About

Emanuel Tandler

UNIFR

[28/10/2025]

Falling Upwards

A Cognitive Metaphor Between Gravity And Levitation

Figure 1. Trajectory and positions of the space station's orbit within 24 hours © Samantha Harvey 2023

I. Orientation in Orbit

In her latest Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital (2024), Samantha Harvey begins with a cosmonautical map. It provides the reader orientation and navigation. But not immediately: Only when we read the first few pages we gradually begin to understand what the map’s caption “24 Hours of Earth Orbits with Daylight in the Northern Hemisphere” actually means as we flip back and forth between pages and map.

Orbital takes us on an ecstatic 24-hour odyssey on a Tuesday morning in early October with an imaginary crew on an international Space Station. For a single day we accompany four astronauts and two cosmonauts (from America, Italy, UK, Japan and Russia) as they orbit the Earth at an altitude of around 400 km and at a speed of over 28,000 km/h. The series of numbers from 1 to 16 mapped on both hemispheres becomes much clearer as we realize that ‘a single day up here’ is something completely different than ‘down there’: A baffling arithmetic of thrust, attitude, speed and sensors.

And so it is, but in this new day they’ll circle the earth sixteen times. They’ll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights. (…) And so it is. But it’s a day of five continents and of autumn and spring, glaciers and deserts, wildernesses and warzones. In their rotations around the earth in accumulations of light and dark in the baffling arithmetic of thrust and attitude and speed and sensors, the whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes. (Harvey 2024, 5).

Space travel obviously shreds time – whether it is zone-, standard-, seasonal-, night- or day and even astronomical time – into pieces. 24 hours means sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets every ninety minutes. But what about the space itself or as Harvey puts it what about a day of five continents, glaciers and deserts, wilderness and warzones? Grasping "the world" not with a singular place within an individual presence, opens up instead for the ISS-space-crew and Harvey’s reading fellows rather the chance to remote sensing and reading "the earth" in a wide spectrum of contrasting landscapes and culture zones in real-time. As a countermeasure, Harvey’s space crew insists: It’s 24 hours; and ground crews keep telling them so, but it takes their 24 hours and throws sixteen days and nights at them in return. They cling to their 24-hour-clock because it’s all their feeble little timebound body knows – sleep and bowels and all that is leashed to it. But as Harvey reminds us their mind goes free within the first week: “The mind is in a dayless freak zone, surfing earth’s hurtling horizon” (ibid. 13).

II. Paul Virilio’s Open Sky

In his introduction of the essay Open Sky Paul Virilio leads us to this fundamental ‘hurtling’ change not only of time and perception but furthermore of space and perception. The central idea of his dromology to which these introductory lines refer is that modern technologies of speed and real-time transmission are fundamentally changing our traditional perspectives and orientation. Virilio highlights two specific events that also mark decisive breakaways and liftoffs for our SNF-project Aerial Spatial Revolution:

The breakaway of the Wright brothers on their first take-off from the beach at Kitty Hawk or, perhaps, the liftoff of the Apollo 11 mission at Cape Canaveral, show us another way, an exotic reorganization of sight that would finally take account of a possible fall upwards brought on by the recent acquisition of the speed of liberation from gravity: orbital speed at 28,000 kilometres per hour. (Virilio 1997, 2)

Instead of falling into the trap of a simplistic, technical and selectively heroic narrative of progress, Virilio understands history as an intertwining competition between traditional and new ways of seeing and orienting in time and space. Like Martin Jay he thinks perception and technologies in a more overlapping and ‘exotic reorganized’ way within a contested terrain of “scopic regimes” (Jay 1988, 4). In reference to Victor Hugo’s lines – The rope doesn't hang, the Earth pulls – he first of all begins with a blind spot of of a prior revolution, namely the revolution of perspective during the Italian Renaissance.

The original reference point for sight is therefore not what the Italian masters said it was, that of vanishing lines converging on the horizon, but one bound up with the delicate balancing act of a universal attraction which imposes on us its gearing towards the centre of the Earth, at the risk of our falling. (ibid. 3)

So Viriilo trusts again not simply in a single history of the Quattrocento perspectives and its episode of struggle and battle of geometers and painting masters vying to make us forget the 'high' and the 'low' by pushing the 'near' and the 'far' into a vanishing-point that literally fascinated them. Virilio instead adjusts and highlights phenomenologically that our vision is actually determined by our weight and oriented more vertically by the pull of earth’s gravity: the classic distinction between zenith and nadir.

