Thorup Terror

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VOLUME 10 NUMBER 3 , 2011

Terror as Terror

The return of fear and horror?

Mikkel ThorupInstitute of Culture and Society, University of Aarhus Denmark

This article surveys contemporary conceptualizations of terror,arguing that we are witnessing a return of terrors original meaning asbasically inexplicable, silent violence, perceived as attacking uswithout warning and without reason. Situating this conceptual and

perceptual change in its historical context, the article explores what itdoes with our comprehension of violence when one of its definingfeatures becomes its incomprehensibility. I argue that violence inmodernity had been supposed to have voice and to give reasons. Itwas understood as horrible but not as inexplicable, pure horror. It was

basically understandable, even if we agreed with neither the reasonsnor the actions. Now, a new conceptualization of violence seems tobe emerging, one that is defined in opposition to voice and reason,and whose defining feature is its silence.

Terror as a concept began its life in Western languages describingmans terror before the might and wrath of God. 1 The word terrororiginates from the Latin terrorem: great fear, dread and terrere: fillwith fear, frighten, and we find the concept used in the Latin

translation of the Old Testament as the fear caused by theintervention of God in the world:

And let the fear and dread [terror] of you be upon all the beasts of

the earth, and upon all the fowls of the air, and all that move uponthe earth: all the fishes of the sea are delivered into your hand.

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It would seem that its pre-modern usage was concentrated on theterror of helplessness, which we could also call mans sense ofinsecurity and vulnerability, an anthropological disposition for fear;and secondly, the terror of eternity, that is, religious horror and thefear of divine punishment (Kelly 1980). These definitions share the


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sense of incapacity to control ones own fate; of standing exposed,small and inconsequential before mighty and frightening forces ofeither nature or God. Terrors original meaning is the speechless.

The agent of terror, whether natural or divine, only speaks through itsactions. No explanation but destruction is given. The terrorized isspeechless too: silenced either by the loss of life or by the loss ofcomprehension. The latter is seen in the travel diary of the Romancardinal Luigi dAragona from 1517, in which he reflects on theemotional impact of large crucifixes vividly depicting the torments ofJesus. Seeing them aroused terrore and devotione (in Groebner2008, p. 89).

One could call this a religious conceptualization of terror, coupling it toGods omnipotence and mans impotence, but more important is thesilence of this terror. This is the defining feature of the original

meaning of the concept of terror. In the pre-modern understanding ofthe concept, terror struck with no explanation, no reasons orarguments, no opening for debate, objection or pleading. The return ofterror as fear and horror does not, therefore, signal any return ofreligion or have anything to do with the present global rebellionagainst secularism. It is a byproduct of neither Islamic terrorism northe war on terrorism. It has rather to do with a basic loss ofcomprehension in Western societies, a questioning of our control ofthe basic levers of development and safety, a weakening of thepositive expectation of the future, which has been one of the definingfeatures of modernity, and finally a new sense of being abandoned toones destiny. Modernity was founded on the rejection of destiny, of

forces beyond ones control and comprehension dictating or playingwith ones life. Now we do seem to see a new feeling ofdestiny and aloss of confidence in the power of the individual to create a hospitablelife for him- or herself.

What one could call a postmodern, globalized risk society has leftpeople feeling more vulnerable and less able to control their ownlives. One may possibly also add the last decades of neoliberaldecoupling of markets and societies, the hollowing out ofparliamentary democracies as the sites of authoritative decisions forsociety, and the various catastrophes, real or imagined, from swineflu, Frankenstein food and climate change. All of them seem tosuggest two basic experiences: man is not in control of his owndestiny and the tools of yesterdays control may be turning against us.This, I would argue, is the structural-historical reason for terrorsreturn as speechless fear and horror. This new silence of terror is thelimit expression of the fear which now underlies everyday life. 3

But the structural reasons behind the return of terror as fear andhorror are not really the focus of this article; the documentation andanalysis of the silent or silencing terror is. My main argument is quitesimply that in the Western world were presently witnessing a return ofterrors original meaning and effect, supplementing and at times


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replacing the understanding of terror as terrorism, i.e. terror asdeliberate use of political violence by non-state actors communicatedas such to the public. Terror has re-entered our perception asinexplicable horror. Of course I do not want to argue that allreferences to terror or terrorism, as we know them from the French

Revolution and onwards as the destructive use of violence againstcivilians for political purposes (or whatever definition one wants togive), have been superseded or forgotten. But I do want to argue thatmany references to terror emphasize terrors silence, itsincomprehension, its lack of meaning and rationale, and that thatpoints toward the original understanding of terror as somethinginexplicable for the ones being terrorized. It describes the terrorizedas inherently vulnerable and exposed to hidden forces manifestingthemselves unexpectedly and catastrophically. An integral part of myargument is also that this re-entry of a fear and horrorconceptualization of terror and its concomitant denial of terrors voiceis a profound, albeit often unacknowledged, break with the mostprevalent understanding of violence and violent action in modernity,namely that violence speaks and gets heard.

