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.
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