Open Sky [Paperback]

Paul Virilio (Author), Julie Rose (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1859841813 | ISBN-13: 978-1859841815 | Publication Date: August 1997

"One day the day will come when the day will not come." Bleak in its analysis of the social destruction wrought by modern technologies of communication and surveillance, but passionately political, Open Sky is Paul Virilio's most far-reaching and radical book for many years. Deepening and extending his earlier work on speed perception and political control, and applying it now to the global 'real time' of the information superhighways, he explores the growing danger of what he calls a "generalized accident," provoked by the breakdown of our collective and individual relation to time, space and movement. But this is not merely a lucid and disturbing lament for the loss of real geographical spaces, distance, intimacy or democracy. Open Sky is also a call for revolt - against the insidious and accelerating manipulation of perception by the electronic media and repressive political power, against the tyranny of "real time," and against the infantilism of cyberhype. Paul Virillo makes a powerful case for a new ethics of perception, and a new ecology, one which will not only strive to protect the natural world from pollution and destruction, but will also combat the devastation of urban communities by proliferating technologies of control and virtuality.

Editorial Reviews

Review

One of the most original thinkers of our time. -- Liberation

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Verso (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859841813
• ISBN-13: 978-1859841815
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #716,476 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars His fears are our hopes..., August 14, 1997

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[e-mail] (Lille, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Open Sky (Paperback)

This is mostly a book on cyberculture. Its French title is _La Vitesse de libération_, which translates as "Escape Velocity". Hard luck: Mark Dery independently chose the same title for _his_ essay on cyberculture, so even though Virilio's opus predates Dery's, its translation must come out with a different title.

I read it in French when it was published. As an avid reader of cyberculture, I found _Open Sky_ very well informed indeed. Paul Virilio, however, is no fan of computers: He feels sheer panic in front of the virtualization of society. This is what makes his book so exhilarating to read: I suppose I felt the same as an amateur of military history craving for Waterloos from Napoleon's point of view or Little Big Horns through Custer's eyes.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars an interesting read, February 16, 2010

By 

Benjamin Kozicki - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Open Sky (Radical Thinkers) (Paperback)

This book starts off with a force and energy initially that drew me in, but it seems to sputter in the last 40 pages and never seems to lead to the conclusion or revelation that it seems to be building up to. Nevertheless it is thought provoking and rather accessible, especially if your familiar with critical/continental theory.

Some of the content of this book seems a bit dated (references to the cybersuit for instance) but that does not necessarily mean that something similar won't come to pass in the future (possibly more like the Matrix?). It is worth noting that one of the previous reviews on Amazon (from 1998 I believe) made light of Virilio's take on the global economy, belittling his ideas and summarily dismissing them for his being 'French,' but as I write this now (in 2010) it seems that Virilio was prescient in his analysis of where late-capitalism and information technology are leading society (rampant unemployment that seems as if it will be a permanent fixture of the new global economy, etc.). There still may be time for Verilio to be proved wrong though.

Virilio does come off as somewhat of an alarmist, tending to focus on the downside of technological advance, but I think that his sense of alarm is not without reason and lends to provoke serious thought in the reader about the potential consequences of technology, consequences that we often seem to remain blissfully ignorant of. Technological advance may not bring the utopia that is promised in the television commercials, but it may not be as bleak as Virilio might imagine; still his point of view provides a counterweight to balance a general naivete that serves the assumption that new technologies can only make our lives a better.

In some ways I find his work in this book to be similar to, or covers similar themes as that covered by the likes of Lyotard and Baudrillard, and I am thinking here specifically of the former's "The Inhuman" and the latter's "Simulations" (but as I am not as well read of these two authors as I would like to be, there may be other works that fit better) and it might be advantageous to read these other works in conjunction with "Open Sky" (although a more casual reader might find both Lyotard and Baudrillard wholly inaccessible).

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "The viewer's main activity is temporal", August 24, 2010

By 

Duane M. Johnson - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Open Sky (Radical Thinkers) (Paperback)

This quote by the artist Paul Klee summarizes the thesis of this book which is a simple if not unoriginal one: that cybernetic techno-culture is in the busy process of fundamentally changing our human perceptions of self, society, and reality. And for that reason the book is a thought-provoking read even if on all points it is not entirely convincing.

The author speaks of three intervals that have shaped man's cognitive history. The first interval is TIME, the way in which its daily, seasonal, and annual cycles have shaped our sense of human identity as a time-bound being. The second interval is SPACE, and this refers to our habit of locating (and thus measuring) ourselves in terms of what amounts to geographic relativism; the key idea here is distance and its historical role in the way that we conceive of ourselves and design reality.

Now the third interval is SPACE-TIME, that is, the way the speed of light serves as the technological and increasingly practical standard for "the perception of duration and of the world's expanse as phenomena" (p. 13), also referred to in the text as 'time-light'. What we now casually accept as the 'real-time' occurrence of events is a reflection of how instantaneous telecommunications have (1) dissolved time's traditional flow of past, present, and future, (2) eliminated distance and any physically-defining sense of horizon, and (3) allowed a world defined in terms of continuous 'telepresence' to emerge. This means that, ironically, the age-old religious and philosophical ideal of living in the present, for the moment, in the now, etc. will only now be realized in fact and EN MASSE by means of our burgeoning communications technologies and the forms of perceptual servitude accompanying them.

Virilio mentions in passing the possible anthropological impact of these developments in areas such as politics, social life, economics, and sexuality, and these will strike the reader as insightful, alarmist, or prematurely ridiculous depending upon his own attitudes about these matters, but there is no denying the assertion that we are currently in the process of having some very ancient and fundamentally formative ways of reckoning human reality forever changed and not necessarily for the sake of a brighter tomorrow that, by Virilio's estimation, the techno-bondage of the 'telepresent' prevents.