borderlands

e-journal www.bo rderland s.ne t .au VOLUM E 1 0 NUM BER 3 , 20 11

Terror as Terror
The return of fear and horror? Mikkel Thorup
Institute 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 as basically inexplicable, silent violence, perceived as attacking us without warning and without reason. Situating this conceptual and perceptual change in its historical context, the article explores what it does with our comprehension of violence when one of its defining features becomes its incomprehensibility. I argue that violence in modernity had been supposed to have voice and to give reasons. It was understood as horrible but not as inexplicable, pure horror. It was basically understandable, even if we agreed with neither the reasons nor the actions. Now, a new conceptualization of violence seems to be 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 describing mans terror before the might and wrath of God. 1 The word terror originates from the Latin terrorem : great fear, dread and terrere: fill with fear, frighten , and we find the concept used in the Latin translation of the Old Testament as the fear caused by the intervention of God in the world:
And let the fear and dread [terror] of you be upon all the beasts of the eart h, and upon all the fowls of the air, and all that move upon 2 the earth: all the fishes of the sea are delivered int o your hand.

It would seem that its pre-modern usage was concentrated on the terror of helplessness , which we could also call mans sense of insecurity and vulnerability, an anthropological disposition for fear; and secondly, the terror of eternity , that is, religious horror and the fear 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 of either nature or God. Terrors original meaning is the speechless. The agent of terror, whether natural or divine, only speaks through its actions. No explanation but destruction is given. The terrorized is speechless too: silenced either by the loss of life or by the loss of comprehension. The latter is seen in the travel diary of the Roman cardinal Luigi d Aragona from 1517, in which he reflects on the emotional impact of large crucifixes vividly depicting the torments of Jesus. Seeing them aroused terrore and devotione (in Groebner 2008, p. 89). One could call this a religious conceptualization of terror, coupling it to Gods omnipotence and mans impotence, but more important is the silence of this terror. This is the defining feature of the original meaning of the concept of terror. In the pre-modern understanding of the concept, terror struck with no explanation, no reasons or arguments, no opening for debate, objection or pleading. The return of terror as fear and horror does not, therefore, signal any return of religion or have anything to do with the present global rebellion against secularism. It is a byproduct of neither Islamic terrorism nor the war on terrorism. It has rather to do with a basic loss of comprehension in Western societies, a questioning of our control of the basic levers of development and safety, a weakening of the positive expectation of the future, which has been one of the defining features of modernity, and finally a new sense of being abandoned to ones destiny. Modernity was founded on the rejection of destiny, of forces beyond ones control and comprehension dictating or playing with ones life. Now we do seem to see a new feeling of destiny and a loss of confidence in the power of the individual to create a hospitable life for him- or herself. What one could call a postmodern, globalized risk society has left people feeling more vulnerable and less able to control their own lives. One may possibly also add the last decades of neoliberal decoupling of markets and societies, the hollowing out of parliamentary democracies as the sites of authoritative decisions for society, and the various catastrophes, real or imagined, from swine flu, Frankenstein food and climate change. All of them seem to suggest two basic experiences: man is not in control of his own destiny and the tools of yesterdays control may be turning against us. This, I would argue, is the structural-historical reason for terrors return as speechless fear and horror. This new silence of terror is the limit expression of the fear which now underlies everyday life. 3 But the structural reasons behind the return of terror as fear and horror are not really the focus of this article; the documentation and analysis of the silent or silencing terror is. My main argument is quite simply that in the Western world were presently witnessing a return of terrors original meaning and effect, supplementing and at times

