Open Sky is Virilio's 1995 book on what the transmission revolution does to perception, the body, the city, and love once real time becomes the medium of action and not only of communication. Its antagonist is the ecology movement, and behind it the whole habit of thinking the human environment in terms of space and matter while the decisive contamination is in time. To the pollution of air, water, fauna and flora Virilio adds a third pollution, of distances, and builds the book to show that the teletechnologies of real time abolish the interval that once organized human geography and history, and with it the reality of the here and now, the hic et nunc.
He gives that third pollution a name in the book's second chapter, and the name carries its own etiology.
page 22Alongside air pollution, water pollution and the like, there exists an unnoticed phenomenon of pollution of the world's dimensions that I propose to call dromospheric – from dromos: a race, running.
The through-line the reconstruction below follows is a single conceptual innovation, restated in every chapter: alongside the interval of space (negative sign) and the interval of time (positive sign) there is now a third interval, of the light kind (neutral sign), the finite-but-absolute speed of light functioning as the standard against which duration and extension are measured.
page 12How can we fully take in such a situation without enlisting the aid of a new type of interval, the interval of the light kind (neutral sign)? The relativistic innovation of this third interval is actually in itself a sort of unremarked cultural revelation.
Everything the book then does is the working-out of what that third interval costs: the static vehicle and the terminal-citizen, grey ecology, the general accident, cybersex and hyperdivorce, the astronauts' inertia in the Sea of Tranquillity. The line Virilio borrows to state the stakes, and returns to, is Klee's.
page 10Paul Klee hit the nail on the head: ‘To define the present in isolation is to kill it.’ This is what the teletechnologies of real time are doing: they are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our ‘concrete presence’ in the world, but is the elsewhere of a ‘discreet telepresence’ that remains a complete mystery.
What follows reconstructs the argument as the book moves, in its own three-part order, and carries every load-bearing formulation whole and page-anchored, so the passages are ready to draft from without reopening the volume. It reconstructs; it does not adjudicate what the frame costs or what it cannot see. That is the researcher's work, and the comparative work against the media-ecology lineage, Baudrillard, Heidegger, or the eros material belongs at the master-reference level, not here.
Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Translated by Julie Rose. London: Verso, 1997. Originally published as La Vitesse de libération. Paris: Galilée, 1995. All page citations below are to the Verso translation. The French title translates literally as escape velocity, the speed of liberation from gravity, which is also the title Rose gives the closing chapter; the organizing irony of the whole book, that this speed of liberation delivers not liberation but inertia, is carried in the English title's vanishing sky.
Introduction (pages 1–6). Part 1: The Third Interval (9–21); The Perspective of Real Time (22–34); Optics on a Grand Scale (35–47). Part 2: The Law of Proximity (49–57); Grey Ecology (58–68); Continental Drift (69–86). Part 3: Eye Lust (89–102); From Sexual Perversion to Sexual Diversion (103–118); Escape Velocity (119–145). Notes and Glossary (147–152). The book opens, before the Introduction, on the epigraph that gives it its motto: ‘One day the day will come when the day won't come.’
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The Introduction stages the governing image and, from it, makes the leap that organizes the whole book: from the physics of the sky to a new conception of time. Virilio opens on the sky as an optical instrument.
page 1The blue sky above us is the optical layer of the atmosphere, the great lens of the terrestrial globe, its brilliant retina.
The first move is against the Quattrocento. Virilio denies that sight is grounded in the vanishing-point on the horizon, as the Italian masters held; it is grounded in gravity, in the pull toward the centre of the earth. The authority for the correction is Hugo.
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