Virilio's Open Sky

Reading Paul Virilio's Open Sky was a grounding and thought-provoking experience.  Much like reading Turkle earlier in the semester, Virilio prompts us to question our use, reliance and development of technology and how it effects our lives.  There is a sharp deviation though, in the tone of Turkle and Virilio respectively, along with the ways in which they explore our world.  Turkle's tone is balanced in between the benefits of technological advances and the worry or need to be aware of the ways in which those technological advances impact the way we live.  The tone is relatively subdued, and her mode of investigation is more psychological and/or sociological. Virilio, on the other hand, writes a bleak outlook of the future- still warning of the ways in which telecommunication in particular affects us, but the warning is particularly more dire (and it seemed to me as though no real alternatives were proposed.)  It was almost as if he was writing from the perspective that this future that awaits us, the general disaster, etc. is inevitable (or else already here.)  He investigates the ways in which our perceptions of time and space have changed, from a more scientific and theoretical perspective.  The ultimate idea is that technological progress and the "tyranny of real time" are leading towards a generalized accident, where there is a perpetual present that exists globally and intensely, breaking down the way that mankind relates to one another and his surroundings, to past-present-future, and the way he understands himself.
 

Virilio's exploration of the conditions that are leading to this "general accident" is what interests me the most.  His exploration of these conditions mainly revolve around the "intervals" of time and space.  He explores the ways that time has always been conceived: as past, present and future- as a linear and continual process that shapes human memory and history.  He additionally talks about the traditional conception of space, centering around the ideas of "here" and "there," or "not here."  He then explores the progression of human society (propagated by technological advances) from nomadic - centering on and defined by movement and the journey, to the urban- more localized but defined by relations between subject and object.

He talks about the industrial revolution and how advances in transportation technologies contributed to the de-emphasis on the journey, in favor of departure and arrival.  Space was still important, but for different reasons.  Along with the increasing efficiency in transportation came leisure and de-localized work.  Man could work "elsewhere," and could also NOT work.  He thus became less mobile, yet was able to cover greater distances and go just about anywhere.  Man moved from "mobilized" to "motorized."  Finally, in the revolution of telecommunications, man is able to be present from a distance and act indirectly...  With all of our modern conveniences, we may still be "motorized," but we are- according to Virilio- increasingly "motile" and sedentary.  Probably the creepiest illustration of our increasingly sedentary nature is when Virilio encourages us to contrast the "well-equipped" handicapped with the physically-fit man.  Increasingly, there is less and less distinction between the two.  Yikes!  With this sedentary-ness, and with the ability to be "telepresent," our perceptions and even existence inside of traditional notions of space are being challenged.

Further than the break down of space though, Virilio is equally concerned with changing perceptions in time.  Going back to the improved telecommunication technologies, our traditional ways of existing in time (or understanding time) have changed dramatically.  This is where Virilio puts a great deal of emphasis.  The traditional notion of time has changed just as much as space with the advent of instant telecommunication technologies: teletechnologies.  Virilio talks about our traditional perception of time, as I stated before, as a linear progression of past, present and future.  What is occurring now though is the promotion of the present above any past and extending into the future:  the perpetual present.  This is visible in the various "real time" technologies that exist today.  Not only are we intensely existing in the present, but the present is extended beyond geographical borders to the extent that there exists a sort of global present.

 The collapsing of the intervals of space and time onto one another indicates what Virilio calls the third interval: the interval of light or light-speed.  This is an interval where our understandings of the world are defined not by the passing of time or the here-there of space, but by the instantaneous transmission of what Virilio calls the grand-scale optic.  Virilio argues that this interval "mutates" the way man relates to his surroundings, to space and to time.  Duration is no longer defined by old understandings of time, but of "real time," with no real beginning or end to its duration.  Extension is now paradoxically both hyper-extended across great distances, and also inconceivable/nonexistant because it dwells in the virtual.  This mutation, he says, leads to the "accident of the present": a remote telepresence where our "sole entry into duration is the present."

One of the greatest effects that these changes are having immediately on mankind is in what Virilio calls "terminal sedentarization."  On pg 25, he argues that this movement toward sedentary life is intensifying due to our ability to communicate, interact, even live remotely.  He describes this sedentarization and its effects where man dwells in a "transparent horizon spawned by telecommunications, that opens up the incredible possibility of a 'civilization of forgetting', a live (live-coverage) society that has no future and no past, since it has no extension and no duration, a society intensely present here and there at once - in other words, telepresent to the whole world.

Through this telepresence and sedentary life that Virilio perceives, I begin to see some of the danger of his vision of our future.  Life where we are instantaneously connected with "neighbors" at a distant, at the expense of proximate neighbors; life where we intensely exist in the present because "real time" is all that there is, neglecting both past and future; life where mankind is almost exclusively sedentary, living by proxy (as he is already communicating often) rather than living in reality- this is the picture of the world that Virilio paints.  In essence, as he says on pg 43: "the very notion of physical proximity is in danger of finding itself radically changed."  It seems to go without saying that this change would be to the negative.

He situates us in the world of large scale optics where there is innovation and also disaster/accident.  The innovation is the ability to perceive that which is remote.  Virilio neglects to really talk about the "good" side of this innovation, likely because it goes without saying that it is a "good" thing to be able to talk/see a loved one who is miles away.  However, as he says every innovation also invents a disaster, and the disaster of the innovation of "large scale optics" is in the invalidation of that which is physically present.  This is where I connect him with Turkle:  whereas Turkle might agree that there is a certain invalidation of the physically present occurring (and interestingly Turkle wrote after Virilio,) she would likely say that there is a remedy in being aware of the ways technology works on you and making a conscious effort not to lose one's grip of that need for physical presence.  On the other hand, Virilio says no such thing, rather he paints a picture of a world that is evolving into one big "global city", not a geographical/political city but a metacity, one that occurs in the frontier of the virtual- outside (arguably) of the realm of politics.

What we get in the end is this picture of society as global metacity, mankind as physically distant and inert, but visually and temporally ever-present.  The danger in this sort of harsh/sharp form of existence is that mankind- caught up in perceiving, communicating, relating and acting at a distance- is at great risk to lose his place in the world.  He is in the process of trading in relations to physical space, to the past, to the future, to the proximate other; for relations that occur in the non-existent world of telepresence.  He is in the process of reaching an escape velocity from the limitations that have always "suppressed" human progress, thus transcending space and time and coming to what Virilio calls "the end of the world."


Questions:

1) Virilio wrote this book in the 1990s:  do you think his outlook would change at all if he wrote this book today, with all the advances of the past decade and the evolution of these technologies?

2) Virilio obviously is very interested in our mutating relationship with "time."  Do you feel that our modern society exists in the tyranny of "real time" as he says?  Do we still relate to the past and the future, and is there a possibility that telecommunication technologies and particularly the great databasing capabilities of the internet enable us to still exist in relation to the past in particular?



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