Reading for 12/8/11: Paul Virilio “Open Sky”

Source:

Virilio, P. (1997). Open Sky. London and New York: Verso.

Overview & Synthesis:

Overall within his book, Virilio discusses the impact of technology on shaping perception and society today. He sees new technologies as substituting a virtual world for the real one. He argues that our advances in technology are destroying our view of the world by creating new objects and spaces. These include objects like cyberspace and virtual reality and new forms of space/time perception such as computer generated realities. These cannot really be explained by modern ideas and instead need new modes of thought. He warns that the dangers of technology are growing out of control and argues that it is weakening human abilities, taking over certain functions, and making humans reliant on it. Therefore, technology becomes a major problem and threat today due to its harmful effects. Virilio thinks technology is taking away direct observation and thus common sense. Due to this, we are also losing our grasp on the materiality and concreteness of objects and people in everyday life. New technological developments disrupt our natural experience and reformat the ways in which we find meaning instead into a virtual realm. Society is then subject to technological control and we must do something about it.

In looking at new information technology, Virilio examines the shift from the transportation revolution to a communication revolution. He says, “the ‘information revolution’ that has today superseded the revolution in industrial manufacturing is not without danger, for the damage done by progress in interactivity may well be as harmful in the future as that done by radioactivity” (118). He claims that these new forms of communication and transportation are taking us ‘out of this world,’ so to speak. In the beginning, he compares technological advances to limits of the sky and horizon in order to make the point that they bring us past the limits of space and time and into a new dimension with its own temporality, spatiality, and ways of being. He argues that theories of light and speed are replacing time and space. There is a “distortion of appearances caused by the real-time perspective of telecommunications” (3). Cyberspace provides us with a new conception of time and space. Communication and interaction then overcome the boundaries of time and space and can take place in a new way, both instantaneously and globally. While to start off with this sounds like a good thing, he argues that this is not because as a disembodied, dematerialized, and abstract realm it causes one to lose their connection with the world. There is a kind of “artificial counter-gravity allowing man to shed telluric gravity, the stability of gravitational space that has always oriented man’s habitual activities” (2). Therefore, Virilio fears that this change will take us out of our world as we have known it and place us into a terrifying new one.

Virilio fears that our vision will be replaced by machines in what he calls “a pernicious industrialization of vision” (89). Because machines are increasingly seeing for us, whether through cameras, video, surveillance, etc. this may lead to a decline in our vision and experience. He ponders whether “cinema means pulling a uniform over your eyes, television means pulling on a straitjacket, stepping up an eye training regime that leads to eye disease, just as the acoustic intensity of the walkman ends in irreversible lesions in the inner ear” (97).

One of the things that stands out in Virilio’s work is his discussion of the accident. Virilio is worried that this sudden ‘motorization of appearances’ that endlessly bombards us will subject us to a “discreet pollution of our vision of the world through the sundry tools of communication” (96). He sees all technologies as having their own accident – like when we discussed with Ulmer how the car creates the car crash, plane creates the plane crash, etc. However, whereas before we were only exposed to ‘specific accidents,’ the emergence of world time has now left us all vulnerable to being exposed to a general accident (69). Also, while things have always had accidents (he says that a substance cannot exist without any accident), the “problem of the accident has shifted from the space of matter to the time of light” (17). He fears that this will soon turn catastrophic and bring about a technological apocalypse, or ‘the accident to end all accidents’ (70). Describing this, he says “like some gigantic implosion, the circulation of the general accident of communication technologies is building up and spreading, forcing all substances to keep moving in order to interact globally, at the risk of being wiped out, being swallowed up completely” (71).

Questions & Reflections:

1. It seems that Virilio’s critique of technology considers that technologies will come to rule human beings and our world. But did we not create these technologies? So aren’t technically we the ones who will come to take control over our world, just through the technologies? So is anything really changing in that sense?

2. Virilio also seems to see technology as all bad and ruining the world. But what about how technologies can be used to create a better world? Like through improving standards of living and health, human empowerment, or democratization? Can this not help balance out some of the bad aspects of technology?

3. Similarly, wouldn’t creating restrictions on technology restrict the good things too? What if instead we just reformulated technology to serve more positive ends? Is this even possible?

4. Do you think we are beginning to prefer cyberspace/the virtual world to the real world? A lot of youth seem to be spending more time online, connected to technology than participating in the real world, so this seems to bring up that question.