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Lost Dimension (Paperback, new edition)
Paul Virilio; Introduction by Jean-Louis Violeau; Translated by Daniel Moshenberg
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R463
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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.
Baudrillard's essential crib-book, lexicon, and companion piece to
any and all of his books and a prescient portrait of our
contemporary condition. "The need to speak, even if one has nothing
to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as
the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its
meaning." -from The Ecstasy of Communication First published in
France in 1987, The Ecstasy of Communication was Baudrillard's
summarization of his work for a postdoctoral degree at the
Sorbonne: a dense, poetically crystalline essay that boiled down
two decades of radical, provocative theory into an aphoristically
eloquent swan song to twentieth-century alienation. Baudrillard's
quixotic effort to be recognized by the French intellectual
establishment may have been doomed to failure, but this text
immediately became a pinnacle to his work, a mid-career assessment
that looked both forward and back. By carefully distilling the most
radical elements of his previous books, Baudrillard constructed the
skeleton key to all of the work that was to come in the second half
of his career, and set the scene for what he termed the "obscene":
a world in which alienation has been succeeded by ceaseless
communication and information. The Ecstasy of Communication is a
decisive, compact description of what it means to be "wired" in our
braver-than-brave new world, where sexuality has been superseded by
pornography, knowledge by information, hysteria by schizophrenia,
subject by object, and violence by terror. The Ecstasy of
Communication is an anti-manifesto that confronted and dispensed
with such influences as Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and Georges
Bataille. It is an essential crib-book, lexicon, and companion
piece to any and all of Baudrillard's books. Twenty-five years
after its original publication, it remains not only a prescient
portrait of our contemporary condition, but also a dark mirror into
which we have not yet dared to look.
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