III. A Challenging New Orientational Metaphor: “Falling Upwards”

This physical orientation is also manifested in Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphors in their seminal work Metaphors We Live By (1980). For them, not only our concepts, our thinking, and our language are fundamentally structured metaphorically, but metaphors are themselves anchored deeply in physical experience. We experience “up” and “down” through our bodies—through gravity, balance, movement, and spatial orientation. When we stand upright, we are alert, active, and alive. When we fall or lie down, we lose our orientation and ability to act. Therefore, our vertical body orientation shapes significantly our assessment of the Up and Down: ‘Up’ is associated with stability, health, control, life. Vice versa: ‘Down’ comes with powerlessness, illness and death. In chapter 4 four on orientational metaphors, they also make it clear: Thinking has a physical basis; ergo, it is embodied (Lakoff/Johnson 2003, 21ff.). However, this physical basis is turned upside down by the new chance of escape velocity and the new time and space dimensions in outer space. After this excursion into cognitive-linguistic and conceptual metaphor theory, it is clear that this is not only about the body, but also about language and cognition, or rather: Metaphors. Can we now logically derive an inverse metaphor for floating in outer space? As Virilio further points out, in times of aerial conquest and air pollution there is not only the ozone hole through which all UV radiation penetrates unfiltered, but also another hole above us where “a secret perspective is, in fact, hidden on high” (ibid. 2). A perspective that is actually challenging the traditional Open Sky, the zenith as a fixed point in a blue-coloured Azure and – as we know now – the bodily and metaphorical grid of orientation. And this is where not only Virilio's real-time-critique comes into play, but also his accurate metaphor of “falling upwards”, which brings us back to the question of outer space, since not only velocity is escaping, but also the sky is vanishing:

Preoccupied as we are, at the end of the millennium, with developing the absolute speed of our modern real-time transmission tools, we too often forget the importance of this other limit-speed, the one which has enabled us to escape the real space of our planet and so to 'fall upwards'. (ibid. 2)

Once again, it’s a fictional piece of art that allows us to visualize and understand in an iconic way Virilio’s notion of the “fall upwards”: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (UK 1968) has provided us one of the most frequently noted transitions in film history, the match cut that takes viewers from “The Dawn of Man” - as the film’s first sequence is titled - to the year 2001. That cut matches a bone cast into the air by a shrieking hominid to a space station, similarly thrust into space by modern humans dominating the following sequences.

Figure 2. Two match-cut still images from the falling bone to the floating spaceship in: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – exhibited in the Design Museum: Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition, London 2019.

IV. The Serious Irony of Gravity

Tossed bones, of course, inevitably fall back down to Earth, thanks to the law of gravity. Good science simply anticipates that something thrown into the sky will eventually arc downward. Yet that hominid’s exuberant effort to defy gravity, an effort celebrated by the images of satellites and other space probes that we then glimpse as Kubrick’s narrative bursts through the boundaries of the past and moves to the year 2001. ”It is a wonderfully ironic piece of editing”, as film scholar Jay P. Telotte aptly remarks when he considers all layers of Kubrick's match cut: Pointing out that despite all our technological advances – evidenced by the complexity of the scientifically accurate model of the space station and other satellites we see – “we nevertheless have fundamentally progressed very little” although we are listening simultaneously to the classic strains of a Strauss waltz. Referring to Virilio, he critically adds: “We continue to fling our bits of technology into the air, higher and faster, of course, but with a similar sort of exultation, of self-conscious pride, as we strive to overcome one of the fundamental laws that weighs us down, governs human life, and constrains our ambitions: Gravity” (Telotte 2006, 43). Consequently, this type of irony implies that a scientifically self-heroic attempt to make technology higher and faster may, even under these extreme circumstances of outer space, remain a monkey-like gesture. Even if weightlessness is celebrated with Johann Strauss's melodious pompousness in The Blue Danube (1866), Kubrick's irony carries a “gravitational weight” and continues to echo Virilio's concerns. Gravity then becomes and stays more than a scientific revolution left-over, context and law: Gravity continues – not only physically as microgravity – to have a relatively strong effect and opens up a greater gravitas in the sense of “seriousness” of human life beyond the heroic self-glorification. In the following, we will demonstrate phenomenologically how the cognitive and orientational inversed metaphor of “falling upwards” matches not only the ambivalence and balance between gravity and levitation linguistically, but connects the serious impact - possibilities and restrictions - that space travel implies physically, scientifically, technically, perceptually and, as we will emphasize finally, above all emotionally.

Let’s first consider the physical-bodily risk of muscle atrophy in the space station – depicted accurately in Samantha Harvey’s thoroughly researched novel Orbital:

Up here in microgravity you’re a seabird on a warm day drifting, just drifting. What use are biceps, calves, strong shin bones; what use muscle mass? Legs are a thing of the past. But every day the six of them have to fight this urge to dissipate. They retreat inside their headphones and press weights and cycle nowhere at twenty-three times the speed of sound on a bike that has no seat or handlebars, just a set of pedals attached to a rig, and run eight miles inside a slick metal module with a close-up view of a turning planet. (Harvey 2024, 11.)

