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O Espaço Crítico
"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.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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About the author
Paul Virilio
140 books266 followersPaul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 28, 2024
“machinery displaces the substance of space-time, in favor of a kind of energy reduction and a hyper-cinematic reductionism that affects urbanism and architecture, but above all else re-orders geometry and the dimensions of physical space.”
“Jorge-Luis Borges once remarked, "If something were unforgettable, we could never think of anything else."
Essentially, memory electronic or other—is a fixation.
This fixation becomes neurotic or pathological if not accompanied by the projectile capacities of the imaginary, whose very possibility requires forgetting, understood as the absence of reminiscence. In the same way, a momentary absence of consciousness, a picnoleptic interruption, is the existential prerequisite for time, and for the identity of time as lived by individuals. In a parallel manner, the absence of the dimension of the point, or punctum, that iconic cutting of the representation of physical dimensions, is the basis for the appearance of a geometrical configuration inherited from the past. This brings us to a re-consideration of Henri Poincaré's analysis of continuity and discontinuity.
According to Poincaré, if physical dimensions could be legitimately considered as slices in a continuum..”
“The relativist notions of length of speed and depth of time finally allow us to understand the paradox of nonseparability of events.”
“if the "man-machine" interface is the product of electronic interactivity combined with relativist non-separability, then the synthetic image is the visible consequence of a static conception of real time and real space. This purely theoretical and quantitative conception finds its apparent, practical confirmation in the appearance and disappearance of those form-images composed of points without dimension and instants without duration, digitally controlled by the algorithms of an encoded language.”
“Cinematographic and videographic techniques-the artisanal invention of dissolves, feedback, slow-motion and time-lapse, zoom, live and delayed broadcast—now appear to have been premonitory signs, symptoms of a derealization of sensory appearances. These technologies proposed a question that was elaborated most succinctly by Jean-Luc Godard: "It seems to me increasingly that the sole great problem of film, in each movie, is where and why to begin a shot and why complete it?”
“If speed is now the shortest route between two points, the necessarily reductive character of all scientific and sensible representation becomes a reality effect of acceleration, an optic effect of the speed of propagation.”
“Pure war contributes to the inversion of all terms of power, as it leads each antagonist to the immediate reversibility of the conditions of the possibility of confrontation.”
“metamorphoses of acceleration contribute to the deformation of ancient reference points, such as physical standards and other architectural archetypes. Basically, reality encounters the fate of modernity: it has always already happened.”
“Against aesthetics (coming from esthesis, meaning 'unmeasured'), metrology, or "the science of measurement," allows us to observe the history of referents and successive standards that, in the evolution of science, have allowed increasingly precise evaluations of distances, lengths as well as durations of time. Thus we have length and distance of a space of time, of a continuum which has continuously undergone the metamorphoses of engines and the successive and metamorphic deformations of machines of displacement and communication. Meanwhile, these machines have contributed—under the guise of measurement instruments-to the constant redefinition of perceived and of lived space, and thus indirectly to the increasingly rigorous determination of the image of the sensible world: the world of geometry, geography, geomorphology of constructed spaces, and so forth. These are measurement instruments of relative uncertainty and not, as we like to pretend, of a certain inexactitude.”
“This displacement of direct ocular observation in favor of optic equipment gave way to the indirect perception of the new instruments of measurement. This story is paralleled by the seemingly natural shift from "primary standards" to transfer standards, from the measured and surveyed material to the measuring light. All of these inaugurate a mutation in the scientific evaluation of time and of space, one which today introduces the crisis-as well as the abandonment-of the dissection of physical dimensions, and hence the pressing necessity for a readjustment of the form-image of the sensible world.”
"The existence of gravity allows a difficult escape from expansion. For every value of density in the universe there exists a minimum speed of expansion if it is to avoid collapsing in on itself.“
“Physics and astrophysics found their common theoretical basis in the war machine. The machinery of pure war was conceived in the progress of the advanced experimental sciences that emerged from the arsenal”
“Finally, what do we make of the philosophers' histories of reference? Since Antiquity, philosophers and scientists referred to the movement of projectiles of the first genera-tion, such as the arrow and the cannonball. Then, with Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Heisenberg, they all switched to the vehicles of the second generation, such as the train, the plane, firing shell, the rocket. Then they moved with Bergson, Walter Benjamin, Deleuze and Barthes towards the different vectors of technical representation, such as photography, cinematography, holography. All this ends up with Steven Weinberg and Ilya Prigogine, Nobel-Prized physicists, rediscovering Plato's cave, the magic box of the pre-rationa origins of science.”
