The Lost Dimension is Virilio’s argument that speed has become a measuring standard, and that as the transmission speed of the electronic image approaches the speed of light, speed displaces space and time as the units in which we apprehend the world. Written in 1983, dated “June 1983” on its final page and published the following year as L’espace critique, the book enters a live quarrel over the fate of the city and the terms of the postmodern-architecture debate, and answers by refusing the debate’s premises. The question, for Virilio, is not architecture or post-architecture, modernity or post-modernity, but reality or post-reality: a crisis in the very concept of dimension that runs from the airport checkpoint to nuclear first-strike doctrine.
The through-line the reconstruction follows is one substitution restated in every chapter: a depth of space (the field, perspective, topology, the geometry that once measured the city) is replaced by a depth of time, and that depth of time is in fact a depth of speed. What turns on it is the whole book. Once the standard of the real is the speed of light rather than the meter, the city loses its gates, architecture reaches what Virilio calls its “zero degree,” consciousness is handed “mental objects,” and war collapses into a single second in which the head of state’s decision is displaced by a computer’s. The method is accumulation and analogy: a result from physics (Mandelbrot’s fractional dimension, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, the redefinition of the meter as a count of light-wavelengths) is set beside an urban or architectural fact (CNN, the garage, the telescope at Mass), and the two are treated as one process. The reconstruction preserves Virilio’s five-chapter sequence and carries his load-bearing formulations whole, because in Virilio the formulation is the argument.
The chapter opens on a datum and lets it expand into the book’s founding claim: the boundary that once ringed the city has moved inside it, and it is now temporal rather than spatial. The mayor’s line is the seed.
page 9
At the beginning of the 60’s, with black ghettoes rioting, the mayor of Philadelphia announced: “From here on in, the frontiers of the State pass to the interior of the cities.”
Virilio arrays the confirmations (the Berlin Wall of August 13, 1961; Belfast and Londonderry, where certain streets bore a yellow band separating the Catholic side from the Protestant; Beirut with its mined boulevards) and names the process as “obligatory introversion,” the city gutted by a multinational economy: Liverpool and Sheffield in England, Detroit and Saint Louis in the United States, Dortmund in West Germany, against the build-up around airports, the METROPLEX of Dallas/Fort Worth. The first turn is the airport, where construction stops answering to technical constraint and starts answering to security. This is where the argument first detaches architecture from the architect.
page 10
The architecture that resulted from this had little to do with the architect’s personality. It emerged instead from perceived public security requirements.
The tactic shifts from confining the sick or the suspect to “a tactic of mid-voyage interception,” and the road user is reclassified. Here the chapter states its first general law, the move from a break in space to a break in time.
page 11
Users of the road were no longer understood to be inhabitants or privileged residents. They were now interlocutors in permanent transit. From this moment on, continuity no longer breaks down in space, not in the physical space of urban lots nor in the juridical space of their property tax records. From here, continuity is ruptured in time, in a time that advanced technologies and industrial redeployment incessantly arrange through a series of interruptions, such as plant closings, unemployment, casual labor, and successive or simultaneous disappearing acts.
The second movement traces the boundary from palisade to screen and identifies its latest form as the interface. With the steel skeleton and the curtain wall the opacity of building materials falls to zero; with the screen the surface of inscription becomes a new kind of depth.
pages 12–13
On the other hand, with the screen interface of computers, television and teleconferences, the surface of inscription, hitherto devoid of depth, becomes a kind of “distance,” a depth of field of a new kind of representation, a visibility without any face-to-face encounter in which the vis-à-vis of the ancient streets disappears and is erased.
The consequence is the chapter’s first statement of a formula it will keep restating, that access no longer runs through a door.
page 13
In terms of access, telematics replaces the doorway. The sound of gates gives way to the clatter of data banks and the rites of passage of a technical culture whose progress is disguised by the immateriality of its parts and networks.
The third movement introduces the “false day,” the screen-light with no relation to solar or chronological time. This is the first locus of a figure that returns across the whole book.
page 14
It is an electronic false-day, and it appears on a calendar of information “commutations” that has absolutely no relationship whatsoever to real time. Chronological and historical time, time that passes, is replaced by a time that exposes itself instantaneously. On the computer screen, a time period becomes the “support-surface” of inscription.
The city, deprived of the line that separated here from there, is reduced to a schedule.
page 14
The urban figure is no longer designated by a dividing line that separates here from there. Instead, it has become a computerized timetable.
