This is not a treatise but a sequence of dated dispatches, thirteen short pieces written across a dozen years and set in a single descent backward through time: the reader enters in 1996 and exits in 1984, moving against the grain of chronology. The order is the argument. Virilio is claiming that the present has lost its future and been overtaken by its past, and the book enacts that reversal in its own arrangement before it argues it on any page.
The thesis under all thirteen essays is that time has displaced space as the medium of perception and politics, and that this is a catastrophe rather than a convenience. Tschumi states it for the architect's discipline and then compresses it to a sentence:
page viiiConveyed by media culture, P.V.'s events are less here than now. His definition of the event is less in space than in time. P.V.'s thesis may be simply that time has finally overcome space as our main mode of perception.
The book's unit is the event, and Virilio works the word in two registers at once: the news occurrence (a bombing, a riot, a demolition, an anniversary) and the event as collision, the accidental meeting of uncoordinated vectors. The title comes from a theological image in the Calling Card, history seen as God sees it, co-present rather than sequential, which real-time technology now hands to everyone. What recurs from essay to essay is a fixed set of operations Virilio performs on each occurrence: he reads it as a symptom of a mutation in the war machine and in perception, treats real time as having superseded real space, treats the accident as the hidden truth of the substance, and treats the media event as the place where the occurrence is both staged and digested. He names the form himself:
page xiiThe work that follows is devoted to this radical reversal in perspective. It is halfway between an essay and a narrative in which a series of atypical events succeed each other over the course of only a dozen or so years; events whose scope has escaped the theorists as much as the historians of the moment.
The reconstruction below follows the book's own sequence, front matter then essay by essay, because the descent through time is the book's structure and is not to be reorganized into themes. Each section states the move Virilio is making and carries his load-bearing formulations at full length, at every place a formulation appears. Where Virilio names his own earlier concepts in this text, the aesthetics of disappearance, pure war, those naming moments are recorded as part of this text, by its own lights. Comparative placement against the rest of the Virilio corpus is left to the master reference document.
| Title | Dateline | pp. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| – | Foreword (Bernard Tschumi) | – | vii–viii |
| – | Calling Card (preface, signed P.V.) | – | ix–xii |
| one | The Big Night | 15 May 1996 | 2–11 |
| two | The Avant-Garde of Forgetting | 18 June 1994 | 12–17 |
| three | Delirious New York | 30 March 1993 | 18–23 |
| four | The Imbalance of Terror | 30 January 1992 | 24–31 |
| five | The Near-Death Experience | 28 May 1991 | 32–37 |
| six | A Glimpse | 27 November 1989 | 38–43 |
| seven | Light Time | 31 March 1990 | 44–53 |
| eight | The Accident Museum | 20 February 1986 | 54–61 |
| nine | Peace of Nerves | 3 December 1986 | 62–67 |
| ten | The Fire Tomorrow | 18 September 1985 | 68–73 |
| eleven | Mass Murderer | 30 October 1985 | 74–81 |
| twelve | The Immaterials of War | 15 November 1984 | 82–89 |
| thirteen | Probable Imminence | undated; signed "Paul Virilio, Paris" | 90–97 |
| – | Notes | – | 98–99 |
The datelines descend broadly from newest to oldest, 1996 back to 1984, but the descent is not strict. Three local inversions sit inside the sweep: essay six (27 November 1989) precedes essay seven (31 March 1990); essay eight (20 February 1986) precedes essay nine (3 December 1986); essay ten (18 September 1985) precedes essay eleven (30 October 1985). In each pair the earlier-dated piece is placed first, so the inversions are local pairings within a globally reverse-chronological arrangement. The closing essay, "Probable Imminence," carries no dateline; its references to the 1982 Falklands War and to the pre-START arms-control talks place it among the earliest material rather than the latest.
Tschumi opens on the pun that frames the whole book. The author signs himself P.V., and in French the procès-verbal is the official report, the minutes, the police report. Tschumi reads the essays as Virilio's procès-verbal of the present, and lists the occurrences it logs:
page viiIn these essays, P.V. reports on a series of occurrences, incidents, accidents of all sorts—in short, on events—ranging from the World Trade Center bombing to the Gulf War, from the demolition of a social housing project (a French equivalent to Pruitt-Igoe) to the fiftieth anniversary of D Day.
