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occurrence: he reads it as a symptom of a mutation in the war machine and in perception, treats real time as having superseded real space, treats the accident as the hidden truth of the substance, and treats the media event as the place where the occurrence is both staged and digested.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:
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