The article is divided into four parts. The first part elaborates on thevoice of violence in modernity. The second part exemplifies thepresent tendency to deny terror a voice through a short discussion ofthe thesis of a new terrorism and how one of its distinguishingfeatures is said to be the lack of rational meaning and understandablevoice in favour of apocalyptic destruction. The third part delves intocontemporary descriptions of the age of terror in which we allegedlylive. The fourth and final part investigates how this new terrorized

condition of life fits into, or is parasitic upon, a new and increasingunderstanding of humans and society as constitutively vulnerablerather than robust. This new understanding leaves us all exposed asHobbesian beings (humans supposed to fear) confronted by thespectre of the ever-present possibility of a violent death reiterated,chanted even, by Hobbesian mini-sovereigns (state agenciessupposed to protect) eager to offer protection in exchange forobedience.

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Violence speaks. It speaks in the manifest form of hurting andscreaming, but it also speaks of its own righteousness. This, at least,is the case for political violence. In modernity political violence has tospeak. It has to legitimize itself and this legitimization has a history.The intellectual history of terror and violence is an investigation intothe structural constraints on convincing arguments for legitimateviolence. In trying to legitimate an action, one is never completelydetached from ones surroundings, even when attacking thosesurroundings. Using violence, one is often at a disadvantagelegitimatorily and one has to re-describe what is perhaps universallythought of as horrendous as actually being benign and moral. This


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can only be done by drawing on already established criteria of thegood.

One has to capitalize on the authority of available languages oflegitimacy, appeal to the sensibilities of ones audience, speak withinthe established parameters of categories of morality. The degrees offreedom when trying to convince is determined by the languagealready there. This is why Quentin Skinner says that all ideologicalinnovators:

[] are obliged to march backwards into battle. To legitimise theirconduct, they are committed to showing that it can be described in

such a way that those who currently disapprove of it can be broughtto see that they ought to withhold their disapproval of it. To achievethis end, they have no option but to show that at least some of the

terms used by their ideological opponents to describe what theyadmire can be applied to include and thus to legitimise their own

seemingly questionable behaviour. (Skinner 2002, p. 150)

In his sociological master work The Civilizing Process Norbert Eliaswrote about the pre-modern view on violence:

Outbursts of cruelty did not exclude one from social life. They werenot outlawed. The pleasure in killing and torturing others was great,and it was a socially permitted pleasure. To a certain extent, the

social structure even pushed its members in this direction, makingit seem necessary and practically advantageous to behave in thisway. (Elias 2000, p. 163)

Elias fails to recognize the warrior ethos as a legitimization ofviolence, just as he doesnt differentiate between different socialgroups and their very different free use of violence, but he doeshighlight a very substantial difference between the pre-modern andmodern relation to violence. In pre-modern Europe violence waspredominantly viewed as an integral part of everyday life. It was moreprevalent than now both as practice and as expectation and it wasconsidered an inescapable part of life for most if not all groups insociety and within most human relationships (father versusson/wife/employees; tutor versus pupil; king/nobles versuscommoners etc.). No act, excepting the Second Coming, itself a verybloody event, could change the constancy and presence of violence.Violence was there, it needed no explanation. It was destiny, part ofthe human condition:

Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition,slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission

statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring realestate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the deathpenalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination

as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war,pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form ofconflict resolution all were unexceptionable features of life for

most of human history. But today, they are rare to nonexistent in


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the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be,concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when theyare brought to light. (Pinker 2007)

In modernity, however, violence begins to become problematic,

scandalous even, because it goes from being considered a conditionof life to a result of institutions. Violence became unnecessary andbarbaric. It went from being beyond human control to a most humanphenomenon. Voltaire expressed the new feeling most prominentlywhen he wrote that warcomes to us from the imaginations of three orfour hundred persons scattered over the surface of this globe underthe name of princes or ministers (1972, p. 231). This nave thought isnot the truth about the modern understanding of the causes ofviolence but there is a definite shift from accepting violence as a givento resisting and changing it as a product of mans inadequate shapingof its environment.

The development from premodernity to modernity doesnt necessarilymean a reduction in violence. It only means that our relation toviolence is transformed from the resigned to the active; active as boththe idea that violence can serve transformative political purposes andas the ruling doctrine that less violence is both a possibility and arequirement of political action. Politics now promises to address theexistence and amount of violence. The basic political problem inmodernity is the existence and distribution of violence. And this is aproblem talked about.

The modern imperative is what Hans Joas aptly calls the dream of a

modernity without violence (Joas 2003). When violence becomes aproduct of man, an accidental or non-necessary part of life, itscontinuance also becomes a scandal. Violence is now becoming aquality not of man or nature as such but of the social and itsinstitutions. It comes within the reach of man to rid the world ofviolence. Violence becomes an issue for mans action. Its abolitionbecomes a demand. One can no longer (as easily) refer to the violentnature of the world as justification of ones own violence. The violentnarrative has to include a promise to abolish, minimize or preventviolence. Violence now has to justify itself as anti-violence (Mayer2000, p. 71).

