Open Sky

1) Virilio opens this reading by comparing his “dromospheric” pollution to the pollution of natural contamination—emphasizing the apparent dangers of dormology. He claims that new technology of communication and travel has caused pollution to “spread further that the elements, natural substances, air, water, fauna and flora – as far as the space-time of our planet” (137). We can see from this that his problem with technology goes beyond the physical contaminates that are produced by machines, but rather how they affect human perception and duration. This shows an indirect irony of how these new methods of travel and communication, which are supposed to advance man-kind, actually contaminate them. Virilio goes on to claim that this “machine time” pollution has to do with “ergonomics… economics… [and] politics” instead of “ecology” (137). With a statement like this, it seems hard to consider such technological advancements as a pollution because in natural contaminates in ecology actually degrade and eat away at an environment, while “machine time” actually makes designs, economies and governments more efficient/useful.

2) He admires the “original [‘warrior’] nomad for whom the journey… are dominate” and says that the other type of man, the “sedentary urban ‘civilian,’” focuses on the “subject and object” (139). The sedentary man is more focused on the cause and result of an event—similar to Bergson’s belief in the cinematographical habit of the mind—whereas the nomad is more concerned with the process or “journey” itself. The practical, cinematographical interests of the sedentary man result in the title of “civilian” because he/she is not willing to do things outside of the social construct of the state. For example, Virilio explains that the use of the “remote control and long-distance telepresence” will cause an “ultimate state of sedentariness where real-time environmental control will take over from the deployment of the real space of the territory” (139). As we can see, the sedentary “civilian” utilizes the remote control in order to change the channel without having to go through the “journey” of going to change the channel manually on the television set. Now, the “warrior” label on the nomadic man serves as a hyperbole to emphasize Vilirio’s respect for them because getting up off of the couch to change the channel or going to talk to someone in person as opposed to the telephone does not literally make you a warrior.

3) Photography is viewed by Virilio as a freezing of time that represents movement and Virilio believes that a collection of these “time-light” photographs in cinematographic sequence forms “real-time video” (140-141). Even though they would agree on the “representative” quality of a photograph, Virilio’s view of video is a clear departure from the views of Henri Bergson because Bergson explicitly believes that cinematography is at best a representation of motion, whereas Virilio believes that cinematography shows motion in “real-time.” Virilio depicts cinematography both as “the greatest scientific invention since fire,” and an invention that runs on electricity and that doesn’t have to follow “chronological time” (141). Unlike Bergson, Virilio glorifies video through the deployment of an absolute. However, by stating that film does not need to be chronological, Virilio brings back the beginning of his paper, where he talked about how machines caused dromospheric pollution because they eliminated the “journey,” and how such things would be distanced from the natural way of perceiving the world.

-Christopher Melgaard