The direction of travel reverses: departure gives way to arrival.
page 15
With the new instantaneous communications media, arrival supplants departure: without necessarily leaving, everything “arrives.”
The evidence for the post-industrial exodus is quantitative, and Virilio wants the figures on the record.
page 16
On the brink of bankruptcy, New York City lost ten percent of its population in the last ten years. Meanwhile, Detroit lost twenty percent of its inhabitants, Cleveland 23 percent, Saint Louis 27 percent. Already, whole neighborhoods have turned into ghost towns.
The fourth movement takes a scientific redefinition of “surface” and reads the conversion of the boundary into a permeable membrane out of it.
page 17
“Each surface is an interface between two environments that is ruled by a constant activity in the form of an exchange between the two substances placed in contact with one another.”
A new scientific definition of surface, quoted by Virilio.
The worked example is the launch of CNN, which turns the home into a studio and makes the near/far distinction collapse.
page 17
In the interface of the screen, everything is always already there, offered to view in the immediacy of an instantaneous transmission. In 1980, for example, when Ted Turner decided to launch Cable News Network as a round-the-clock live news station, he transformed his subscribers’ living space into a kind of global broadcast studio for world events.
From this Virilio states the promotion of speed to the rank of a dimension, the book’s central claim in its first compact form.
page 18
After the spatial and temporal distances, speed distance obliterates the notion of physical dimension. Speed suddenly becomes a primal dimension that defies all temporal and physical measurements. This radical erasure is equivalent to a momentary inertia in the environment.
The camera is enlisted through a deposed witness.
page 18
“The camera has become our best inspector,” declared John F. Kennedy, a little before being struck down in a Dallas street.
John F. Kennedy, quoted by Virilio.
The agora is replaced by the screen, and Virilio names the result “an urbanism without urbanity.”
page 19
Where once the polis inaugurated a political theater, with its agora and its forum, now there is only a cathode-ray screen, where the shadows and spectres of a community dance amid their processes of disappearance, where cinematism broadcasts the last appearance of urbanism, the last image of an urbanism without urbanity. This is where tact and contact give way to televisual impact.
The fifth movement asks the title question literally, where the city without gates begins, and finds part of the answer in a French politics of demolition, which Virilio documents with its own cost figures.
page 20
“The destruction of 300,000 residential units over a five-year period would cost 10 billion francs per year, while creating 100,000 new jobs. In addition, at the end of the demolition / reconstruction, the fiscal receipts would be 6 to 10 billion francs above the sum of public moneys invested.”
A French study released by the Association for Community Development, quoted by Virilio.
From this he draws the chapter’s sharpest political claim.
page 20
In a period of economic crisis, will mass destruction of the large cities replace the traditional politics of large public works? If that happens, there will be no essential difference between economic-industrial recession and war.
He declines the easy antithesis, refusing to let the argument settle into a metaphysical dualism. This is an explicit move on the record, not an absence.
page 22
The point here is not to propose a Manichaean judgment that opposes the physical to the metaphysical, but rather to attempt to catch the status of contemporary, and particularly urban, architecture within the disconcerting concert of advanced technologies.
Lyotard is used once, as a pivot, to route the crisis of narrative into the crisis of dimension.
page 24
Lyotard’s modern crisis of grand narratives betrays the effect of new technologies, with the accent, from here on, placed on means more than ends.
page 24
The crisis in the conceptualization of dimension becomes the crisis of the whole.
The chapter closes on cinema as the truth of the contemporary city, Hollywood over Las Vegas.
pages 25–26
So, more than Venturi’s Las Vegas, it is Hollywood that merits urbanist scholarship, for, after the theater-cities of Antiquity and of the Italian Renaissance, it was Hollywood that was the first Cinecittà, the city of living cinema where stage-sets and reality, tax-plans and scripts, the living and the living dead, mix and merge deliriously.
The video artist supplies the epigraph for the aerial view become opto-electronic.
page 26
“Video doesn’t mean I see; it means I fly,” according to Nam June Paik.
Nam June Paik, quoted by Virilio.
The last worked example fuses sight and weapon in a single military videodisk, the image that carries the chapter into the militarized argument of the book’s end.
page 27
This system offers a continuous view of Aspen, Colorado, by accelerating or decelerating the speed of 54,000 images, changing direction or season as easily as one switches television channels, turning the town into a kind of shooting gallery in which the functions of eyesight and weaponry melt into each other.