In his book Rebelfrom 1951, Albert Camus starts by saying that thereare two kinds of crime: the emotionally induced, crimes of passion,and the logically contemplated, crimes of logic. The differencebetween the two lies in whether the crime is premeditated or not, andCamus remarks that we live in an age of premeditation and perfectcrime, an age that kills on purpose and never lacks a justification forviolence: Our criminals are no longer helpless children who couldplead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and theyhave a perfect alibi: philosophy which can be used for any purpose even for transforming murderers intojudges (Camus 1957, p. 3). Theperfect alibis are the voices of modern violence. In modernity, evenviolence is supposed, obliged even, to speak. New conceptualizations


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of contemporary public violence like the ones discussed below claim aradical break with this speech dimension and then implicitly, andsometimes explicitly, with modernity also.

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In 1993 the German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger publishedAussichten auf den Brgerkrieg[View of the Civil War] which depicteda future of the formless, the unfathomable, the black holes, themeaningless violence. Enzensberger draws a distinction between theconflicts of yesterday, when politics and ideology mattered, and now:In todays civil wars every legitimatization has evaporated. Theviolence has completely cut itself off from any ideological reasoning.Violence has become its own purpose: What gives the present civilwars a new, scary quality is the fact that they are literally aboutnothing (Enzensberger 1993, pp. 20 & 35, his italics). Thirteen years

later, in 2006, he revisits the theme in a small booklet, SchreckensMnner: Versuch ber den radikalen Verlierer [Men of Horror: Anessay on the radical loser]. The violent perpetrator is now whollypsychologized. He is intent only on destruction, his own and everyoneelses. The Islamist terrorist or Islamism

is not interested in solutions to the dilemma of the Arab world; It ispure negation. It concerns in strict sense an unpolitical movement

because none of its demands are open to negotiation. Put bluntly, itwants the majority of the worlds inhabitants, consisting of infidelsor apostates, to capitulate or be murdered. (Enzensberger 2006, p.xviii)

Enzensberger stands aghast in front of what his perspective cannotunderstand. Or more precisely: he silences whom he takes to bevoiceless. Denied voice, they are also stripped of reason and reasons.

The debates on new terrorism and new war share many features,not least the devaluation of motives and the emphasis on wantondestruction (religious fanaticism in the new terrorism, primordialhatred and private looting in the new wars) but here I want to focusexclusively on the new terrorism thesis.4 I do not mean to criticize ordebunk the new terror thesis (others have done that convincingly,Tucker 2001; Copeland 2001; Duyvesteyn 2004; Mueller 2006; Stohl

2008; Crenshaw 2009) nor to foolishly deny that present terrorismdiffers on important points from its previous forms, though perhapsless in its methodology than its historical context. Often we find thefuture or present being described as the return of a pre-modern past,the return of ancient hatreds, religious fanaticism and other allegedlypre-modern and pre-political causes. Many even distinguish the newterrorists from the old by the the shedding of all moral restraint andeven by one of the most effective modern taboos, the joy generatedby killing and destruction (Laqueur 1999, p. 231). The return of thepast is also the abandonment of restraint and voice in favor oftriumphal mayhem.


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Silencing, I will argue, is the most common maneuver in descriptiveefforts to understand present violent threats. A distinction is beingmade between an old violence or terrorism which may have beenhorrible and bloody but which was also communicable andunderstandable and then a new violence or terrorism fundamentally at

odds with any rationality or proper politics. The politicized terrorism ismost often part of the usual suspects when writing the history ofterrorism, sometimes with a pre-start on the Zealots of the f irst centuryPalestine, then jumping a thousand years to the eleventh centuryPersian Assassins before jumping some seven hundred years again(Chaliand & Blin 2007) to continue with the anarchists of the latenineteenth to early twentieth century and the red, urban terrorism ofthe sixties, seventies and eighties before giving way to the allegedlynew, apolitical terrorism of religious fundamentalism. My aim here isnot to debate or question this history of terrorism. There was earlierwhat Paul Wilkinson calls a potentially corrigibleterrorism restrainingits use of violence and then an incorrigible terrorism with absolutistand maximalist aims aiming ultimately at world domination ordestruction (Wilkinson 2006, p. 4, his italics).5 This is a powerful andoften repeated claim about the new, more dangerous terrorism facingus today with fanatics who do not seek a seat at the table, as PaulBremer, then ambassador, later head of the Coalition Provisional

Authority in Iraq wrote; they want to overturn the table and killeverybody at it. The new terrorists are motivated less by narrowpolitical goals and more by ideological, apocalyptic or religiousfanaticism (Bremer 2001, p. 24). Terrorists today are most oftenmotivated by religious enmity, blind hatred or a mix of individuallyidiosyncratic motivations (Hoffman 2006, p. 281). Terror is no longer

a method or a means to an end but rather, as Bruce Hoffman writes,an end in itself that does not require any wider explanation or

justification beyond the groups members themselves and perhapstheir followers (Hoffman 1999, p. 28).6 This analysis is echoed in anarticle in the military journal Parametersstating that for many radicalorganizations, terror has evolved from being a means to an end, tobecoming the end in itself, meaning that todays terroristsincreasingly look at their acts of death and destruction as sacramentalor transcendental on a spiritual or eschatological level [] Religiousterrorists are often their own constituency, having no externalaudience for their acts of destruction. For the new terrorists violenceis itself the objective (Morgan 2004, pp. 30, 32, 34).

