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.

The fifteen years from 1994 to 2009 have seen unprecedented change in the Republic of South Africa. The contributors to Searching for South Africa set out to test the legitimacy and utility of this general consensus. The authors actively refuse to travel the path of transition. Instead, they write from the articulatory cauldron of the current social movements in South Africa to seek something better, as well as something other, than a language of transition. With intense and speculative critiques of sites of struggle, the essays range in focus from the campaigns of outsourced workers at the University of Cape Town to the 'informal high school' Masiphumelele in the Mandela Park section of Khayelitsha; from the Anti-Eviction Campaign to the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee; from the Anti-Privatisation Forum to the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the African National Congress. In each instance, the authors attempt to trace the new calculus of dignity among the indignant social majority. Searching for South Africa takes seriously a critique and critical reflection of knowledge production as writing in and on social movements in South Africa. It raises critical questions on the economies of knowledge. Who gets to say what, why, where and how? Who represents whom, why, where and how? In raising these questions, the authors attempt to understand individual and collective issues of representation, marginalisation and omission. Searching for South Africa articulates a struggle that is always a struggle with struggle itself - as a concept, as a phenomenon, as an event, and as a process. The essays function as part analysis, part manual, part manifesto. Each essay celebrates the real and manifest capacity of South African masses to value their own lived time through an assertion of agency. Another form of resistance is possible!