He names the theme as time rather than space, and proposes an alternate title:
page viiTime, rather than space, is the theme of this book: the collapse of time, the acceleration of time, the reversal of time, the simultaneity of all times. Another title for Virilio's A Landscape of Events could have been "Mediated Blitzes."
The architect's gloss is the load-bearing move. Where the architect builds space and uses time to activate it, Virilio is "somewhere else," because in him the social itself has become temporal:
page viiBut Virilio is somewhere else. When we say that his space becomes temporal, it is because we feel, in reading him, that society has become entirely a function of time, and that duration is really a conjunction of simultaneities.
Tschumi then carries forward Virilio's own claim from the final essay, the long-term/short-term collapse that Tschumi foregrounds as the book's motor. The passage runs across the page break:
pages vii–viiiIn "Probable Imminence," the essay that concludes this collection, Virilio notes that "long-term" has become so long that it now exceeds our capacity for statistical prediction, but "short-term" has accelerated so much that immediate decisions are the only decisions ever made. Memory and continuous time are now "academic." If, in the university system, nothing ever seems urgent, in government, on the contrary, everything goes fast; decisions are made in five minutes, a quarter of an hour, an hour. "Long-term" means "a week."
The mathematical sense of the event is stated next, and with it the definition of the event as accident that governs the whole book:
page viiiHere the concept of event takes on its mathematical dimension: an event is any one of all possible occurrences, one of which must happen under stated conditions.
page viiiIn Virilio's global temporal space, landscapes become a random network of pure trajectories whose occasional collisions suggest a possible topography: here is a peak, there an abyss. The acceleration of this temporal reality becomes the subject of this book. Each collision is an event relayed by media—political, social, technological. No value judgments here: after all, an event is a kind of accident, one that arises from the unlikely collision of generally uncoordinated vectors. Accidents will happen.
The Foreword closes on the thesis in compressed form:
page viiiConveyed by media culture, P.V.'s events are less here than now. His definition of the event is less in space than in time. P.V.'s thesis may be simply that time has finally overcome space as our main mode of perception.
The preface supplies the title. The opening image is theological, glossing Ecclesiasticus and Melville:
page ixFor God, history is a landscape of events. For Him, nothing really follows sequentially since everything is co-present. From the smallest fact to the greatest historical event, "there is nothing wonderful before Him." This transhistoric land, so hard to imagine, extends from age to age, from eternity to eternity.
Virilio renders that atemporal vantage as a film that never lets go of its own beginning and end:
page ixWe can hardly hope to grasp this atemporal perspective, in which before and after coexist, unless we see it as a film. Only, a film in which the sequence shot would constantly keep the beginning and the end in view. . . A landscape of time in which events suddenly take the place of relief, of vegetation; in which the past and the future loom up together in all their obvious simultaneity; a place where nothing follows on from anything else any more and yet where nothing ever ends, the lack of duration of the perpetual present circumscribing the cycle of history and its repetitions.
He then secularizes the image into a program for the book, and against "general history" sets a "fractal" history of the located event:
page xSince universal world time is gearing up to outstrip the time of erstwhile localities in historical importance, it is now a matter of urgency that we reform the "whole" dimension of general history so as to make way for the "fractal" history of the limited but precisely located event.
The landscape is defined by its lack of a vantage point, and the collection's material is announced as the small and the ignored rather than the major event:
page xA landscape has no fixed meaning, no privileged vantage point. It is oriented only by the itinerary of the passerby. But in the essays that follow, it is no longer the big events that make up the fabric of the landscape of time but the myriad incidents, minute facts either overlooked or deliberately ignored.
The landscape is named a passage, and the collection's span is fixed at roughly a dozen years:
page xHere, the landscape is a passage—the data transfer accident of the present to the most recent past, a past that goes back some ten or twelve years, a period in which everything has suddenly plunged headlong into a discontinuity that has destroyed the age-old agreement of tenses: the chronaxy that only a little while ago still made sense of history.