The difference between terrorists is historicized with old terror groupsportrayed as basically understandable from a political point of viewwhereas the new groups, Al Qaeda in particular (often made thetemplate of all new terrorist groups), are rooted in somemetaphysical or religious commitment immune to argumentation,pragmatism or compromise. We have, therefore, moved from apolitical confrontation to one of political societies threatened by theunpolitical or antipolitical, from order vs. order to order vs. chaos. Theconclusion from this is basically that whereas before we couldunderstand the motives of the violent opponent and possibly engagein dialogue, now the only recourse is to use all possible measures to


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suppress the group before it can wreak more mayhem (Wilkinson2006, p. 4); a mayhem often depicted through the threat of weaponsof mass destruction in the hands of what Jessica Stern calls theultimate terrorists (Stern 1999).

Religion is back with a vengeance. It seems one just has to sayreligious in order to conjure up images of crusades, fanaticism,eschatological violence and suchlike. The messianic foe isconfrontingand killingus as this is his sole motive in life. Whatreligion does here is supposedly to explain a greater lethality anddanger, an enemy unwilling, unable even, to give up his strugglebefore final victory.7 But it does also something else. It places us, thespectator and victim, in the strange role of the trembling subjectconfronted by a wrathful deity striking without warning or apparentreason. The decoupling of (our) action and (their) reaction implodesall accounts of causality leaving only the terror incident as inexplicable

horror.

The core assumption in most theories of a new terrorism is that theabsence of a plausible agenda is related to the absence ofconstraints on violence (Simon & Benjamin 2001/2, p. 6; See alsoSimon & Benjamin 2000; Simon 2003). Terrorist violence becomespervasive and unhinged. There are no blockages to pure destruction.The terrorists have de-coupled themselves from all restraint and thenew religious and technological reality of terrorism means that we associeties have fewer, if any, means to stop the destruction. Alldevelopments in terrorists organization, legitimization, recruitment,financing and execution are interpreted as rendering terrorist groups a

truly horrific menace, making this a far more dangerous situation thanever before. No development seems to make it safer. For instance,one could interpret network-organization as a choice which weakensterrorists, diminishing their control, command and coordination, but itis almost unanimously depicted as especially dangerous and elusive,enabling the terrorists to act with stealth and strike at will. Or onecould rejoice at the end of the super power nuclear rivalry and thethreat of an actual global total war. Instead were told that the world isnow entering a new phase in its history, more dangerous than anybefore (Laqueur 2001, p. 82, my italics).

I shall return to this later but the shared assumption seems to be thatcontemporary societies are dependent upon an infrastructure which isincreasingly more concentrated, more interconnected, and moresophisticated, making them ever more vulnerable and difficult toprotect. The sole emphasis on our non-knowledge and theirseemingly all-powerful ability to attack makes it a confrontation highlyskewed in their favor leaving us to merely await our imminentslaughter. The danger of catastrophic terrorism is being emphasizedwhile the resilience and defensibility of our societies is beingdevalued. Filling the opening gap is a new sense of insecurity andvulnerability (Flynn 2001, pp. 184-5). Or rather, it is the insistencethat we should feel insecure. The new threat, as Anastassia Tsoukala


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has shown, is portrayed as extraordinary, limitless and completelyunpredictable, and she quotes Rohan Gunaratna as saying that wedo not know where the enemy is, or its numbers. We have no ideawhen it is going to attack, or where and how (Tsoukala 2008, p. 55).

I take the thesis of the unpolitical nature of the new terrorists to besymptomatic of one of the dominant theories of the risk profile of ourcontemporary societies, namely a broader trend to emphasize thesilence, even the anti-voice, of contemporary violent (non-state)actors whether insurgents or terrorists (possibly also commoncriminals but that is beyond the scope of this article). It is beyond thescope of this article to give any answers to the reasons behind thisshift from a preoccupation with voice/comprehension to one ofsilence/incomprehension, but one could speculate that it hassomething to do with a broader feeling of fluid perception categorieswhich cannot solidify into comprehensive systems of thought. In that

situation, where the perceptual categories are muted or strained,another category of comprehension takes the lead, that of the body.To become afraid, to be terrorized, is to become aware of oneself as afragile and mortal body exposed to forces beyond ones control. Thebody produces affective categories zooming in on this body, thissituation. The restthe world, the structural explanationsareimmaterial to a body gripped by fear. These bodily reactions seem tocompensate for a lack of strong conceptual control over the situationand it produces new perceptions of danger where the important thingis not to understand but to react. The feeling of me exposedtranslates into them attacking. Nothing else is needed in a concretedanger situation but at present it seems there are no overarching

conceptual resources to get us safely beyond the feeling of beingunder attack from the invisible and the horrible.