Legs seem to be a thing of the past in an imaginative seabird’s eye view. But what does sport mean as a daily routine under the conditions of falling upwards? Without constant training before and especially during their space-travel, the astronauts would hardly be able to get up from their chairs upon their return. Although cycling inside a slick metal at an increased speed of sound feels like travelling heroically nowhere, the “past body” obviously doesn’t dissipate in microgravity. It’s already a ‘pre-call’ by gravity.

Figure 3. ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet demonstrates what daily training on the space station looks like. © ESA / NASA / Screenshot from the ISS fitness-program-video (2017).

V. The Body as Scientific Experiment

Harvey's description seems to strike at the heart of Virilio's concern that the real possibility of falling upwards not only turns the essence of human orientation upside down when the territorial body with his four limbs is maneuvered into the extremely restrictive, high-tech wired infrastructure of the spacecraft. (see fig.3). Rather, it also fundamentally changes the biological body: This is what biomedical scientist and space physiologist Peter Norsk and his team are investigating when they measure the “fluid shift” of the ISS crew (Norsk et al. 2015). As a brief description: Fluid shift is the movement of body fluids between different compartments, such as between blood vessels and tissue, or from the lower extremities to the upper body. In the case of astronauts and due to weightlessness, this leads to a swollen face, a blocked nose and permanent headaches.

Figure 4. Individual systolic (SAP) and diastolic (DAP) arterial pressures and heart rate (HR) measured on the ISS as well as before and after flight. Recorded during ambulatory conditions when awake (day); in connection with seated cardiac output rebreathing measurements (day); and during the sleep period (night). © 2014 The Physiological Society.

The study's measurements are revealing because they not only measure the astronauts' arterial blood pressure and heart rate, but also show comparative cardiological values before, during and after the spaceflight. Both pressure (contraction and relaxation of the heart muscle) as well as heartbeat, are significantly higher during the in-flight-phase. So falling upwards can potentially be compared to severe headaches and cold symptoms while actively immersing the body in water and leaving the head above its surface; or to quick changes between sitting and reclining positions on ground:

It was therefore unexpected that we found significant increases in stroke volume and cardiac output of as much as 35% and 41% after 3 months or more of flight, and similarly so in all astronauts independent of mission duration. (…) It is comparable to very acute head-out water immersion (Stadeager et al. 1992). Furthermore, the increase is considerably higher compared to when changing from an upright seated posture to supine on the ground, where cardiac output only increases by 15–20%. (Norsk et al. 2015, 579)

This increased fluid-shift-factor affects of course the entire body system and significantly influence all astronauts' perceptive senses; in particular the sense of smell and taste. However, Harvey's prose also makes it clear that this factor – and especially their headaches – not only impair their research, but are themselves scientifically the subject of research in a larger survey and measurement effort. All of them are experimenting on their own bodies, testing and checking the limits and stresses of prolonged weightless existence while falling upwards. Continuous monitoring therefore accompanies constantly their particular scientifical routine tasks. Harvey's protagonists set various examples: “Pietro”, the Italian astronaut monitors his microbes telling them something more about the terrestrial viruses, funguses and bacteria that are present on the craft itself. Therefore, he takes also a swab of his own throat. The female Japanese astronaut “Chie” continues growing her protein crystals, and attaches afterwards herself to the MRI to have one of many routine brain scans that show the impact of microgravity on her neural functioning. Female British astronaut “Nell” checks the well-being of their forty mice residents and their muscle wastage in space. She will pull herself afterwards a syringe for her overused veins. US-astronaut “Shaun” on the other hand monitors thale cress to see what happens to plant roots when they lack gravity and light. Later on, like the others he will sleep with hist chest constricted by straps and monitors which hamper his breath. Finally, the two Russian cosmonauts “Roman” and “Anton”: One services the oxygen generator, the other cultures heart cells. Simultaneously both of them measure repeatedly their grips (Harvey 2024, 16f.) Just a few of many other ex(s)amples:

They take blood, urine, faecal and saliva samples, monitor their heart rates and blood pressure and sleep patterns, document any ache, pain or unusual sensation. They are data. Above all else, that. A means and not an end. (ibid. 94f.)

