Customer Reviews

Open Sky

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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.

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).

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.

This book was recommended by a couple of artist/art critic friends who found it engrossing, but difficult to work through. (They do not have an extensive Internet/technology background, but eat French theory for breakfast.j

A few years of online work and an interest in the implications of the increasing importance of tech. mediation of our environment/communication were rewarded (in my case) by Virilio's intriguing discourses--essays, really-- on how we perceive and relate to the world.

The one section on the globalization of the economy, though, was so off-base, I can only attribute it to the French academic community's expertise in theory and absolute cluelessness with real life (see: French economy).

-greg allen