And More From Paul Virilio
This morning I read more from Virilio’s book, Lost Dimension, published in 1984. I read a few pages and came upon this section. These words left me existentially numb. For now I can read no further.
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.
From matter to light, scientific knowledge progressively avoids any reference to solids or solid reference points, as they submit increasingly to the impact of advanced technologies and, thus, give up on their required material proofs. For contemporary physics, this poses the major and thus far unnoticed technological danger, of a kind of delirium of interpretation due to the excess of mediation of experiences, in which the rapport, the relation of the subject to the object of the experiment, could be definitively lost,……. We are facing a cinematism of scientific representation, detached from all human, ethical, and soon even scientific, constraint or context.
Where we once had art for the sake of the art of theoretical conception, now we have science for the science of a magico-statistical representation of the world, of which the recent enumeration of the elementary particles offers an example of the trend.
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…….? We must at least resolve ourselves to losing the sense of our senses, common sense and certainties, in the material of representation.
chapter entitled The Morphological Irruption, page 72
