By Paul Virilio Open Sky (Radical Thinkers) [Paperback]

by Paul Virilio

Writer and political activist Paul Virilio makes a passionate critique of information technology and the global media. OPEN SKY is a call for revolt against the insidious manipulation of perception by the electronic media and the infantilism of cyberhype. Virilio pleads for a new ethics of perception and a new ecology, to protect not only the natural world, but also the urban community.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Technology, Academic, Society

Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.

Reviews

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 4 out of 5]

"One day
the day will come
when the day won't come"

So there ya go. Now then--four stars and a "favorite?" How can such things be? Well, if you're the type of person who reads these things (I'm not), here goes:

1) There are probably five or six truly brilliant insights in this book, often presented in the profound/pseudo-profound sentences that comprise the bulk of an entire Wesley Morris film review. e.g., "real time" will triumph over space and distance, our vision will be altered by various means (biotechnology, improved hardware), "glocalization" will render us sedentary nodes at computer terminals, cybersex may result in the extinction of the human race, and so on.

2) And yet...and yet this entire book is just too poetic and precious for its own good. I pity the translator here; perhaps the original was beautiful and the garish Anglo-Saxon/Latinate fusion of the English language simply couldn't convey that. But even in the original, 150 pages to make the aforementioned points when one isn't even covering one's philosophical trail (by battling against other critics or offering any solutions to the problem being described) strikes me as expanded beyond necessity.

3) Virilio seems to regard this shift as a fait accompli, and from the perspective of several years later, he's been proved right. I'm genuinely fascinated to see how the children of today evolve into the college students I'll be teaching tomorrow.

4) Finally, the chapter "From Sexual Perversion to Sexual Diversion" deserves a book of its own, one that is longer than 150 pages. "With cybersexuality," Virilio writes, "you no longer divorce, you disintegrate." As someone who has disintegrated too many online love affairs to count, who has explored (if not enjoyed) every debauchery available on the World Wide Web, perhaps that someone will be me. Even if the chapter doesn't quite fit with what comes before or after, I'm glad Virilio included it...but I wish he'd written more.

In short: an essential book, a brilliant book, but not a good one. Lots of jargon, lots of McLuhan-izing, no real engage with the big-time critical theorists who have already paved the way in this area...and such a slow read, for the most part. But my goodness there are a few beautiful parts.

[Sam Farnsworth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another day, another french guy. Interesting book if u want to learn more about how time, speed, light, “dromospheric pollution”, and telecommunications all interact together to shape our perceptions and understanding of reality 😂. Flashes of really good insight here and there but many parts were boring and repetitive. Per usual, everything these guys lamented in the 80s and 90s has only 100x in severity. If only they knew how bad things really are….

[Gustavs · Rating 3 out of 5]

old man yells at cloud.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sunday: Of the books purchased today not the most scintillating but it was in tough company. The others were off the charts.

Tuesday: In response to Mia's review, below--

On such a serious topic, your review feels dismissive. Though you gave it five stars so I don't think you were meaning to be dismissive. Words like "now" and "obsolete" don't give any hints as to consequence or value of those meanings. As if humans could live with a vertical horizon and as if two-point perspective is an option among a series of types of perspectives. I'm only at the beginning but he seems to be talking more about Renaissance perspective in general, with one vanishing point, or two, or however many. To say that Renaissance perspective, however many points, is obsolete, is also to ignore what was before even that, which Virilio does not do. In other words, 2D rendering is not absolute or fundamental.

[Ben Cardillo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, some of it was kinda reactionary/conservative, but had an interesting approach to how instantaneous communication and modern technology fundamentally changes the ways we define our subjectivity. Particularly enjoyed his ideas about the shift from linear historically grounded time to an “infinite present”/chronoscopic time of underexposure, exposure, and overexposure. Comes from the same place as some of his contemporary Proto-accelerationist thinkers like deleuze and baudrillard but arrives at some different and potentially questionable conclusions. Read with a critical eye.

[Daniel Liddle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun and Funky!

This book was a wonderful, clear read. Anyone interested in the conjunction between neurophilosophy and the underlying logics of the transition from Newtonian to relativistic physics should give this book a try.