The chapter ends on the metropolis as fossil.
page 27
Neo-geological, the “Monument Valley” of some pseudolithic era, today’s metropolis is a phantom landscape, the fossil of past societies whose technologies were intimately aligned with the visible transformation of matter, a project from which the sciences have increasingly turned away.
This is the long chapter and the theoretical hinge. The argument leaves the city and goes into physics and the history of measurement to establish that dimension itself is in crisis, so that the urban claims of chapter 1 rest on a change in the standard of the real. It opens by turning a line about perception back onto the polis.
page 29
“In politics, unlike physics, perceptions are facts,” wrote Lionel S. Johns, adjunct-director of the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Senate.
Lionel S. Johns, quoted by Virilio.
The opening move sequences the reference points that disappear as urban centrality decays, ending on the geometric as the most decisive loss.
page 30
With the decay of urban centrality and axiality, the symbolic and historic reference points go first. Then, when the industrial apparatus and the monuments lose their meanings, the architectonic references vanish. Most decisively, the demise of the ancient categorization and partition of the physical dimension leads to the loss of the geometric reference points.
The first sustained argument is that measurement has migrated from space to speed, stated as the inversion that will recur through the book.
page 31
Thus, the primitive grandeur of speed-vector reassumes its importance in the redefinition of sensible space: the depth of time of opto-electronic teleology displaces the old depth of field of topology.
The point recovers its primacy and the higher dimensions are declared obsolete.
page 33
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.
The evidentiary core here is quantitative, and it is exactly the kind of figure that becomes a footnote when the brief is drafted from. The pixel is the unit.
page 33
Thus, each image taken by the Landsat tele-detection satellite, covering a surface of 185 x 185 km, is composed of 7,581,000 pixels, each representing half a hectare. Each pixel is affected by four bits in the multispectral scanning system (MSS), which finally adds up to 30,324,000 bits. Thus, three successive satellite orbits provides more than 90 million bits. Since each pixel can be examined in relationship with its eight immediate neighbors, the treatment of a single limited expanse of 185 x 185 km can result in the consideration of hundreds of millions of bits of information.
Quoted by Virilio.
The television image is quantified the same way.
page 33
The same situation arises with the definition of television images projected on the traditional cathode ray screen of 625 lines. Each image is made up of some 400,000 points or ‘discrete elements’ (1,000,000 per 819 lines).
The retinal threshold, cited from his source, is what lets speed of transmission become the whole content of the image.
page 35
The eye integrates all of the luminous sensations that come in in less than twenty milliseconds and merges the images that occur more rapidly, at a frequency of at least 50 per second.
Quoted by Virilio.
page 35
Thus speed becomes the sole vector for electronic representation, not only inside the micro-processor but in the terminal screen-writing itself: the numeric image.
He names the result a crisis of the whole, the substitution of a continuous, homogeneous classical space by a discontinuous and heterogeneous one.
pages 35–36
The crisis of the notion of dimension then appears as a crisis of the whole, a crisis of substantive, continuous and homogeneous space inherited from classical geometry, in favor of the relativity of an accidental, discontinuous and heterogeneous space, one in which the parts and the fractions, the points and the various fragments become once more essential, as if they were an instant, a fraction or fragmenting of time.
The second sustained argument is a history of metrology, deployed to show the standard of measure dematerializing from the King’s body to the Earth to light. The invention of the meter is the pivot.
pages 37–38
between 1792 and 1799, the revolutionary invention of the official meter, one ten-millionth part of one-fourth of the terrestrial meridian, which would supplant the units of measure of the Ancien Régime, units which referred to the physiological body and often to the body of the King himself.
The dematerialization completes when the standard becomes a count of light-wavelengths, then light-time. Virilio quotes the formal redefinitions, and these definitions are the load-bearing evidence of the whole chapter.
page 40
“The meter is the length equal to 1,650,763.73 lengths of a wave in the vacuum of radiation corresponding to the transition between the 2p10 and the 5d5 levels of the Krypton 86 atom.”
Eleventh General Conference of Weights and Measures (Paris, 1960), quoted by Virilio.
pages 40–41
“The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the Cesium 133 atom in its fundamental state.”
Thirteenth General Conference, quoted by Virilio.
page 41
after the last evaluation of the speed of light in 1972, a definition was proposed in which the meter would be merely “the length crossed by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.”
The move this serves is named as a suspicion Virilio presses rather than merely raises: that this is a cult of light.
page 41
How can we no longer believe our own eyes and then believe so easily in the vectors of electronic representation, or in the vector-speed of light? Are we in the presence of an obscurantism of relativity? Is this some new solar cult?