The passage on forgetting quotes a young writer twice, the material behind the essay to come on the "industrialization of forgetting":
page xWe are forced to transmit what we know, that is our legacy, but we share the impotence of those who come after. This is why I believe we must hold on not only to our memory, but also to the possibility of forgetting.
page xHumanity will banish the twentieth century, the most infamous and murderous of all, from its history; we should forget it.
The central reversal is then stated plainly, the sentence that governs the entire descent-through-time structure of the book:
page xiIf we look for a moment at the reversal that is happening before our very eyes, trend for trend, we see that fear of the future has now been outstripped by fear of the past, as though the past, far from disappearing, from being erased by the present, continues to weigh it down—worse, to secretly contaminate it.
The figure for the reversal is collision, and here the book's master term, "real time," enters bound to the speed of light:
page xiIndeed, when you run into an obstacle, an insuperable barrier, the impact makes you recoil. This is evidently what has just happened; history has just crashed into the wall of time, the barrier of this "real time" that corresponds to a cosmological constant, the speed of light in a vacuum.
To see the acceleration, Virilio calls for the distant vantage of Sirius:
page xiTo observe this sudden unfolding of time in which not only history is accelerating, as before, but also its reality, we need to adopt the perspective of Sirius and step back, get our distance to avoid the contemporary myopia of the media age.
The Benjamin "Angelus Novus" passage is quoted across the page break and then turned. The angel-of-history vision, Virilio says, is now everyone's:
pages xi–xiiWalter Benjamin once wrote, "A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet." Today this theological vision no longer belongs to the angel of history. It has become the vision of each and every one of us.
Virilio closes by naming the form, halfway between essay and narrative, and signs it P.V.:
page xiiThe work that follows is devoted to this radical reversal in perspective. It is halfway between an essay and a narrative in which a series of atypical events succeed each other over the course of only a dozen or so years; events whose scope has escaped the theorists as much as the historians of the moment.
The essay begins from the invention of street lighting and reads the whole of technoculture out of it. The origin is a police measure: La Reynie lights Paris to make the night governable and profitable, and Virilio dates the "false day" of technoculture to that act.
page 2The false day of technoculture rightly sprang up out of those vast death traps that the first great cities of the industrial world turned into at night. Hell without the fire, with their murderous princes and gutter princesses stepping out in the mud, absolute squalor of a shady populace devoted unstintingly to doing evil.
page 2When La Reynie quit his post as police chief in 1697, there were 6,500 street lamps democratically lighting up the capital. The Englishman Joseph Lister, comparing the "City of Light" to London, which was not yet so privileged, wrote, "The streets of Paris are ablaze all through winter and even of a full moon."
The artificial day abolishes the day/night rhythm from physiology, and Virilio runs the story forward into digital time, where the multimedia web is figured as a degraded McLuhan. This is the essay's key image for the internet, and it arrives early:
page 3After the fields and the forests, the cities and suburbs will be evacuated of work and social intercourse; after the space of the countryside, urban space will be destroyed. The web of multimedia—that ever-watchful spider—will be merely a grotesque caricature of the global village of Marshall McLuhan, who will someday look like the bucolic Jean-Jacques Rousseau of digital times.
The urban consequence is the emptying of the city into fortified enclaves. Virilio gives the demographic estimate and the coinage together:
page 4Whatever the case may be, it is estimated that between now and the end of the millennium, 30 percent of the population will take shelter in cities of refuge removed from the escheated megalopolises: priva-topias, much like entrenched camps, protecting the comfortable existence, the life and goods, of the privileged sons and daughters of technoliberalism on hostile and fragmented territory.
page 4"You can't live in New York during the day, you can only live here at night," filmmaker Abel Ferrara recently told a journalist.
Melatonin appears as the chemical completion of the project: the drug that erases the difference between here and there, night and day, at the level of the body itself.
page 5Thanks to the untimely use of this substance, night and day become equivalent; we no longer know physiologically where night ends and day begins, what the difference is between here and there, for melatonin takes on the job of filling in the last remaining gaps, erasing distinctions, compensating for our optical transgressions, the nuisance of jet lag.