This view deemphasizes the rationality and constraint of the attackersand forcefully (over-)emphasizes the horror they constitute andperpetrate. In that sense terror returns as unfathomable fear anddread. My argument is that we are witnessing a silencing of violentactors as part of a broader perception of the dangers andvulnerabilities of contemporary life. Martha Crenshaw is correct in herclaim concerning the rationale and appeal behind the idea of a newterrorism, namely that it supports the case for major policy change(Crenshaw 2009, p. 133), and this argument is also applicable to the

idea of a new war. However, I want to argue that we should also tryto understand the reasons for the underlying perception of our societyas increasingly threatened by hidden and catastrophic dangers.

To summarize this section: My argument is that claims of newterrorism (and new wars) gain credibility by tapping into a morecomprehensive proliferation of fear as angst, a fear disconnected fromany visible and comprehensible source.


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III

Terrorism, and to a lesser extent war, are now woven into what UlrichBeck (2002) calls the world risk society already in place before the9/11-attacks. Terrorism is suddenly thought to threaten us all; and notonly that, it is now thought to be something more and else than acriminal justice issue threatening specific targets as it was mostlythought in the previous terrorism waves. It is now in real Hobbesianterms thought to be an egalitarian threat to everyone everywhere,exposing our basic vulnerability as persons and societies. We hadlearnt to live with the bomb earlier but the precondition was that theterrorism didnt really threaten us all existentially. It was a terrible butmanageable threat.

In 1983 Louis Horowitz wrote about the routinization of terrorism andsaid: In the last decade terrorism has become routine [] Once

extraordinary and unusual phenomena have become normal,everyday events (Horowitz 1983, p. 39). Some ten years later, in1991, Noemi Gal-Or wrote in the introduction of the book ToleratingTerrorism in the West: Terrorism has ceased to be an attraction.Political terrorism inflicted upon the international community, inparticular terrorism in the western hemisphere since the late 1960s,has indeed become a routine ingredient of life in these societies (Gal-Or 1991, p. xiii). Terrorism had become one of the dangers of an opensociety. It was not described as an existential phenomenonnecessitating a radical restructuring of policies, law and everyday life.

Despite wanted posters and enhanced police (and political)

surveillance, terrorism was in the post-Second World War era mostlyconsidered something localizable and relevant for specificgovernment agencies rather than for the general public as such. Itwas seen as something requiring a strengthening of internationalcooperation, not an overthrowing and complete redrafting of the rulesof international law (Mgret 2003, p. 328). The low -level terrorismdisturbance of the late decades of the twentieth century, described byHorowitz and Gal-Or, was an acquired terrormindedness8 based on acriminological understanding of terrorism. By contrast, thepredominant interpretation nowwhether using the terms war onterror or notis a war interpretation, maybe even a global civil warperspective, having a profoundly more intrusive effect. Despite themass casualties of the 9/11-attacks there was nothing inherent in thethreat meriting a war-response or a description as an attack oncivilization as such (Kapitan & Schulte 2002). Terrorism became terrorwhen a specific attack and a specific enemy were transformed or readinto a general system of fear. It was re-described as inexplicablehorror. The language of terrorism degenerated into a psychologicaland moral language of our horror and their barbarity. Basically, itwas no longer a language of terrorism, understood as a description ofillegitimate yet comprehensible violence. It became a language ofterror as horror, a language about our reactions rather than themotives or actions of the perpetrators.


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In the present age terror signifies less an act than a condition. Weseem to have moved from a perception of terror as terrorism, that is, aspecific and local phenomenon, back to one of terror as terror in itsoriginal sense of dread and horror, that is, as an abstract, pervasiveand universal fear of unknown and invisible dangers. Perhaps this is

partly due to what Patrick Porter (2009, p. 288) identifies as theprevalent vision in the war on terror during the Bush -administration,being less a strategy than tapping into some sort of theologicalargumentation, an all-consuming total vision of existential threat anddoom from forces beyond known and containable measure.

When the Bush-administration called it a war on terror many criticspointed out that war against a tactic means perpetual warfare; that thewar metaphor leads to the wrong approach and to political paranoia;and that terror was too vague a concept, it meant too much and toolittle (Ackerman 2006, ch. 1; Lakoff 2008, ch. 6). Actually it would

seem that the Bush-administration tapped into a terror conceptdeveloped in the decade prior to 9/11 as the threat shifted from therecognizable foe of the Soviet Union to what the first George Bush,after an US-Soviet summit in 1990, called instability andunpredictability (in Barash 1994, p. 44). This new threat was a near-total abstraction and it quickly gave way to various representations ofinstability and unpredictability, such as warlords (Somalia), old-fashioned dictators (Iraq war 1 and 2), terrorism (first attack on WTC),international crime (narcotics, mafia) etc. Terror was being re-definedfrom identifiable terrorists to abstract terrors. This process has beenaccelerated after 9/11 in an abstraction and globalization of theterrorist threat. The threat has been described as elusive, invisible,

pervasive and globalpeople in 60 countries trained to kill us, asGeorge W. Bush once said. The important change in present daydescriptions of terrorists is that while the anti-colonial and redterrorism of the 1970s and 60s claimed to be fighting a global battlewith many fronts, they were not believed (despite some, largelygovernment-financed, claims of a Soviet conspiracy). The threat waslocalized in its description and counter-offensive. The 9/11-attackswere in a certain sense the confirming event for the feeling of abstracthorrors: Unexpected, brutal, materializing in all its horror before ourbewildered eyes. It seemed to confirm and therefore augment thediffuse feeling of some strange tectonic shift in our society: that weare gradually, almost imperceptibly, losing control of our own society

and its development. 9/11 showed this diffuse fear to be true. So, itwas in no way the reason behind the shift that this article documentsbut it did serve to tip the scales in favour of what we could call anaffective reading of dangers rather than an ideological or political one.