Flaubert is the pivot-aphorism that turns the apparatus into the proof.
page 42
Flaubert proclaimed, “The more developed the telescope, the more stars there will be.” In fact, if the apparatus is the irrefutable proof, then the most technologically advanced equipment is the advancement of the sciences!
Virilio states, on the record, the strong charge the chapter is building toward, that this is warfare by other means.
page 42
In the face of this remarkable eviction of direct observation, in the face of this automatic diagnostics, this increased mediatization of all scientific knowledge, this elimination of immediate consciousness and then of the person of the seeker and the worker, we could even ask ourselves if this post-science is not some insidious form of warfare, a pure, intellectual and conceptual warfare that is less attached to the destruction than to the de-realization of the world.
The center of the world is relocated from earth and man to the luminous point.
page 43
The center of the universe is no longer the geocentric earth or the anthropocentric human. It is now the luminous point of a helio-centrism, or, better yet, of a lumino-centrism, one that special relativity helped install, whose uncontrolled ambitions derive from the purposes of general relativity.
The third sustained argument bends the history of science back onto the war machine, stated flatly.
page 45
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, even more directly than from Galileo’s experiments in Venice.
He reframes the whole periodization of the sciences around the concept of accident.
pages 47–48
Basically, if the early sciences were sciences of the earth, of matter and of physical sciences, sciences of substance such as geology and physiology, then the contemporary or post-modern late sciences appear as sciences of accidence: accidents of energy, accidents of electrological and luminological transfer that have to do with fluids and different kinds of radiance and radiation.
The philosophical reversal he wants accepted is stated as a demand on the reader.
page 48
Are we prepared to accept a reversal of all philosophic meaning, hereafter considering accident as absolute and necessary, and substance — all substance — as relative and contingent, hereafter considering catastrophe not as substantial deformation but rather as an unexpected accidental formation à la René Thom…?
The quantum turn invalidates space and time as such.
page 49
Punctum, quantum; with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Planck’s constant, not only was the difference between matter and light blurred, but also the notions of space and time became invalidated.
De Broglie is quoted to make space and time macroscopic statistical effects of the grain.
pages 49–50
“Real quantum physics will undoubtedly be a physics that, renouncing all ideas of positions, instants, objects and all that which constitutes our common sense, will bid farewell to purely quantum notions and hypotheses and, elevating itself to the level of macroscopic statistical phenomena, will show us how quantum reality at the atomic level can emerge, by the play of means, the frame of space time valid for the human dimension.”
Louis de Broglie, quoted by Virilio.
The 1982 Aspect experiment is cited as the historical confirmation.
page 50
In 1982, Alain Aspect, physician of the Optic Institute at Orsay, confirmed as much in an experiment of historical consequences.
Virilio concedes the obvious objection to the detour and answers it, a move on the record.
page 50
Some might see this long detour through physics as needlessly, even uselessly, arduous, but that would be to ignore and misread the effects of models, the effect of the reality of theoretical models on practical geometry, the space and time of different spatial, architectonic and urbanistic representations.
The human-scale analogue of quantum mechanics is named: a mechanics of the point, the pixel.
page 51
then at the macroscopic level of humans, the practical representation is now the effect of a sort of alpha-numerical punctum mechanics which — while seemingly sacrificing the grid of Cartesian coordinates — nevertheless and essentially relies on the video-performances of a punctum of action, the pixel or luminous point of electronic optics.
The chapter’s central borrowed passage is Mandelbrot on dimension as a matter of the observer’s resolution, carried whole because it is the clearest statement in the book of why “whole” dimensions dissolve.
pages 53–55
“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 deals with real data and facts. From this perspective, objects, even the tiniest ball or the sheerest veil or the finest thread, must be represented by three dimensional figures, in the exact same manner as a large, coarse ball. But, in fact, every physicist knows that we must proceed differently, and that it is more useful to think that the veil, the thread, or the ball, if they are sufficiently fine, are respectively closer to the second, first and zero dimensions. In other words, the physical dimension inevitably has a pragmatic, and hence subjective, base; it concerns the degree of resolution. As confirmation, remember that a complex object, such as a ball of thread 10 cm in diameter and made up of thread that is 1 mm in diameter, possesses in a somewhat latent manner many distinct physical dimensions. At the 10-meter degree of resolution, it appears as a point, thus as a zero-dimensional figure. At the 10-centimeter degree of resolution, it is a ball, and thus a three-dimensional figure. At the 10-millimeter degree of resolution, it is a construction of threads, and thus a one-dimensional figure. At the 0.1-mm degree of resolution, each thread becomes a kind of column, and the whole becomes again a three-dimensional figure. At the 0.01-mm degree of resolution, each column dissolves into filiform fibers and the whole is once again a uni-dimensional figure, and thus we see the determination of the dimension continuously jumping around. At a certain level of analysis, the ball of thread is represented as a finite number of infinitesimally small atoms, and the whole once more is zero-dimensional.”
