Paul Virilio /// Expecting the Unexpected.

'The seventeenth century was the century of mathematics, the eighteenth that of physical sciences, and the nineteenth that of biology. Our twentieth century is the century of fear. I will be told that fear is not a science. But science must be involved in some measure since its latest theoretical advances have brought it to the point of negating itself while its perfected technology threatens the globe itself with destruction.
Moreover, if fear itself cannot be considered a science, it is certainly a technique'. Thus wrote Albert Camus in 1948. For my part, I should add that since that date, fear has become, if not an art –a contemporary art of mutually assured destruction– then a dominant culture.
Indeed, since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, history has seen an advancement towards extreme positions, analysed by Clausewitz in terms of war, but this growing tendency which should have led to a balancing out between East and West during the twentieth century has not been given the importance it deserves with regard to peace Ðthe peace of dissuasion that sustains all mass media cultures today.