What does it mean for a viewer to see 'history as it is happening' through the medium of television? Likewise what is the experience of time produced in cinematic representation: the image ejects the possibility of an experience of flowing time with and within a present towards that will become history, a 'history' in the future? Indeed if there is a substantial relation between the production of 'historical' experience by way of the media and a 'historic' experience of time which presents the staged production that is the media, then the image of war constitutes the space between the experienced time that flows and the future place where history's image is manifest as such. Between the viewer who assumes himself 'outside' of the media, which serves as the condition of the production of historical experience, and the magical flow of invisible time, where in the future the past will be presented, even the passing of the media (as the condition of the historicity of history), lies the secret of the End of historical time.

In 'our present' certain questions concerning the media, war, and historical time become critical. How do we describe the general structure of time, where an experience of the present, is nothing other than an experience of producing a representation of a future past, a future history at the same time we attempt to describe the historicity of the 'now', where the media appears from now on the only means to instantiate an experience of time's dimensions - past, present. or future? At what point in time are we if the condition of the appearance of being 'in' time is perpetually inscribed within the lifeless organon known as the media? But then what is the historicity of this organon which governs the presentation of what will be history by infusing and confusing any experience of the living present with a vertiginous experience of electronic representation of hybridized times? If the present is indissociable from its future in the empty presentation of what will be its past, its history, then the experience of the media as a synthetic creature of present and future steems from another dimension of time. This other dimension is war time, the war of time itself, a phenomenological battle to master the media time that will become history of how history will become itself in a time without any trace of the media. The French philosopher and social critic, Paul Virilio, offers some uncanny reflections on questions of war, time and the media.¹

In summarizing the relation between military technology, cinematic representation, and the viewer's position, Virilio states:

The disappearance of the proximity effect in the prosthesis of accelerated travel made it necessary to create a wholly simulated appearance that would restore three-dimensionality to the message in full. Now a holographic prosthesis of the military commanders inertia was to communicated to the viewer, extending his look in time and space by means of constant flashes, here and there, today and yesterday... Already in the flash-back and then in feed-back, this miniaturization of chronological meaning was the direct result of a military technology in which events always unfolded in theoretical time. As in cinema, what happens is governed not by a single space-time principle but by its relative and contingent distortion, the capacity for repressive response depending upon the power of anticipation.²

The historicity of our gaze no longer lies before the screen; it is represented on the space of the screen which in turn takes the place of the transcendental ground where the possibility of the visual "event" in space or time is fashioned; the visual event is the event of history 'happening' prior to its sedimentation in the dimension of the past. The moving organon of the gaze known as the screen is the temporal apparatus of perception in place of the universal apperception of the unity of the "I" (eye). The perceptual machinery traverses a field of possibilities that are not temporal or spatial by nature but 'theoretical' where the possibility of symbolic coordinations of space-time manifests itself. The marked differentiations, leaps and intervals, repetitions and laminor flows suggest that the temporality produced by the cinema is not ground in which the being of truth is lodged in the space of narrative representation. Rather the screen as a space of representationality is the material presentation of time as the technical effect of an innovation, a technical instrument, whose matter governs the both the temporal structure of visual production and the production of temporality.

In terms of our understanding of historical time, we have the reciprocal confusion of the historical event and the material presentation of the event by cinematic means, a material presentation of the event built into event of the media itself. Hence time does not become the condition for the space of history to open up to our present. Rather technology opens up a time where possility for history to be written exacts a constituent yet not-fictive 'event' whose material presentation is its cinematic representation. If you like the past - as a 'historical' space of possibility - is the mark of a technical intervention and material redistribution of temporality within the structure of media whereby a 'history', and moreover a historical representation, becomes its effect: the present is the factory of the past while the site of production slides into an unknown future. The past is the janus where cinematic technique inscribes within the space of its representation a mark of its own present that should have accompanied it. Hence an historian's perspective on this object constituted as the "past" must decipher the perilous ambiguities of the technical mark of present within the representation of the past by the progenitor of time, itself, namely the cinema: the temporal structure of History determined by the two dimensions (past and present). Specifically we must ask what is the relation between the flow of historical time, the experience of society in a 'war state', and the production of cinematic representations? Virilio again is decisive in broaching the question. He states, "The history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception... war consists not so much in scoring territorial, economic, or other material victories as in appropriating the 'immateriality' of perceptual fields".³