What is striking about Harvey's literary protagonists is the cohesion of detailed descriptions – based on her full-time analysis of archival and online footage of the ISS and her work experience at the Herschel Astronomy Museum in London (cf. Allardice 2024) – and her poetic radiance of the falling upwards: “They swim in microgravity like little watched fish (Harvey 2024, 93).” A metaphorical sentence that perfectly echoes Virilio’s request in Open Sky, anticipating that the conditions experienced by astronauts will soon be ours: “Soon we will have to learn to fly, to swim in the ether (Virilio 1997, 3).” In interactions with machines and research technology on board, the astronauts receive and generate information, results and data, which on behalf to the ‘gravitas’ of the scientific community is transmitted to the ground station. This involves as well individual inquiring reports: “They will all report on whether they have headaches and where in the head and how acute (ibid. 16).”

VI. Real-Time-Ecology and The Terminal Body

For Virilio, a fitting example, that the astronautical subject transforms into – what he calls – a body terminal human-being; voluntarily plugging its own body into various interfaces of the spacecraft’s infrastructure supported by all kinds of “data suits” (Virilio 1997, 37f.). Protheses, as Virilio polemically exaggerates, that make the super equipped able-bodied astronaut almost an exact equivalent of a motorized and wired, but now wireless and telesurveillanced disabled person (cf. 11). One that is triggered by the growth of real-time technologies by means of satellites and fiber optic cables. Without stretching this polemical claim too much, Virilio’s terminal body is a proper image for the ubiquitous computing of our presence: “The final looping and locking up of a world that has become orbital, not only in terms of circumterrestrial satellites on the beat, but of the entire array telecommunication tools as well (ibid. 61).” In abstract historical terms of his dromology, the place of the observer shifted revolutionary multiple times and most recently with the possibility to fall upwards: While the static geometric observer of the Renaissance had a revolutionary sense of spatial depth, and the motorised observer of the kinetic revolution on his dynamic vehicle (train, motorbike, car, plane) still had a sense of the interval of time and space, the real-time terminal-observer seems to be loosing both: time and space (cf. 11). With the accelerated shift by escape velocity and the speed of light, the real-time revolution not only creates but propels Virilio’s terminal-observers as astronauts into outer space, whose perception seems to be mobilized and conditioned by the illusion that the whole world is beneath their floating bodies without restrictions. That is why, for Virilio again, astronauts were the harbingers of various forms of a “delusion of grandeur” (ibid. 139): “Our astronauts were thus the first to glimpse this general accident that awaits us tomorrow, down here, in this already-here tomorrow of the perpetual present of real-time technologies (ibid).” Thus, Virilio is stretching his laconic figure of thought that every invention of progress invents simultaneously its accident to a “general accident”. For abstract concepts in particular, Lakoff and Johnson also apply the thesis that they not only require metaphors, but that it is precisely the metaphor which enables us to grasp them as physically experienced domains (cf. Lakoff/Johnson 2003, 96). E.g: “LOVE IS A JOURNEY” (ibid. 98). That’s how and why Vrilio’s critique of the real-time regime becomes an accident and bodily risk: SPACE TRAVEL IS AN ACCIDENT. Secondly, that is also the point where the orientational metaphor of falling upwards gets attached to another guiding metaphor by Virilio, namely: “Grey ecology”. A proposition, that the environmental destruction takes place not only in nature, but also in perception by a discreet visual pollution. The overexposure of the visible is connected to the development of the falling upward machines of vision itself: sight-, time- and placeless vision machines for the most of us (ibid. 96). This is why his grey ecology includes also an aesthetic of excess: Too much visibility erases the visible. Like a green ecology protects the nature of things, Virilio proposes his grey ecology that aims to protect the nature of perception (ibid.59). But what happens, when a concept like the “whole world” seems to become ‘flattened’ and consciously ‘shrinked’ to a flip-flop circuit (ibid.116)? Virilio answers: “In a word, ecology as a discipline does not sufficiently register the impact of machine time on the environment (…)” (ibid. 23).

VII. The Apocalypse of the “Hic et Nunc” and Paul Klee’s Counter-Perspective

Virilio’s man-machine dialogue considers the following consequences: Spatial depth becomes surface, time as duration becomes real-time, and physical presence becomes digital telepresence. Or, as quoted: “Terminals” under the regime of a real-time transmitting and receiving power of various signals – destroying our awareness of the “here and now”:

Paul Klee hits 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’(ibid. 10.).