Today, Western policymakers and journalists tend to mirror theradical, violent Islamist claim that any Muslim throwing a bomb forwhatever purpose and in whatever place is part of one unified, anti-Western campaign. As Frank Furedi says in his highly readable andprovocative book, Invitation to Terror: [T]he threat of todayshomegrown Islamic radical is not experienced as that posed by a

small isolated fringe group. On the contrary, they are perceived as


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part of a global revolt against the Western way of life (2007, p. 96).That understanding of the threat mirrors the self-portrayal of theviolent Islamists and is thus a uniquely new way of responding:accepting the basic rationale given by the opponent.

Terror and terrorism are not only inherently political concepts in thesense that they less describe a specific action than a relation of powerbut also in the sense that they can serve inflationary politicalpurposes. They are potent concepts as evidenced in the manicattempts to connect whatever other political issues to the terrorismagenda in the way various actors re-describe their field in the threatterms of terrorism. It seems that if terrorism and terrorists cannotconnect or be connected to your field then youre in budgetarytroubles. This terrorist expansionism has generated a proliferation ofcategories of terrorism, engulfing our societies in fear of potentiallyanything. New terrorisms are grouped around two poles. Firstly, terror

is perceived as originating in everyday life issues and commodities:All you need is a cellphone to trigger an explosion (Todorov 2009, p.52). Terror originates in just about any political issue and just aboutany technology. We have seen sustained attempts to warn about:cyber-terrorism/information terrorism; bio-terrorism; nuclear terrorism;eco-terrorism/environmental terrorism; ethno-terrorism; narco-terrorism; network terrorism; agro-terrorism; existential terrorism;pyro-terrorism; how long is it before some entrepreneurial journalist orresearcher starts peddling climate terror, nano-terror or gene-terror?They emphatically serve less to describe something which actuallyhappens but something we should fear may happen. This is also thecase with the second form of new terrorism: terror threatening to

extinguish life and civilization as such. This is evident in variouswarnings of the great terror: mass terrorism , mega-terrorism, super-terrorism, apocalyptic terrorism, cosmic terrorism, catastrophicterrorism, hyper-terrorism, etc.

All of these terrorisms are less descriptive than performative. Theydo not describe a terrorism happening but a terror feeling. This is alsotrue of the pre-terrorism anti-radicalization approach and preventivepolicing (Toscano 2009) heralded in Western government circles aswell as the constant refrain (expressed almost instantaneously on9/11) that the world changed today (Birkland 2004). What theyactually perform is a terror act, in the sense that their (unintended)

effect is to make terrorism pervasive; they tell us to fear everydayconveniences and to prepare for the absolutely catastrophic. We arealways, everywhere and from everyone, threatened by purposeful,extreme violence. The political system now predominantly views theindividual subject not as a citizen endowed with capacity for reflectionand action but as a victim, actual or potential, in need of a support andsecurity the person cannot provide for him or herself. Security andsafety was, even before 9/11, the primary political concern,epitomized by then Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi in 1997:[T]he problem of the safety of the country seems to be no longer oneof external safety, but an internal one: the safety of citizens in their

everyday life. This feeling of lurking threat was available both as a


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template for thought and as a fear multiplier on 9/11, as was echoedin the Quadrennial Defense Review issued just 19 days after theterror attack:

The attack on the United States and the war that has been visited

upon us highlights a fundamental condition of our circumstances :we cannot and will not know precisely where and when Americasinterests will be threatened, when America will come under attack,or when Americans might die as the result of aggression. (USGovernment 2001, p. iii, my italics)

Insecurity no longer just comes from the catastrophic and the rare butnow also from the banal and everyday life situations. Threats areepidemic. Once one starts to look at the world through the securitylens every thing seems threatening. Security creates insecurities(Zedner 2003a; 2003b).

The notion of indiscriminate killings is precisely parallel to the fear ofnew risks and threats such as epidemics, pedophiles and globalwarming affecting whomever irrespective of guilt, status, geographyor any other marker which might have been used to explain exposureto sudden death. It is also linked to a more general and increasingtendency to offer religion as an explanation. When the latter is putforward, when religion becomes the explanatory variable, conceptslike messianic, apocalyptic, metaphysical, divine wrath andsuchlike are thrown around detached from any strict theological basis.They serve the twin purpose of exposing the utter irrationality of thephenomena as well as its overpowering of the traditional politics of

ideas, rational debate and compromise. Religion not only becomesthe explanation. It also restates ancient theological tropes of bare manstanding before the vengeful God. This is not really religion as anexplanation. It is more religion in the absence of an explanation. Or toput it even more paradoxically: It is religion as the explanation of theabsence of any rational explanation of the violent incident.