“we encounter in the interface a form-image in which time more than space makes the "surface," since the only depth is that of the primitive dimension of speed, the emptiness of the quick, that of the vector of instantaneous transmission of data that affects, with the consciousness of the users, the figures, the movements and the represented extension.
To better understand the rediscovered importance of this notion of transparence, connected to that of interface, the advent of this future world beyond this one of sensible appearances, we return to the work of Benoit Mandelbrot, and especially his notion of dimension: "What exactly is a physical dimension? It is an intuitive notion that seems to have originated with ancient Greek geometry. It deals with relations between figure and objects, the first term necessarily concerning mathematical idealizations, while the latter deas with real data and facts. From this perspective, objects, even…If, as suggested by relativity theory, speed expands time in the instant it contracts space, we arrive finally at the negation of the notion of physical dimension, and we must ask once more, "What is a dimension?" Mandelbrot repeats that this is a matter of the degree of resolution, and that the numerical result depends on the relations between the object and the observer. That is, it depends on the nature of the difference between the observed and the one observing, the physical dimension acting merely as fragmentary messages that ancient geometry endlessly interpreted or, better, misinter-preted-and from which came the optical illusion of entire, or unitary, dimensions, an illusion which arose from the inadequacy of ancient methods of observation.”
“The standard for measuring the space traveled through is no longer the time of passage but rather the speed, the distance-speed, which has become the measure and the privileged dimension of space as of time.”
“It is an effect of celerity, understood not as "acceleration" so much as "illumination"— less speed than subliminal light, the light of the velocity of light that illuminates the world, in the instant in which it offers up its representation.””
“Gödel's theorem: the existential proof,22 a method that mathematically proves the existence of an object without producing that object, and a theory that will end with von Neumann, one of the developers of atomic armaments, whose celebrated game theory will serve as the basis for United States nuclear strategy. Following his involvement in a car crash, it was von Neumann who provided a definition of relativist inter-face, as he declared: "A curious thing happened. The trees on my right were moving in a row at a steady 60 miles per hour, when one of them stepped out of line."”
“inertia has become manifest: "Duration consists of instants without perceptible duration, just as the line is made of points without sensible dimension.”
“the televised transparency replaces the appearance of direct vision. The sensible appearance of objects submits to the transmutation of the tele-observation and tele-communication of the facts of the image, as a globalizing image, that definitively displaces immediate perceptions, with all the implied risks of iconological disruptions. The synoptic homogeneity that results from the geometry of the point of view, much the same as the multi-temporal character of recorded facts, abolished the descriptive approach that so often prevails in scientific work in favor of a quantitative perception that has participated in a manner thoroughly opposed to statistical analysis. What becomes noteworthy, then, is the recuperated importance of the point in the electronic image, as if the 0 dimension suddenly retrieved its numerical significance, at the expense of the line, plane and solid —obsolete analogical dimensions all.”
“Literally, or better cinematically, time surfaces. Thanks to the cathoderay tube, spatial dimensions have become inseparable from their rate of transmission. As a unity of place without any unity of time, the City has disappeared into the heterogeneity of that regime comprising the temporality of advanced technologies. The urban figure is no longer designated by a dividing line that separates here from there. Instead, it has become a computerized timetable.”
“With the new instantaneous communications media, arrival supplants departure: without necessarily leaving, everything "arrives."”
“collection of spatial and temporal mutations that is constantly reorganizing both the world of everyday experience and the esthetic representations of contemporary life. Constructed space, then, is more than simply the concrete and material substance of constructed structures, the permanence of elements and the architectonies of urbanistic details. It also exists as the sudden proliferation and the incessant multiplication of special effects which, along with the consciousness of time and of distances, affect the perception of the environment.
This technological deregulation of various milieus is also topological to the exact extent”
“With the growing imbalance between direct and indirect information that comes of the development of various means of communication, and its tendency to privilege information mediated to the detriment of meaning”
“It is as if the fusion/confusion of the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small sprang from the deterioration of physical dimensions and analogical representations of space, and to the solitary benefit of numerical representation or, better, digital placarding. It is as if this fusion/confusion sprang from the too-great profusion of facts that occurs in the act of instantaneous representation.”
“Jorge-Luis Borges once remarked, "If something were unforgettable, we could never think of anything else."
Essentially, memory electronic or other—is a fixation.