Virilio's emphasis on Klee’s hit gets much clearer when we refer directly to other statements in Paul Klee’s article “Schöpferische Konfession” of the anthology Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit (1920): There, he not only begins with the much-quoted sentence “Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible” (ibid. 28). Furthermore, in contrast to Lessing's definition of the visual arts in Laocoon (1766) as spatial art – as indicated clearly by Klee as a fully ‘lived delusion’ – the Swiss artist emphasizes that a point, which becomes a line; and a line, which becomes surface; and a surface, which becomes space, requires above all one thing: time (cf. 33). That’s why Paul Klee shows how dots and graphs are not limited to measuring abstractly heart rates and discreet telepresence, but present vice versa his discrete elements in use for a genesis of a creational and reflective praxis that, by means of abstraction, is detached from an instantaneous and immediately visible real. Like Virilio, Klee also asks polemically and rhetorically: “Is a work of art created all at once?” And he replies laconically: “No, it is built up piece by piece, just like a house.” He continuous and shifts the perspective to the observer: “And does the observer finish with the work all at once?” And he surprisingly adds a single parenthesis right afterwards: “(Unfortunately, often yes)” (ibid.33). And it’s precisely this single “unfortunately” within Paul Klee’s brackets that Virilio strains in his “temporal apocalypse” (Virilio 1997, 127), where every single one of us becomes a terrestrial astronaut without a “concrete presence”. Instead, so Virilio, we’re embedded in a “discreet telepresence” in favour of a “commutative elsewhere”, which, through real-time-telepresence instantly instils in us what he calls the ‘delusion of grandeur’.

But let us instead briefly set aside Virilio's Apocalypse Now and continue reading Klee’s confession. Klee's approach not only literally illustrates Lakoff and Johnson's physical thesis, but also fills a gap in their theory of the metaphor. Although Lakoff and Johnson use the term ‘perspective’, it seems to be too specific and narrow:

Third, different metaphors can structure different aspects of a single concept; for example, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS WAR, LOVE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE, LOVE IS MADNESS. Each of these provides one perspective on the concept LOVE and structures one of many aspects of the concept. (ibid. 98)

According to the authors, each metaphor integrates and alters a perspective that highlights a new aspect of the core concept (e.g. LOVE). But their focus on physical anchoring causes them to overlook partially not the fact, but the importance and implications that each perspective has its situational context, social meaning and especially: its media environment. Besides the physical basis, this media factor is not only equally important in determining the meaning of a metaphor, rather it’s a new approach on perspectivism of metaphors itself. As Emmanuel Alloa makes clear in The Share of Perspective (2025), seeing is physical and embodied, but always as well partial, mediated and shared. His main thesis is precisely that perspective is not simply a collection of subjective points of view which might lead to relativism or just encounters the relativity in accessing reality. On the contrary: Perspective, with its reliance on media, creates and shares an intersubjective space. Neither is the visible simply an object ‘out there,’ nor is perspective subjectively ‘in there,’ but rather arises in the intermediated space between the visible and the seeing:“Partial perspective is not so much a deformation as it is a condition of access to reality” (Alloa 2025, 4). And these intersubjective spaces are not only realized, metaphorized and reflected in Klee's own thoughts on perspectival seeing, but captured in sketch forms. Above, we have just emphasized with Klee the temporality of seeing over the dominance of spatially seeing ; a connection that Lakoff/Johnson also make when they say that orientation must be assumed as an inherent property of instants of time if expressions like “follow,” “precede,” “meet the future head on,” “face the future,” etc. Of course, they emphasize the physical basis: “FUTURE EVENTS ARE UP (& AHEAD)” (Lakoff/Johnson 2003, 22 & 101f.). However, Klee's eye(s) cannot be squeezed into such a simple up-down-schema.

Figure 5. Paul Klee, sketch: ‘Ways of Studying Nature’. Wege des Naturstudiums. In: Staatliches Bauhaus 1919–1923. Bauhaus Verlag, Weimar 1923. (cf. Dittmann 1989, 129)

It is Klee’s “cosmic” perspective – precisely an “eye” and “I” that do not simply ‘fall out’ into the ‘outer world’ and mimically reproduce it or subjectively copy it in nuce as a “you” or an “object” – that rather falls upwards between rootedness and gravity on the “metaphysical path” (see fig.6). His perspective as an artist – similar to Alloa’s understanding – is always in an alternating dynamic with reality and his media artistic tools. Surly, like all living beings and all matter on earth, humans are also subject to the law of gravity – the ‘Lot’ – as Klee calls the plumb line in German. However, standstill is only a special case for him: “Even in space, movement is the given. Rest on earth is a random inhibition of matter. To regard this adhesion as primary is a deception” (Klee 1917, 33f.). On one hand, there is the art which carefully differentiates and explores the appearance anchoring the seeing I and the seen object in the earthly realm. And on the other hand, there is a metaphysical path of art that is not optical, but takes place in the dynamics of a shared non-optical, abstract and cosmic way that reveals something new (cf. Dittmann 1989, 128f.). Of course, Klee is convinced of the latter. Klee’s dynamic perception does not succumb to the illusion of the given and the static ground, rather – and perhaps in contradiction to Virilio – his perspective resonates even with a former new and dynamic kinetic revolution. His “modern” perspective escapes, falls, rotates; or falls upwards and sums up his ‘checks and balances’:

A few examples:
A person from ancient times as a boatman in a boat, truly enjoying and appreciating the ingenious convenience of the furnishings. Correspondingly, the depiction of the ancients.
And now: what a modern person experiences when walking across the deck of a steamboat:
1. their own movement, 2. the movement of the ship, which may be in the opposite direction, 3. the direction and speed of the current, 4. the rotation of the Earth, 5. its orbit, 6. the orbits of the moons and stars around it.
The result: a structure of movements in space, with the self on the steamboat at its centre.
(Klee 1920, 37)

A discreet telepresence avant la letter or avant the drawing – but with time and space, ergo: with movement. Klee posits an overview hic et nunc. According to Virilio: This is “unfortunately” a passed perspective conveyed by media(s) which is now in the shadow of acceleration. Nowadays the “delusion of grandeur” prevails. One that sees everything at once and controls everything from afar, and loses itself in the elsewhere and on the surface – losing the ‘here and now’ with its blending density of the past and future; with its duration and embodied rhythms between points and lines while the heart beats. Perception is always perspective-based, and Virilio is indicating, that the varieties of perspectives became automated, accelerated and emptied. However, this automated feature is also reliably programmed to disappoint: Harvey's space crew's priority list includes also comprehensive observations of a typhoon. As their protagonists stick to the panoramic window, it says: “What they see is an unbroken vista of typhoon and a deep sucking well at its centre” (Harvey 2024, 37). And at the same time – equipped with the best optics – Italian astronaut Pietro critically remarks: “Here he is now, a non-robot with a camera and a pair of average eyes and a heart pitching forwards, tripping up, at the earth’s singularity” (ibid. 36). Harvey's poetics reliably interrupts these real-time and muted observations of the typhoon with a singular quality like “anxious”: “They have no power — they have only their cameras and a privileged anxious view of its building magnificence” (ibid. 24). A powerlessness that reveals Virilio's power of real-time vision and scale, which is causing the “average” embodied sense of space and time to collapse.

VIII. Two-Dimensionality as a Poetic Experiment on Surface

At first glance, Harvey's imaginative Orbital-odyssey seems to outline the omnipresence of a discreet real-time-regime in relation to the scientific language on board: “Their day is mapped by acronyms, MOP, MPC, PGP, RR, MRI, CEO, OESI, WRT for WSS, T-T-A-B.” (Harvey 2024, 16). As indicated by Virilio, within real-time communication, all that remains is the ‘now’ of the signal, a simultaneous connection without location, without duration and without a profound man-machine dialogue – in other words, a symbolic ‘silencing’ despite permanent transmission. Dialogue becomes the mere transmission of signals, in contrast to an exchange between subjects and between men and machines sharing a common time and place. That leads to a disembodied and delocalized language in the sense of speech. That’s how speech loses as well its connection to the ‘here and now’ and thus potentially its social and political dimension. According to Virilio the astronaut’s personality “(…) is split in time between the real time of our immediate activities — in which they act both here and now - and the real time of a media interactivity that privileges the ‘now’ of the time slot” (Virilio 1997, 37). A prediction, we could say that provides a fitting description of today's conference calls: They take place in several sights at the same time, but paradoxically, the electronic connection creates a feeling of alienation among the present participants, accompanied by the feeling of being nowhere (ibid.).
The philosopher and media theorist Sybille Krämer would probably critically remark that Virilios' position clings too strongly to an ideal of spoken language as a meaningful continuum or its absence as silence for contemplation. However, writing and scientific codes are not merely a means of fixing spoken language, but an independent medium of thought, cognition and operation: an “operating space” (cf. Krämer 2005). In operative writing, we do not speak, but think with signs that can be arranged, compared, combined and transformed. Krämer goes even further and says: Writing does not only operate linearly (one line after another), but it uses surface like a two-dimensional image: “What distinguishes writing is a synthesis of the discursive and the iconic” (ibid. 29, trans. by ET). Thus, writing combines the characteristics of language (symbolism, syntax) and images (spatiality, visibility) – it operates horizontally and vertically, figuratively and linguistically. We could especially say that literature is characterized by the possibility of developing the specific potential of writing to a particularly high degree of Krämer’s operational space. Literature works not only with language, but also with the materiality of writing itself: with layout, structure, typography, rhythm, white space, intertextuality, line breaks, typographical symbols and, in Harvey's case: even with a cosmonautical map (see fig.1). While Klee emphasizes the dimensions of time and movement in relation to his discrete elements of point and line, Harvey shows how spatially discrete the imagery of writing also places the accelerated sunrises and sunsets in ‘iconic letters’ (e.g. the sun is up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy) and offers the possibility of a reflective counter-strategy to the scopic real-time regime: "Too bad for you that the Omega Speedmaster watch on your wrist with its chronograph and tachymeter and coaxial escapement has no grasp of the fact that this is your seventh time around the earth since you woke up this morning, that the sun is up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy" (Harvey 2024, 97). It is also a beautifully dizzying structural device to align each chapter with an orbit of the Earth. But there are not just fixed 16 chapters, mirroring the 16 orbits mentioned above; from time to time they are divided into Orbit 3, ascending and orbit 3 descending. The fluid and discreet narrative sends probes into the past and future, but everything is kept within the looping motion of the elliptical journey and, in particular, within the cognitive metaphor of falling upwards. No horizon is fixed; macro and micro levels are separated and mixed in perspective leaps. This also catches the reader's eye in all discretion when a list suddenly appears in Orbit 10 and stops the flow of prose:

(…) They swab their throats. They pull the syringe from their overused veins. All of it gladly.

Maddening things:
Forgetfulness
Questions
Church bells that ring every quarter-hour
Non-opening windows
Lying awake
Blocked noses
Hair in ducts and filters
Fire alarm tests
Powerlessness
A fly in the eye (ibid. 95f.)

As readers, we are able to decide word by word anew whether we are above or below, or whether we lie awake in between. And sometimes a single letter gets our attention:

Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth. They turn head on heel, four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They are the latest six of many, nothing unusual about this any more, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard.

But most of us don’t live as if humbled. Whether, in these iconic overview-images, our world seems large or tiny, central or radically decentered, what is truly remarkable is how quickly our amazement goes back to sleep. How many of us give much of a thought to, say, the hovering H of the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth sixteen times a day as we go about our lives, in earth’s backyard?

A fine example of how even a single letter, in its materiality, can serve like a metaphor, transforming not only primary physical experiences but also the ‘body’ of a high-tech space station into symbolic significance through its similarity in form. But let us return to Virilio's metaphor of falling upwards and examine two further components to conclude.

IX. The Truth is Nomadic

As we have tried to show, Virilio is an apocalypticist par excellence. The sound of his writings is breathless, frantic, hasty and driven by the ever-dwindling time in the real-time apocalypse. With and against Virilio's defiance, we have attempted to demonstrate that media and media technology not only block, damage, and destroy reality, but always serve as ‘mediators’ for accessing it, whether blindly due to overexposure or insightfully. Klee's visual art and Harvey's poetics bear witness to the latter. Nevertheless, Virilio is not a conservative who simply isolates himself and settles comfortably far away from technological developments. As an apocalypticist, i.e. a revolutionary thinker, he escalates every decision into a final either/or between extremes gravitation and levitation; between good and evil; between true and false: Either we learn to swim and fly in the ether of the “Jetzt-Zeit”, or we don't. We have shown that his metaphor of falling upwards not only refers to vertigo, but also provides orientation and evokes counter-strategies in times of escape velocity and speed of light. However, in this final section we would like to show that falling upwards also serves as a cognitive metaphor for weighing up truth without ignoring its emotional dimensions.

Let’s gain therefore another perspective and pick up the sound of Maurice Blanchot’s short essay The Conquest of Space (1964): “It is extraordinary, we have left the earth”, the French philosopher highlights in joyful reference to the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight 1961. And he emphasizes immediately: “Herein lies, indeed, the true significance of the experience: man has freed himself from place” (Blanchot 1995, 269). And Blanchot reminds us as well, that astronauts and cosmonauts remain linked to Earth in a very ambivalent form. Their falling-upwards-situation is characterized by the paradox of simultaneously being the bearers of liberation and being confined to their situation on board:

A man who is the bearer of the very sense of liberty and who has never found himself a greater prisoner of his own position, free of the force of gravity and weighted down more than any other being, on the way to maturity and all bundled up in scientific swaddling clothes, like a new-born child of former times, reduced to nourishing himself with a feeding bottle and to wailing more than talking. (ibid. 270)