IV

We have witnessed the same process in the inflation of allegedterrorist targets, most absurdly in the way local governments in the UShave gotten all kinds of landmarks and events on a list of possible

terrorist targets in order to gain access to anti-terrorist funds, but alsoin the re-description of our societies as characterized by vulnerability:With the dramatic rise in wealth [] has come an equally dramaticrise in vulnerability (Bobbitt 2009, p. 95). Any feature of our societynormally heralded as an achievementthe open society, theinformation society, the capitalist economy, welfare services,democratic institutionsare now re-described as that which makes usvulnerable to attack. They are now critical infrastructure, thedisruption or destruction of which will bring our way of life to a halt.

Any dimension of social life, any institution, event or person is now apossible target and there has been a simultaneous process of makingan ever-increasing list of institutions and processes essential for the


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functioning of society while describing them as ever-more vulnerableto all-destructive attack. In a book critically examining criticalinfrastructure protection, Cavelty & Kristensen observe twointerrelated ideas: 1) the perception that modern societies are bytheir very nature exposed to an ever-increasing number of

potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities and 2) the perception of anincreasing willingness of dangerous actors to brutally exploit thesevulnerabilities (2008, p. 2).

The things in our society we should be proud of and which could havebeen seen as the things protecting us from either attacks or thecatastrophic implications of an attack are now seen as the very thingsexposing us to disaster. In an article, America the Vulnerable theauthors say: Whatever happens next in the war on terror, massdestruction will remain only a mouse click, a credit card and a rentaltruck away (in Furedi 2007, p. 5). Our strengths now turn on us,

exposing the sinister dialectic of progress, radicalizing the critique ofEnlightenment optimism and, in a weird kind of self-flagellation,prophesying the end of life as we know it.

These different conceptualizations of terrorism teach us to disengagethe visibly unthreatened lives most of us generally lead from the threatwe should be aware of and alert to. They are invocations of ever-increasing phenomena and groups of ever-smaller real-lifeproportions blown up to ever-growing size. They do not reallyconstitute a separate cluster of phenomena but are rather to bethought of as an integral part of the general culture of fear which alsobrought us the millennium scare, the bird and swine flu hysterias, the

media stories of pedophiles in every kindergarten, asteroids headingfor earth, gene manipulated killer organisms and other suchphenomena. Fear is what is becoming epidemic (Altheide 2006).Imagination becomes dead certain reality. The authors of an article oncatastrophic terrorism write: Long part of the Hollywood and TomClancy repertory of nightmarish scenarios, catastrophic terrorism hasmoved from far-fetched horror to a contingency that could happennext month (Carter, Deutch & Zelikow 1998, p. 80). When faced witha risk we tend to respond with possibilistic fearrather than probalisticassessment (Furedi 2005; 2007; Lipschutz 1999; Clarke 2006). Theinvisible and unknowable until catastrophically evident is the newschemata of risks into and through which terrorism has been read:

[I]ncreasingly the dangers that lie ahead terrorism, global

warming, a viral epidemic are interpreted and experienced asthreats that are far worse than we suspect. They are also portrayedas threats about which in reality we know very little and about

which we are not in a position to know very much. (Furedi 2007, p.53)

Disasters are no longer rare, unusual events but everydayoccurrences. Terrorism is just one of several kinds of disaster, all ofwhich are portrayed as unknowable while existentially catastrophic.Without terrorism we as societies would still be scared, alert, making


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contingency plans and curtailing freedoms. Terrorism inscribes itselfinto the present disbelief in the sustainability and defensibility of l iberaldemocracies (now repeated with reference to the imperatives ofglobal flows of finance capital). The inexplicable and unknowabledoes not say something (or at any rate not much) about the terrorism

threatening us. It is not a matter of lack of intelligence, a new kind ofthreat or missing conceptual resources. The idea of the invisible andunknowable threat is how we see threats as such today. This is thepresent language of disaster which the new terrorism fits into andwhich make the following a common way to portray our currentpredicament: The enemies of the United States in this global war arecomplex, adaptive, asymmetric, innovative, dispersed, networked,resilient, and capable of regeneration (Cassidy 2008, p. 5). How isone to survive such a foe? Why are we not already dead?

The idea of a new terrorism is often predicated on the idea that we

have gone from a discriminate terrorism to an indiscriminate one,terrorists now seeking mass casualties just for the joy of killing. Thisfits neatly into the general conceptualization of imminent, invisiblyoperating disasters of our present age and it is a claim repeated sinceat least the 1970s and probably since the anarchist age of terror. Thenotion of a new indiscriminate terrorism doesnt serve to distinguishpresent terrorism from earlier ones in any analytically coherent sense(remember the 1983 attacks on US and French barracks in Lebanon,or the Lockerbie plane-bombing in 1988) but it does serve to inscribeterrorism within the general culture of fear. In other words, it is lessterrorism necessitating a new description but a culture of fear unableto read terrorism in any other language than that of the invisible and

the catastrophic.