This fixation becomes neurotic or pathological if not accompanied by the projectile capacities of the imaginary, whose very possibility requires forgetting, understood as the absence of reminiscence. In the same way, a momentary absence of consciousness, a picnoleptic interruption, is the existential prerequisite for time, and for the identity of time as lived by individuals. In a parallel manner, the absence of the dimension of the point, or punctum, that iconic cutting of the representation of physical dimensions, is the basis for the appearance of a geometrical configuration inherited from the past. This brings us to a re-consideration of Henri Poincaré's analysis of continuity and discontinuity.
According to Poincaré, if physical dimensions could be legitimately considered as slices in a continuum..”
“The relativist notions of length of speed and depth of time finally allow us to understand the paradox of nonseparability of events.”
“if the "man-machine" interface is the product of electronic interactivity combined with relativist non-separability, then the synthetic image is the visible consequence of a static conception of real time and real space. This purely theoretical and quantitative conception finds its apparent, practical confirmation in the appearance and disappearance of those form-images composed of points without dimension and instants without duration, digitally controlled by the algorithms of an encoded language.”
“Cinematographic and videographic techniques-the artisanal invention of dissolves, feedback, slow-motion and time-lapse, zoom, live and delayed broadcast—now appear to have been premonitory signs, symptoms of a derealization of sensory appearances. These technologies proposed a question that was elaborated most succinctly by Jean-Luc Godard: "It seems to me increasingly that the sole great problem of film, in each movie, is where and why to begin a shot and why complete it?”
“If speed is now the shortest route between two points, the necessarily reductive character of all scientific and sensible representation becomes a reality effect of acceleration, an optic effect of the speed of propagation.”
“Pure war contributes to the inversion of all terms of power, as it leads each antagonist to the immediate reversibility of the conditions of the possibility of confrontation.”
“metamorphoses of acceleration contribute to the deformation of ancient reference points, such as physical standards and other architectural archetypes. Basically, reality encounters the fate of modernity: it has always already happened.”
“Against aesthetics (coming from esthesis, meaning 'unmeasured'), metrology, or "the science of measurement," allows us to observe the history of referents and successive standards that, in the evolution of science, have allowed increasingly precise evaluations of distances, lengths as well as durations of time. Thus we have length and distance of a space of time, of a continuum which has continuously undergone the metamorphoses of engines and the successive and metamorphic deformations of machines of displacement and communication. Meanwhile, these machines have contributed—under the guise of measurement instruments-to the constant redefinition of perceived and of lived space, and thus indirectly to the increasingly rigorous determination of the image of the sensible world: the world of geometry, geography, geomorphology of constructed spaces, and so forth. These are measurement instruments of relative uncertainty and not, as we like to pretend, of a certain inexactitude.”
“This displacement of direct ocular observation in favor of optic equipment gave way to the indirect perception of the new instruments of measurement. This story is paralleled by the seemingly natural shift from "primary standards" to transfer standards, from the measured and surveyed material to the measuring light. All of these inaugurate a mutation in the scientific evaluation of time and of space, one which today introduces the crisis-as well as the abandonment-of the dissection of physical dimensions, and hence the pressing necessity for a readjustment of the form-image of the sensible world.”
"The existence of gravity allows a difficult escape from expansion. For every value of density in the universe there exists a minimum speed of expansion if it is to avoid collapsing in on itself.“
“Physics and astrophysics found their common theoretical basis in the war machine. The machinery of pure war was conceived in the progress of the advanced experimental sciences that emerged from the arsenal”
“Finally, what do we make of the philosophers' histories of reference? Since Antiquity, philosophers and scientists referred to the movement of projectiles of the first genera-tion, such as the arrow and the cannonball. Then, with Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Heisenberg, they all switched to the vehicles of the second generation, such as the train, the plane, firing shell, the rocket. Then they moved with Bergson, Walter Benjamin, Deleuze and Barthes towards the different vectors of technical representation, such as photography, cinematography, holography. All this ends up with Steven Weinberg and Ilya Prigogine, Nobel-Prized physicists, rediscovering Plato's cave, the magic box of the pre-rationa origins of science.”
“we encounter in the interface a form-image in which time more than space makes the "surface," since the only depth is that of the primitive dimension of speed, the emptiness of the quick, that of the vector of instantaneous transmission of data that affects, with the consciousness of the users, the figures, the movements and the represented extension.