The umbilical cord for Blanchot’s Gagagrin – connecting the “new-born child” of outer space to earth – was language. This babbling bottle child, as difficult as it was to understand in the early 1960s due to interference between his orbital positions and earth, as banal as it may have sounded in the face of the new foreign outer space, can’t be interrupted, as Blanchot emphasizes: “The slightest break in the noise would already mean the everlasting void” (ibid.271). Blanchot assures us: “It is therefore necessary, up there, for the man from the Outside to speak, and to speak continually, not only to reassure us and to inform us, but because he has no other link with the old place than that unceasing word” (ibid.). But it is also the “everlasting void” that interests Blanchot imagining Gagarin’s experience: “He has felt, at least for a moment, the sense of something decisive: far away - in an abstract distance of pure science - removed from the common condition symbolized by the force of gravity, there was a man, no longer in the sky, but in space, in a space which has no being or nature but is the pure and simple reality of a measurable (almost) void” (ibid.269). Blanchot thus anticipates the unique moment, the contactless and natureless moment, when no discourse from below – be it politically (Khrushchev/Kennedy), religiously or philosophically motivated – can bind Gagarin back down, rooting and eternally encrusting him in his tradition(s), but rather an utopia without a preconceived horizon emerges. The conquest of space points to a clear but cautiously worded hope: “(…) It is correct to say that the superstition about place cannot be eradicated in us except by a momentary abandonment to some utopia of non-place” (ibid.270). The very same tension between connectedness and ecstasy, humility and megalomania, childhood and utopian outer space, which Virilio so aptly captured in his metaphor, pervades Harvey's Orbital.

They look down and they understand why it’s called Mother Earth. They all feel it from time to time. They all make an association between the earth and a mother, and this in turn makes them feel like children. In their clean-shaven androgynous bobbing, their regulation shorts and spoonable food, the juice drunk through straws, the early nights, the enforced innocence of dutiful days, they all have moments up here of a sudden obliteration of their astronaut selves and a powerful sense of childhood and smallness. Their towering parent ever-present through the dome of glass. (Harvey 2024, 8)

Squeezed in their clean-shaven androgynous bobbing and regulation shorts, Harvey’s protagonists deal with their nostalgic feelings for their home planet Earth. But in return, they are also overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of happiness, which, unlike unhappiness, does not have to tie together the thousands of tragic threads, but ambushes them in a very simple, non-earthly utopian way with everything. Perceiving ‘everything’ while falling upwards means leaving ‘everything’ behind, especially when floors are walls and walls are ceilings and ceilings are floors. Blanchot's insignificant truism and final line in The Conquest of Space not only serves us the right reading glasses for our last passage from Harvey’s Orbital, but also draws our attention to a reliability that always applies – provided we listen carefully to the signals, lines, dots, panels of screens, airlocks…and metaphors; “That the truth is nomadic” (Blanchot 1995, 271).

At some point in their stay in orbit there comes for each of them a powerful desire that sets in — a desire never to leave. A sudden ambushing by happiness. They find it everywhere, this happiness, springing forth from the blandest of places — from the experiment decks, from within the sachets of risotto and chicken cassoulet, from the panels of screens, switches and vents, from the brutally cramped titanium, Kevlar and steel tubes in which they’re trapped, from the very floors which are walls and the walls which are ceilings and the ceilings which are floors. From the handholds which are foot- holds which chafe the toes. From the spacesuits, which wait in the airlocks somewhat macabre. Everything that speaks of being in space — which is everything — ambushes them with happiness, and it isn’t so much that they don’t want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded — grown so big, so distended and full, that it’s caved in on itself.

X. Bibliography

Alloa, Emmanuel (2025): The Share of Perspective. New York and London: Routledge.

Blanchot, Maurice (1995): "The Conquest of Space". In: The Blanchot Reader, ed. Mike Holland. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 269-271.

Dittmann, Lorenz (1989): «Werk und Natur -Erörterungen unter dem Aspekt der Farbgestaltung». In: Kunstgeschichte - aber wie? Zehn Themen und Beispiele. Hrsg. v. Fruh, Clemens; Rosenberg, Raphael; Rosinski, Hans-Peter. Berlin, S. 109-140.

Harvey, Samantha (2024): Orbital. Dublin: Penguin Random House.
Jay, Martin (1988): "Scopic Regimes of Modernity". In: Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 3-27.

Klee, Paul (1920): «Schöpferische Konfession». In: Tribüne der Kunst. Hrsg. v. Kasimir Edschmid. Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, S. 28-40.

Krämer, Sybille (2005): «‚Operationsraum Schrift‘. Über einen Perspektivenwechsel in
der Betrachtung der Schrift». In: Schrift. Kulturtechnik zwischen Auge, Hand und
Maschine. Hrsg. v. Gernot Grube, Werner Kogge u. Sybille Krämer. München: Fink,
S. 23–60.

Lakoff, Georg & Johnson, Mark (2003): Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Norsk, Peter (2015): «Fluid shifts, vasodilatation and ambulatory blood pressure reduction during long duration spaceflight». In: The Journal of Physiology, 593(3), pp. 573–584.

Telotte, J.P. (2006): “The Gravity of 2001: A Space Odyssey”. In: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, ed. by Robert Kolker. New York: Oxford Press, pp. 43-54.

Virilio, Paul (1997): Open Sky. London, New York: Verso.

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A Cognitive Metaphor Between Gravity And Levitation