Waiting for disaster, any disaster, is what, speaking of terror, theNational Security Strategy of the United States of America fromSeptember 2002 called a new condition of life (US Government2002, p. 31). And what constitutes this new condition of life in respectto terrorism? Every nook and cranny of the democratic world is todaythreatened by [] apocalyptic global terrorism (Keane 2004, p. 27).In 1998 then American President Bill Clinton said that terrorism nowhas a new face [] The new technologies of terror and theirincreasing availability, along with the increasing mobility of terrorists,raise chilling prospects of vulnerability to chemical, biological and

other kinds of attacks, bringing each of us into the category ofpossible victim (in Survival 2000, p. 162, my italics). Simpler put:Anywhere can be the target (Sofsky 2003, p. 185). Terrorism isportrayed as unfathomable, nihilistic, speechless: The terror attack on9/11 made no demands, it offered no explanations (Retort 2005, p.26). Without even a demand that was put forth for negotiation, therewasnt the flimsiest of excuses for the destruction of ordinary lives(Neiman 2004, p. 284). Michael Ignatieff quickly dismissed it asanything related to politics:

September 11 was not politics by other means. There were no

demands, and there never will be. No one took political


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responsibility for the act, and no one ever will. This was a deedcommitted without any expectation of attaining a political objective[] What we are up against is apocalyptic nihilism. (Ignatieff 2001)

And even an otherwise critical scholar such as Edward Said stated:

It was not meant to be argued with. No message was intended withit [] It transcended the political and moved into the metaphysical.There was a kind of cosmic, demonic quality of mind at work here,

which refused to have any interest in dialogue and politicalorganization and persuasion. (in Falk 2003, p. 49)

The apocalyptic and the metaphysicalsomehow the idea thatreligion transcends or negates politics (and its civilizing effects) hasbecome the truism proving that we are faced with an existential threat,ultimately threatening the destruction of all life. Former US Secretaryof Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in response to suicide bombings in

Iraq that: Once again, weve seen the truth that terrorists can attackat any time, at any place, using any tactic (in Furedi 2007, p. 8). Thisdramatic over-stating of terrorist ability places us all within reach ofhorrorand leads one to wonder why people with such allegedlyexceptional skills havent already taken control of the world or blownit up. More importantly this kind of reasoning seems to endowterrorists with powers formerly reserved for God: the ability to strikeanywhere at any time.

These new conceptualizations of terror tend to return us to the originalmeaning of terrormans vulnerability faced with destructive forcesbeyond his or her comprehension and control. We seem to be shiftingthe concept from terrorism as a violence conducted for politicalpurposes back to terror as the completely incomprehensible whichleaves man vulnerable and isolated. The truly radical characteristic ofthe new description of terrorism is the claim that new terrorismdoesnt speak. Modern political violence is characterized by itsincessant desire to speak, to legitimate, to convince. Oftenmonologues but speech nonetheless. Speech is also how we findsomething recognizable in the horror afflicted. Without the talk ofviolence, it becomes truly terror in its original form.

Mikkel Thorup is assistant professor in the history of political

thought at the Institute of Culture and Society, University ofAarhus Denmark.

Notes

1Part of this article is adapted from my book An Intell ectual History of Terror:

War, Violence and the State (Routledge 2010).


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2Genesis 9.2: et terror vester ac tremor sit super cuncta animalia terrae et

super omnes volucres caeli cum universis quae moventur in terra omnespisces maris manui vestrae traditi sunt .

3 This last expression was borrowed from a borderlands editor. I wish tothank both the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for many veryhelpful critiques, comments and suggestions.

4 For a critique of the new war thesis see Kalyvas (2001); Henderson

(2002); Duyvensteyn & Angstrom (2005). The latter quotes Alvin & HeidiTofflers claim that we are confronted by a new dark age of tribal hate,planetary desolation, and wars multiplied with wars and Donald Snows

observation ofthe essential divorce of war from politics because the newwarfare is pre-Clausewitzian, apolitical, and self-justifying (2005, p. 7).

5See also Laqueur (1999, pp. 5, 7, 79, 281; 1998); Giddens (2004); Kelly &

Maghan (2005).

6 See however his misgivings about the new terrorism thesis in Hoffman

(2000).

7A lot of good, solid work is being done on the subject. On religion,

fundamentalism and violence see Rapoport & Alexander (1982); Rapoport(1984); Juergensmeyer (2000); Lincoln (2003); Stern (2003); Weinberg &

Pedahzur (2004); Pearce (2006); Rennie & Tite (2008); On global anti-secularism see Westerlund (1996) and Juergensmeyer (2008). An importantantidote to the thesis that religious groups are more lethal and dangerous

because of their religious creed is Berman (2009). He argues that we shouldlook at the radical religious organization and group dynamics rather than the

theology of the terror group in order to understand their greater longevity andlethality when compared to other terror groups.

8A concept developed by Mats Fridlund.

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