[Mia Ruyter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The horizon is now vertical.
Two-point perspective is obsolete.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I get that Virilio isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. For silly reasons but also because no translation in the world can dissolve the inherent convolution in thought. That said, for those who can see the way many of his visions have come to fruition this is a masterpiece. There is the Kurzweil crowd who gets swept away by the fanaticism of the spectacle and the predictability of the market. With Virilio you get the bigger picture coming from a place of understanding rather than control seeking. His books all tend to get better as they go because you eventually understand the concept he’s been rambling about in an unfocused way for the first half of the book. This one’s similar but then also requires a higher knowledge of physics and a parallel with political and economic paradigms. If you are prepared for that, you get how this book is one of the greatest achievements in the history of human thought.

[Scot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite possibly the most important book you could read today. At times difficult to understand and at other times difficult to bear, this work is recommended for anyone trying to grasp the reality of the world today. Virilio offers no solutions but instead simply lays out where we are, leaving the reader to step into the madness and see for themselves.

[Cheng Wen Cheong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man's a good writer, probably on par with Adorno. This book has some funky phrases that are easy to remember yet profound. However, the rest of the content pales in comparison to these transient moments. I found the thesis to be rather reactionary and overblown. It flirts with critical theory at times but there is a lack of acknowledgement of its influence. Nice read, but not necessary.

[Bernard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I do not agree with the prescriptions (whatever can be drawn from Virilio here) or with the general sentiment towards technology here. Whilst Open Sky is a very well written book, in the sense that it's rich with prose and baroque conceptualisation, particularly of speed and time, it falls demonstrably flat when it has to descend down to a digestible dimension into what this all actually means for the reader. Yes, in many ways technology comes with faults - integral accidents are an interesting notion to explore, but Virilio's total foregoing of any remotely economic analyses of the tech he is exploring is a constant source of frustration that reminds me of how well received Baudrillard is in the public sphere relative to how parochial, and oftentimes, circular the central thesis is. If light-technologies change the way we perceive reality, then maybe that calls into question our relation with reality itself? Is there anything fundamentally sacred (I know Virilio doesn't explicitly argue this) in the pre-world war period where we started to slowly digest mechanised travel through the railway, or was technological development always outpacing our capacity to consider notions of reality in the first place? Are we really at the mercy of technology here, or is it possible to reconstitute our relationship through a rigorous analysis of the social formation in which these devices and gadgets are deployed in the first place? Admittedly, I am very biased. As a linguist, computational models aid significantly in creating grammar formalisms that are able to capture a variety of phenomena in the mechanic constitution of language itself. The question there, as it is for Virilio, is history. Chomskyan linguistics to me is limited by its lack of consideration of history and social formations through its excessive bracketing, but it is only through our privileged perspective in being able to document and analyse past events that we are able to conceive of it as such. Consequently all the social upheaval brought with technology and the supposed distance that it generates (the most antagonistic of which for me was his chapter on cybersex where I could scarcely contain myself at the mention of 'universal condoms') is also met with the distance it eliminates in those willing to use it for good. I have crafted several meaningful relations and have the benefit of the entire assembly of human knowledge at my fingertips - I am able to learn at an unparalleled rate to my parents, and the improvement of communication technologies serves only to undermine the social structure that financially supports them in direct proportion to radical action. This total surrender to the electronic to me is in stark contrast to the realities of the pseudo-feudalistic social formation that they obliterate through an almost Hegelian movement of an enlightening. In short, my own experiences are totally contrary to those that Virilio warns against.

That being said, the prose and the conceptualisation are a treat for those who do not have the same experiences as me. I will not claim therefore that one ought to avoid the book or the author, but one should necessarily ask these questions, and I am very glad that Virilio has posed them. They could have simply been articulated in a better way. The sensation and conclusions I am left with are those of frustration and mild exhaustion, though at the same time I now have an increased interest in his influences (aside from Baudrillard) and in particular Bergson. Maybe the weather just wasn't right for me to read him, or maybe we have already attained the benefit of hindsight over Open Sky.

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Open Sky it may be true that Virilio has to some extent theorized our Facebook (or even Zoom) era, circa 1995. I think there's even a case to be made, because of his heavy emphasis on the notion of speed in this volume, that he simultaneously anticipated and denounced accelerationism, way before it could be said there was such a thing.

But perhaps I'm being too generous. I'm not sure why Virilio spent 145 pages to say so little. He does have a certain poetical sensibility, but what that adds up is to next-to-nothing wrapped in a language that sounds like it came from an early PK Dick novel:

Meeting 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 no-place of teletopical techniques (the man-machine interface, the nodes of packet-switching exchanges of teletransmission).

