Open Sky is Virilio's 1995 book on what the transmission revolution does to perception, the body, the city, and love once real time becomes the medium of action and not only of communication. Its antagonist is the ecology movement, and behind it the whole habit of thinking the human environment in terms of space and matter while the decisive contamination is in time. To the pollution of air, water, fauna and flora Virilio adds a third pollution, of distances, and builds the book to show that the teletechnologies of real time abolish the interval that once organized human geography and history, and with it the reality of the here and now, the hic et nunc.
He gives that third pollution a name in the book's second chapter, and the name carries its own etiology.
page 22Alongside air pollution, water pollution and the like, there exists an unnoticed phenomenon of pollution of the world's dimensions that I propose to call dromospheric – from dromos: a race, running.
The through-line the reconstruction below follows is a single conceptual innovation, restated in every chapter: alongside the interval of space (negative sign) and the interval of time (positive sign) there is now a third interval, of the light kind (neutral sign), the finite-but-absolute speed of light functioning as the standard against which duration and extension are measured.
page 12How can we fully take in such a situation without enlisting the aid of a new type of interval, the interval of the light kind (neutral sign)? The relativistic innovation of this third interval is actually in itself a sort of unremarked cultural revelation.
Everything the book then does is the working-out of what that third interval costs: the static vehicle and the terminal-citizen, grey ecology, the general accident, cybersex and hyperdivorce, the astronauts' inertia in the Sea of Tranquillity. The line Virilio borrows to state the stakes, and returns to, is Klee's.
page 10Paul Klee hit the nail on the head: ‘To define the present in isolation is to kill it.’ This is what the teletechnologies of real time are doing: they are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our ‘concrete presence’ in the world, but is the elsewhere of a ‘discreet telepresence’ that remains a complete mystery.
What follows reconstructs the argument as the book moves, in its own three-part order, and carries every load-bearing formulation whole and page-anchored, so the passages are ready to draft from without reopening the volume. It reconstructs; it does not adjudicate what the frame costs or what it cannot see. That is the researcher's work, and the comparative work against the media-ecology lineage, Baudrillard, Heidegger, or the eros material belongs at the master-reference level, not here.
Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Translated by Julie Rose. London: Verso, 1997. Originally published as La Vitesse de libération. Paris: Galilée, 1995. All page citations below are to the Verso translation. The French title translates literally as escape velocity, the speed of liberation from gravity, which is also the title Rose gives the closing chapter; the organizing irony of the whole book, that this speed of liberation delivers not liberation but inertia, is carried in the English title's vanishing sky.
Introduction (pages 1–6). Part 1: The Third Interval (9–21); The Perspective of Real Time (22–34); Optics on a Grand Scale (35–47). Part 2: The Law of Proximity (49–57); Grey Ecology (58–68); Continental Drift (69–86). Part 3: Eye Lust (89–102); From Sexual Perversion to Sexual Diversion (103–118); Escape Velocity (119–145). Notes and Glossary (147–152). The book opens, before the Introduction, on the epigraph that gives it its motto: ‘One day the day will come when the day won't come.’
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The Introduction stages the governing image and, from it, makes the leap that organizes the whole book: from the physics of the sky to a new conception of time. Virilio opens on the sky as an optical instrument.
page 1The blue sky above us is the optical layer of the atmosphere, the great lens of the terrestrial globe, its brilliant retina.
The first move is against the Quattrocento. Virilio denies that sight is grounded in the vanishing-point on the horizon, as the Italian masters held; it is grounded in gravity, in the pull toward the centre of the earth. The authority for the correction is Hugo.
page 2The rope doesn't hang, the Earth pulls.
Victor Hugo, quoted by Virilio, page 2.
The second move names two holes in the sky. The ozone hole is the one everyone sees; the one that concerns him is the other.
page 2So not only has our generation just discovered a hole in the thin layer of ozone that once protected us from cosmic rays; it has also just poked another one in the blue, for, from now on, our sky is vanishing.
The turn that sets up the rest of the book is the leap to astrophysics. If time itself is a kind of matter, then space is thrown into question, and a third interval enters alongside space and time. Virilio floats the premise as a question he attributes to current science.
page 3Indeed, have not certain astronomers and mathematicians recently asserted that time has its own inertia, that time is in fact matter, a different kind of material?
From that premise he derives the book's central instrument. The third interval is not a metaphor but a measure, and it converts time from succession into exposure.
page 3By the same token introducing a third kind of interval of the ‘light’ type alongside those of ‘space’ and ‘time’, they engineer the emergence of a new conception of time, which is no longer exclusively the time of classic chronological succession, but now a time of (chronoscopic) exposure of the duration of events at the speed of light.