To better understand the rediscovered importance of this notion of transparence, connected to that of interface, the advent of this future world beyond this one of sensible appearances, we return to the work of Benoit Mandelbrot, and especially his notion of dimension: "What exactly is a physical dimension? It is an intuitive notion that seems to have originated with ancient Greek geometry. It deals with relations between figure and objects, the first term necessarily concerning mathematical idealizations, while the latter deas with real data and facts. From this perspective, objects, even…If, as suggested by relativity theory, speed expands time in the instant it contracts space, we arrive finally at the negation of the notion of physical dimension, and we must ask once more, "What is a dimension?" Mandelbrot repeats that this is a matter of the degree of resolution, and that the numerical result depends on the relations between the object and the observer. That is, it depends on the nature of the difference between the observed and the one observing, the physical dimension acting merely as fragmentary messages that ancient geometry endlessly interpreted or, better, misinter-preted-and from which came the optical illusion of entire, or unitary, dimensions, an illusion which arose from the inadequacy of ancient methods of observation.”
“The standard for measuring the space traveled through is no longer the time of passage but rather the speed, the distance-speed, which has become the measure and the privileged dimension of space as of time.”
“It is an effect of celerity, understood not as "acceleration" so much as "illumination"— less speed than subliminal light, the light of the velocity of light that illuminates the world, in the instant in which it offers up its representation.””
“Gödel's theorem: the existential proof,22 a method that mathematically proves the existence of an object without producing that object, and a theory that will end with von Neumann, one of the developers of atomic armaments, whose celebrated game theory will serve as the basis for United States nuclear strategy. Following his involvement in a car crash, it was von Neumann who provided a definition of relativist inter-face, as he declared: "A curious thing happened. The trees on my right were moving in a row at a steady 60 miles per hour, when one of them stepped out of line."”
“inertia has become manifest: "Duration consists of instants without perceptible duration, just as the line is made of points without sensible dimension.”
“the televised transparency replaces the appearance of direct vision. The sensible appearance of objects submits to the transmutation of the tele-observation and tele-communication of the facts of the image, as a globalizing image, that definitively displaces immediate perceptions, with all the implied risks of iconological disruptions. The synoptic homogeneity that results from the geometry of the point of view, much the same as the multi-temporal character of recorded facts, abolished the descriptive approach that so often prevails in scientific work in favor of a quantitative perception that has participated in a manner thoroughly opposed to statistical analysis. What becomes noteworthy, then, is the recuperated importance of the point in the electronic image, as if the 0 dimension suddenly retrieved its numerical significance, at the expense of the line, plane and solid —obsolete analogical dimensions all.”
“Literally, or better cinematically, time surfaces. Thanks to the cathoderay tube, spatial dimensions have become inseparable from their rate of transmission. As a unity of place without any unity of time, the City has disappeared into the heterogeneity of that regime comprising the temporality of advanced technologies. The urban figure is no longer designated by a dividing line that separates here from there. Instead, it has become a computerized timetable.”
“With the new instantaneous communications media, arrival supplants departure: without necessarily leaving, everything "arrives."”
“collection of spatial and temporal mutations that is constantly reorganizing both the world of everyday experience and the esthetic representations of contemporary life. Constructed space, then, is more than simply the concrete and material substance of constructed structures, the permanence of elements and the architectonies of urbanistic details. It also exists as the sudden proliferation and the incessant multiplication of special effects which, along with the consciousness of time and of distances, affect the perception of the environment.
This technological deregulation of various milieus is also topological to the exact extent”
“With the growing imbalance between direct and indirect information that comes of the development of various means of communication, and its tendency to privilege information mediated to the detriment of meaning”
“It is as if the fusion/confusion of the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small sprang from the deterioration of physical dimensions and analogical representations of space, and to the solitary benefit of numerical representation or, better, digital placarding. It is as if this fusion/confusion sprang from the too-great profusion of facts that occurs in the act of instantaneous representation.”
September 24, 2022
The author has interesting perspectives on urbanism, but the treatment of science is somewhat objectionable.
August 17, 2024
Some beautiful lines, stylistically similar to Bachelard. But Bachelard was more honest in his ungrounded, poetic approach to whatever he was going on about in The Poetics of Space. Virilio not only pretends to be scientifically sourced but also claims to have solved the rift between physics and metaphysics? So I don’t know how to take him seriously on any matter of physics.
May 28, 2025
The Lost Dimension feels weaker than (and slidghtly redundant in comparison to) some of Virilio’s other work, though his exploration of spatial collapse in the advent of technology is interesting.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews