ABSTRACT
Euclidean space . . . is literally flattened out, confined to a surface . . . The person who
sees and knows only how to see, the person who draws and knows only how to put
marks on a sheet of paper, the person who drives around and knows only how to drive
a car – all contribute in their way to the mutilation of a space which is everywhere sliced
up . . . the driver is concerned only with steering himself to his destination and in looking
about sees only what he needs to see for that purpose; he thus perceives only his route,
which has been materialised, mechanised and technicised and he sees it from one angle
only – that of its functionality: speed, readability, facility . . . The reading of space that
has been manufactured with readability in mind amounts to a sort of pleonasm, that of
a ‘pure’ and illusory transparency. Space is defined in this context in terms of the
perception of an abstract subject, such as the driver of a motor vehicle, equipped with a
collective common sense, namely the capacity to read the symbols of the highway code,
and with a sole organ – the eye – placed in the service of his movement within the visual
field. Thus, space appears solely in its reduced forms. Volume leaves the field to surface
and any overall view surrenders to visual signals spaced out along fixed trajectories already
laid down in the ‘plan’. An extraordinary – indeed unthinkable, impossible – confusion
gradually arises between space and surface, with the latter determining a spatial
abstraction which it endows with a half-imaginary, half-real physical existence. This
abstract space eventually becomes the simulacrum of a full space . . . Travelling – walking
or strolling about – becomes an actually experienced, gestural simulation of the formerly
urban activity of encounter, of movement amongst concrete existences.1