Benoit Mandelbrot, quoted by Virilio.
He reads Richardson’s coast of Brittany the same way, with Mandelbrot’s walking man replaced by a mouse and then a fly.
page 56
“but since this wild coast is extremely sinuous, one can imagine a man who walks the length of the coast by committing himself to turning as little as possible. In this way, that man measures the distance he has covered. Then we do it over by making the maximal distance of this person on the shoreline smaller and smaller. At a given moment, in the service of exactitude, we replace the man with a mouse, the mouse with a fly, and so on. The closer we get to the actual coast, the greater the distance to be covered. This is inevitable. The final distance will be so great that we can practically consider it infinite.”
Benoit Mandelbrot, quoted by Virilio.
Virilio’s own gloss compresses the point.
page 56
Measurement is thus displacement. One not only displaces oneself, in order to take the measure, but one also displaces the territory in its representation, in its geometric or cartographic reduction.
The supersonic instrument is the clinching example: what is measured is no longer distance but acceleration relative to sound, and behind that stands light.
page 58
In supersonic transports, for example, the speedometer no longer records the kilometers. Instead, the machometer measures nothing more than the intensity of acceleration, that is, the relationship of the speed of an object to the speed of sound in the atmosphere it is displacing. But this “basic unit of measure” is not a true unit of speed, for the speed of sound is itself proportional to the square root of the absolute temperature. The final unit of measure, the final standard of transfer, is once more the absolute speed, the speed of light.
The recurring Galileo exemplum returns in its theological form, the telescope at Mass, tied to the still-current reservation of televised Mass.
page 60
Seventeenth-century theologians were forced to ask a highly pointed question: “Is a Mass seen by means of a telescope valid? . . . Do we consider the worshipper who tele-observes the dominical liturgy as having actually participated in the religious service?” Their response was negative, and today participation in televised mass is still reserved for the old, the infirm and the disabled.
The chapter’s summary formula.
page 63
Speed finally allows us to close the gap between physics and metaphysics.
Two borrowed aphorisms carry the metaphysical turn, Bachelard on the image and Bonhoeffer on time.
page 64
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard explained, “Every image has a destiny of growth.”
Gaston Bachelard, quoted by Virilio.
page 64
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote some fifty years ago, “Time is a cycle of light.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted by Virilio.
Von Neumann’s car-crash line and Einstein’s eternal present are both read as definitions of relativist interface.
page 66
“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.”
John von Neumann, quoted by Virilio.
page 66
Here he reiterates Einstein’s definition of the eternal present: “Events don’t happen. They are there, and we encounter them en route.”
Albert Einstein, quoted by Virilio.
Hugo supplies the definition of interface that Virilio will reuse in chapter 4.
page 66
Hugo once wrote, “Form is the base that rises to the surface.” This definition of interface touches directly and intimately on this transmutation of sensory appearances, in which the surface has become a momentary surface-effect, the line has become an instantaneous tracer-effect, and volume has become an accelerated perspective.
Victor Hugo, quoted by Virilio.
The chapter closes the substance/accident reversal through Bachelard on origins and a theological analogy.
page 67
As Bachelard slyly suggested, “The original sin of reason is that of having an origin.”
Gaston Bachelard, quoted by Virilio.
pages 67–68
According to the most recent theories of the origin of origins, the principle of causality of the universe will not be a primary substance; it will be an accident: an absolute and necessary accident which rendered all subsequent substance relative and contingent. This original accident is to reason and to the human sciences what original sin was to human nature.
The last paragraph places the whole detour under the sign of a quarrel that never ended.
page 68
And finally, the quarrel between theology and teleology never ended. Ever since Galileo, it was simply displaced from the increasingly precise measurements of space and time onto the immeasurable excesses of an instant without duration and without dimension. An instant in which constructive reason finds its destiny.
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