What hangs on the move, on Virilio's own terms, is the whole reality-status of the world. His closing formulation states the stakes flatly: strip away weight, measure, and the distant horizon, and both nature and the real go with them.
page 6If nature abhors a vacuum, so too does la grandeur-nature (life-size). Without weight or measure, there is no ‘nature’ any more or, at least, no idea of nature. Without a distant horizon, there is no longer any possibility of glimpsing reality; we drop into the time of a fall akin to that of the fallen angels and the earth's horizon then becomes just another ‘Baie des Anges’. Philosophical let-down in which the idea of nature of the Age of Enlightenment is eradicated, along with the idea of the real in the age of the speed of light.
The chapter establishes the third interval as the book's central instrument and attacks the engineers' definition of ‘real time.’ It opens under Gogol.
page 9Without even leaving, we are already no longer there.
Nikolai Gogol, epigraph to the chapter, page 9.
The load-bearing correction is directed at electronics engineers. ‘Real time’ is not opposed to delayed time, as they say; it is opposed to the present. This is the sentence the whole book turns on.
page 10What then becomes critical is not so much the three dimensions of space, but the fourth dimension of time – more precisely, the dimension of the present since, as we will see below, ‘real time’ is not the opposite of ‘delayed time’, as electronics engineers claim, but only of the ‘present’.
The condition Virilio calls teletopia is stated as the paradox of being in two places at once, in a ‘real time’ that is really a no-place.
page 10Meeting at a distance, in other words, being telepresent, here and elsewhere, at the same time, in this so-called ‘real time’ which is, however, nothing but a kind of real space-time, since the different events do indeed take place, even if that place is in the end the noplace of teletopical techniques (the man–machine interface, the nodes or packet-switching exchanges of teletransmission).
Two figures enter here that recur for the rest of the book. First, the model for the new able-bodied citizen is the disabled person: the equipment that empowers is the same equipment that immobilizes.
page 11The urbanization of real time is in fact first the urbanization of one's own body plugged into various interfaces (keyboard, cathode screen, DataGlove or DataSuit), prostheses that make the super-equipped able-bodied person almost the exact equivalent of the motorized and wired disabled person.
Second, the emblem of the whole mutation, the vehicle that does not move: the static vehicle, whose passenger is the terminal-man.
page 11If last century's revolution in transportation saw the emergence and gradual popularization of the dynamic motor vehicle (train, motorbike, car, plane), the current revolution in transmission leads in turn to the innovation of the ultimate vehicle: the static audiovisual vehicle, marking the advent of a behavioural inertia in the sender/receiver that moves us along from the celebrated retinal persistence which permits the optical illusion of cinematic projection to the bodily persistence of this ‘terminal-man’; a prerequisite for the sudden mobilization of the illusion of the world, of a whole world, telepresent at each moment, the witness's own body becoming the last urban frontier.
The sign-scheme that keys the three intervals to the geography and history of the world is laid down here, and it is the scheme every later chapter draws on.
page 12If the interval of time (positive sign) and the interval of space (negative sign) have laid out the geography and history of the world through the geometric design of agrarian areas (fragmentation into plots of land) and urban areas (the cadastral system), the organization of calendars and the measurement of time (clocks) have also presided over a vast chronopolitical regulation of human societies. The very recent emergence of an interval of the third type thus signals a sudden qualitative leap, a profound mutation in the relationship between man and his surroundings.
The philosophy of the accident enters through Epicurus, and it is the seed of what becomes, in Part 2, the general accident.
page 14According to Epicurus, time is the accident to end all accidents. If this is so, then with the teletechnologies of general interactivity we are entering the age of the accident of the present, this overhyped remote telepresence being only ever the sudden catastrophe of the reality of the present moment that is our sole entry into duration but also, as everyone knows since Einstein, our entry into the expanse of the real world.
The abolition of the journey is stated as the succession from a nineteenth-century elimination of the journey to a twentieth-century abolition of departure. What is left is arrival with nothing before it.
page 16Currently, with the instantaneous broadcasting revolution, we are seeing the beginnings of a ‘generalized arrival’ whereby everything arrives without having to leave, the nineteenth century's elimination of the journey (that is, of the space interval and of time) combining with the abolition of departure at the end of the twentieth, the journey thereby losing its successive components and being overtaken by arrival alone.
The chapter closes the terminal-citizen figure on its most clinical formulation, the model taken explicitly from disability.
page 20The urbanization of real space is thus being overtaken by this urbanization of real time which is, at the end of the day, the urbanization of the actual body of the city dweller, this citizen-terminal soon to be decked out to the eyeballs with interactive prostheses based on the pathological model of the ‘spastic’, wired to control his/her domestic environment without having physically to stir: the catastrophic figure of an individual who has lost the capacity for immediate intervention along with natural motricity and who abandons himself, for want of anything better, to the capabilities of captors, sensors and other remote control scanners that turn him into a being controlled by the machine with which, they say, he talks.
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