| |
| Paul Virilio
Lost Dimension
| The grand movements of
scientific and technical knowledge, the perception of an intimate
state of matter, will have been only a series of procedures
signaling in advance what was to follow at the heart of Occidental
culture: the decay of visible markers, the loss of sensible
referents, the disintegration of various ‘standards’… |
|
order
this book
|
| 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. |
|
