture, esthetic theory, and sociology, Virilio traces the dystopic unity of the contemporary Western predicament with lightning prescience and clarity.

A vision of the city as a web of interactive, informational networks that turn our world into a prison-house of illusory transcendence.

“Where does the city without gates begin? Perhaps inside that fugitive anxiety, that shudder that seizes the minds of those who, just returning from a long vacation, contemplate the imminent encounter with mounds of unwanted mail or with a house that’s been broken into and emptied of its contents. It begins with the urge to flee and escape for a second from an oppressive technological environment, to regain one’s senses and one’s sense of self.”
—from Lost Dimension

Originally written in French in 1983, Lost Dimension remains a cornerstone book in the work of Paul Virilio: the one most closely tied to his background as an urban planner and architect, and the one that most clearly anticipates the technologically wired urban space we live in today: a city of permanent transit and internalized borders, where time has overtaken space, and where telecommunications has replaced both our living and our working environments. We are living in the realm of the lost dimension, where the three-dimensional public square of our urban past has collapsed into the two-dimensional interface of the various screens that function as gateways to home, office, and public spaces, be they the flat-screen televisions on our walls, the computer screens on our desktops, or the smartphones in our pockets.

In this multidisciplinary tapestry of contemporary physics, architecture, aesthetic theory, and sociology, Virilio describes the effects of today’s hyperreality on our understanding of space. Having long since passed the opposition of city and country, and city and suburb, the speed-ridden city and space of today are an opposition between the nomadic and the sedentary: a web of interactive, informational networks that turn our world into a prison-house of illusory transcendence.

Paul Virilio was born in 1932 and has published a wide range of books, essays, and interviews grappling with the question of speed and technology, including Pure War, Speed and Politics, Lost Dimension, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, and The Accident of Art, all published by Semiotext(e).

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