Immediate teleaction, instantaneous telepresence. Thanks to the new practices of television broadcasting or remote transmission, acting, the famous teleacting of remote control, is here facilitated by the maximum performance of electromagnetism and the radioelectric views of what is now called optoelectronics, the perceptual faculties of the individual's body being transferred one by one to machines.

Straight from the telephone age.

Other times, Virilio seems to be simply larding it on:

Speed not only allows us to get around more easily; it enables us above all to see, to hear, to perceive and thus to conceive the present world more intensely. Tomorrow, it will enable us to act at a distance, beyond the human body's sphere of influence and that of its behavioral ergonomics.

Really? Or another example:

A few souls were already talking about a hole in space some years ago; others, more recently, have been talking about a hole in time, the real time of the instantaneous transmission of historic events and, in particular, the Gulf War. This semantic vacillation seems characteristic of the perceptual disorder now afflicting our society, confronted as it is by the progress in teletechnologies and the dwindling importance of geometric optics, the passive optics of the space of matter (glass, water, air) which, in the end, only covers man's immediate proximity.

In the end, I could only recommend this book if you find it helpful to discover that the baffling and trenchant technology-related problems of our era were both theorized about and cautioned against even when they were just being birthed, and you wish to read such findings written with an absolutist's poetic license.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

One would have to credit Virilio for his intervention at the level of "dromology" here, which has had its progenies in such astounding works as Mohan and Dwivedi's Gandhi and Philosophy. But here it seems, usually, more mundane than all that, mainly teasing out the implications of recent developments in technology for space, time, etc., which is paired with some pseudo-scientific jargon. However, the way that disability is tackled here must strike one as a bit odd, as is the idea that the rise in sexual assault allegations is reducible to this technological periodization.

[Remi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concern when reading critics of technology, virtual worlds, and telepresence (especially in today's age of COVID aka The Generalized Accident) is you tend to agree and see parallels with the current state, then end up concerned that you may more in tandem with Kaczinksy thought than you'd really like to.

[Fraser · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you're writing about digital technology you might want to start a bit closer to the present day than by launching into a treatise on the Big Bang. Confirms every negative stereotype anyone might hold about "philosophical writing". Eventually gets to the point, surveillance is bad... congrats I guess. Give this as a present to someone you really hate.

[Morgan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too many short (one sentence) paragraphs, too much jumping around without fleshing out ideas, too much moralizing.

[Michael Gallagher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah Paul, computers are wild, huh. An essentialist bedfellow of Heidegger and Agamben, but it’s an entertaining read.

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seems to misuse scientific jargon. Some insightful points about digital communication.

[Khalid Kurji · Rating 2 out of 5]

I might have understood 9% of this book, but that 9% does seem prescient

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book truly opened my eyes to new ways of looking at the ways in which technology affects our mental and physical orientation to space/time. The argument he outlines in this short inquiry into the human spirit is so convoluted that, during academic discourse, I am scarcely able to verbally explain even its most simple premises to others without getting lost in the cerebral fog of its more complicated ideas. Conversely, his presentation of the argument is so lucid, the syllogistic connectivity of its persuasiveness so masterful, that comprehension upon reading is as immediate as it is stupefying. Virilio is a visionary, one of the most insightful thinkers of our day and I am certain that he will be regarded as such for generations to come. In truth, I owe much to the intellectual enrichment attainted in reading this and many other books from one of the only second generation post-moderns to explore beyond the philosophical boundaries established by that same renowned consortium.

[Cole Stratton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Virilio attempts to describe some of the dangers hidden but inherent in our digitally dominated world. Lacking the language to adequately describe how technology is altering our experience of reality, he instead relies on a prose that is poetic, metaphorical, philosophical, and loaded with neologisms. This prose, in addition to being translated from French, does not lend itself to easy understanding. The sense one gets, however, is a very real concern for the overlooked implications of a massively mediated world. Virilio sounds an alarm that is too often muffled by the naively hopeful optimism of Progress.

[Kristen Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn't really a fan of this book. Virilio seems like a smart dude, and he had some valuable cautionary tale type things to say but IMO he came off so prematurely pessimistic that it turned me off. Also for the first couple of chapters i was like WTF is this guy talking about?! Maybe it's the French to English translation? I don't even know.