Based on Virilo's inversion, it is possible to venture a peculiar hypothesis concerning not so much the history of actual combat, but the intristic war process within the historicity of our own horizon by which the experience of war becomes a general experience of perception. In that sense the dimension of the past loses its priority in taming the question of history. Rather at stake for our investigation is the ways in which present, experiences are made visible to us within a delimited field of perception dictated by ideological, political, economic, and cultural impulses of global conflict; war in that sense is the mode in which history will have been fashioned on the basis of an ineluctable relationship between media representations and perception, which determine our experience of being-present within History. War situates us as future historical subjects within mutating perceptual technologies that bound an ungroundable present. The media engulfs the possibility oh History prior to its narrativization in texts precisely because the experience of being present is the experience of history 'happening' in the present. One can ask at what point in historical time did the disastrous relation between the moral act of war and the cathected feeling of being a living part of history form? Or would this alleged point in time border on a spectral invisibility given the fact that our perceptive fields are entrenched within the general 'historical' horizon of a self--generating media society which continuously usurps its own temporal referent? Finally a detached question: would history fail to happen for a specific present, whose formation is dependent upon the 'conflict' of perceptual technologies that literally determine the flow of time?

War in the 'age' of the media inverts the experience of the time flowing independently of man's consciousness into the hyptertrophic flow of history which floods the television screen; the absence of historical time in this situation guarantees, ironically, the possibility of history. Representations of war conflict with the possibility of equating present experiences of war with the process of forgetfulness and loss, thus denying the possibility of the present to pass. History happens by blocking the movement of time, thus making the present appear as 'past', while liquidating the capacity of time passage within an unsaturable space of representation. Memory is impossible only because the forgotten can not happen either. Jean Baudrillard offers us a critical insight into the dynamic of historical time when war 'occurs' in a society dominated by the media. He states,

By making transparent the non-event of the war, you give it force in the imagination-somewhere other than in the 'real time' of news where it simply peters out. You give force to the illusion of war, rather than become an accessory to its false reality.⁴

War expands according to an increasing momentum of fantasy production while time passes silently amidst the roar of competing representations of the electronic presence of history. The sole perpetration of time's possibility, namely the occurrence of an 'event', is also the "non-event" of war which is a prepackaged object of automated representation. Historical time is the imaginary inflation of an event within a general continuum of time made visible by the media, while "real time" retreats into the silent conditions by which war becomes a commodifiable object of vision. In an insidious manner, the more the media effaces the authenticity of its product, the more history is guaranteed to really happen.

Questions concerning the 'historical present' become significant particularly since we are attempting to make sense of a series of enormous global changes over the past few years; we have inclined ourselves towards the term 'post-cold war' to describe our present epoch, or rather the deferral of naming epoch. Historical presence is in fact the liquidation of the presence of history and thus the ghostly after-effect of naming a present threatened by a future 'historical' oblivion of epiphenomenality. However, within our brief suspension of epochality, war has re-emerged, awakening age old historical cracks that appeared dormant for our moment of epochal indecision. Hence how do we make sense of the 'temporal coincidence' of historical occurrences that are reluctant to happen, the non-event of history itself, with the proliferation of great historical images by the media about an indecipherable global conflictual condition? Quite literally how does history happen in the 'age' of the media when perception determines the possibility of being-in-history? If our past will become only when the present joins the future and if the future is already present before us in a carnival of electronic images, then how is history 'today' the convoluted entanglement of all three dimensions without referent and direction?

At stake for these questions a theory of historical time which ironically lacks precedent and thus a 'history'. History 'today' is dependent upon the nullification of precursors within the ambiguous history of history at the same time that the great heritage of the West abounds in the 'hyper-real' age of media.⁵ Paradoxically the more historical time shatters into multiplicity of directions in the space of media, mimicking the space of war by endlessly reproducing the image of one dimension in that of another, the more history attains the promise of a single image: that of the line, the narrative, agnosis, redemption, and destiny.

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