The essay turns philosophical through Arendt, whose The Life of the Mind supplies the figure of reversal that Virilio will use for the whole culture. The reversal of values is not an escape from the order reversed:
page 6The quest for meaning, which relentlessly dissolves and examines anew all accepted doctrines and rules, can at any moment turn against itself, produce a reversal of the old values, and declare these contraries to be new values.
page 6But Arendt hastens to add that, before Hitler, "this is what Nietzsche did when he reversed Platonism, forgetting that a reversed Plato is still Plato, or what Marx did when he turned Hegel upside down, producing a strictly Hegelian system of history in the process."
page 6Later, the situationist Guy Debord was to remark, "We didn't try to find the formula for overthrowing the world in books but by roaming around."
Degas supplies the aesthetic law of the age, and Virilio names his own concept in passing: the aesthetics of disappearance, whose first moral expressions he identifies as nihilism and negationism.
page 7At the end of the nineteenth century, Edgar Degas, painter and lover of the camera obscura, was thus able to tell us a great deal more about future times than his contemporary philosophers and theorists, Marx and Nietzsche—with, for instance, a formula so far ahead of its time that it seemed meaningless then: "By freeing itself from Nature's tyranny, art sums itself up rather than extends itself."
page 7So we would no more be able to stop "progress" than resolve the nebulosity of extraterrestrial time—the pathetic progress of an aesthetics of disappearance whose first moral expressions, the most spontaneous, the most obvious, have included historical nihilism and negationism.
Mies van der Rohe gives the age its motto, which Virilio then extends into a litany covering the whole civilization:
pages 7–8And yet it would be an adept of transparent architecture, Mies van der Rohe, who would have the last word, so to speak, with his dizzying and necessarily brief formula: Less is more.
page 8Less is more, from the countdown to the speed record, from cubism to nuclear disintegration, from consumerism to computer science, from aerodynamics to the anorexia of top models, from technoliberalism to the cyber, from deforestation to the great ethnic massacres.
The cyber-ideology is quoted from its own advocates and read as the dream of a society with no authority, which Virilio treats as continuous with the emptying-out of the city. Heim arrives with one descriptive phrase, Negroponte and Barlow with the manifesto line:
page 8"All the signs of the decline of social life, of politics, of civilian life, must be interpreted positively as signs of the coming of the cyber," Michael Heim, a distant California disciple of Heidegger, recently wrote.
page 8"We have entered the digital age, the age of a universal network with no one in charge, no president, no chief. . . . Because of the network's decentralized structure, it will in any case be impossible to censor it without banning the telephone! And this is a good thing, for cybernetic space should reflect a society of individuals and in no case become the plaything of government!"
The Platonic frame closes the thought: the society of individuals with no law is the tyrant's soul from Republic Book Nine, the dreamer who becomes in waking life what he was only in dreams.
page 9"When he was still democratically minded and under the influence of the laws and his father, they [immoral attitudes] only appeared in dreams; but under the tyranny of the master-passion, he becomes in reality what he was once only occasionally in his dreams, and there's nothing, no murder, no outrage however terrible, no unfit food, from which he will shrink."
The great man shrinks (Malraux) while the ordinary individual inflates to planetary scale. Virilio's example is a supersonic golf tournament, the earth reduced to a green:
page 10The performance is to take place on three different continents on one and the same day: on 3 August 1996, the sixty participants will be able to putt successively in Marrakech (Africa), Shannon (Europe), and Atlantic City (United States). Thanks to the chartering of a special Concorde, three continents are reduced to the size of a golf course and the confines of the earth to those of a green.
The essay ends by completing the Arendt figure. The commandment to kill is superseded by a ban on surviving, and the closing anecdote of the donated organs shows the body forgotten even in grief.
page 11We discover that Hitler's commandment to kill, cynically playing on Judeo-Christian morality, is then superseded by a ban on surviving, at least spiritually. A new edict daily relayed by the mass media, which now target God himself. Having systematically exhausted daytime and time on earth with the aid of a bit of acceleration, why not indeed now deny eternity?
page 11"But she was very healthy," she told me, as though apologizing for some defect. After a long pause, she added, on a happier note: "Anyway, she donated her organs and they've all taken well!" In the end, the woman was able to forget her daughter's body without too much trouble, since that flesh of her flesh, dispersed like so many unhoped-for fetuses, had found itself back in vivo, propelled on new and unconscious journeys.
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