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replacing the understanding of terror as terrorism, i.e. terror as deliberate use of political violence by non-state actors communicated as such to the public. Terror has re-entered our perception as inexplicable horror. Of course I do not want to argue that all references to terror or terrorism, as we know them from the French Revolution and onwards as the destructive use of violence against civilians for political purposes (or whatever definition one wants to give), have been superseded or forgotten. But I do want to argue that many references to terror emphasize terrors silence, its incomprehension, its lack of meaning and rationale, and that that points toward the original understanding of terror as something inexplicable for the ones being terrorized. It describes the terrorized as inherently vulnerable and exposed to hidden forces manifesting themselves unexpectedly and catastrophically. An integral part of my argument is also that this re-entry of a fear and horror conceptualization of terror and its concomitant denial of terrors voice is a profound, albeit often unacknowledged, break with the most prevalent 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 the voice of violence in modernity. The second part exemplifies the present tendency to deny terror a voice through a short discussion of the thesis of a new terrorism and how one of its distinguishing features is said to be the lack of rational meaning and understandable voice in favour of apocalyptic destruction. The third part delves into contemporary descriptions of the age of terror in which we allegedly live. The fourth and final part investigates how this new terrorized condition of life fits into, or is parasitic upon, a new and increasing understanding of humans and society as constitutively vulnerable rather than robust. This new understanding leaves us all exposed as Hobbesian beings (humans supposed to fear) confronted by the spectre of the ever-present possibility of a violent death reiterated, chanted even, by Hobbesian mini-sovereigns (state agencies supposed to protect) eager to offer protection in exchange for obedience. I Violence speaks. It speaks in the manifest form of hurting and screaming, but it also speaks of its own righteousness. This, at least, is the case for political violence. In modernity political violence has to speak. It has to legitimize itself and this legitimization has a history. The intellectual history of terror and violence is an investigation into the structural constraints on convincing arguments for legitimate violence. In trying to legitimate an action, one is never completely detached from ones surroundings, even when attacking those surroundings. Using violence, one is often at a disadvantage legitimatorily and one has to re-describe what is perhaps universally thought 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 the good. One has to capitalize on the authority of available languages of legitimacy, appeal to the sensibilities of ones audience, speak within the established parameters of categories of morality. The degrees of freedom when trying to convince is determined by the language already there. This is why Quentin Skinner says that all ideological innovators:
[] are obliged to march backwards into battle. To legitimise their conduct, they are committed to showing that it can be described in such a way that those who currently disapprove of it can be brought to see that they ought to withhold their disapproval of it. To achieve this end, they have no option but to show that at least some of the terms used by their ideological opponents to describe what they admire 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 Elias wrote about the pre-modern view on violence:
Outbursts of c ruelty did not exclude one from social lif e. They were not 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, making it seem necessary and practically advantageous t o behave in this way. (Elias 2000, p. 163)

Elias fails to recognize the warrior ethos as a legitimization of violence, just as he doesnt differentiate between different social groups and their very different free use of violence, but he does highlight a very substantial difference between the pre-modern and modern relation to violence. In pre-modern Europe violence was predominantly viewed as an integral part of everyday life. It was more prevalent than now both as practice and as expectation and it was considered an inescapable part of life for most if not all groups in society and within most human relationships (father versus son/wife/employees; tutor versus pupil; king/nobles versus commoners etc.). No act, excepting the Second Coming, itself a very bloody event, could change the constancy and presence of violence. Violence was there, it needed no explanation. It was destiny, part of the human condition:
Cruelty as entertainment, human s acrifice t o indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the deat h penalty for mis demeanors 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 of conflict 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 they are brought to light. (Pinker 2007)

In modernity, however, violence begins to become problematic, scandalous even, because it goes from being considered a condition of life to a result of institutions. Violence became unnecessary and barbaric. It went from being beyond human control to a most human phenomenon. Voltaire expressed the new feeling most prominently when he wrote that war comes to us from the imaginations of three or four hundred persons scattered over the surface of this globe under the name of princes or ministers (1972, p. 231). This nave thought is not the truth about the modern understanding of the causes of violence but there is a definite shift from accepting violence as a given to resisting and changing it as a product of mans inadequate shaping of its environment. The development from premodernity to modernity doesnt necessarily mean a reduction in violence. It only means that our relation to violence is transformed from the resigned to the active; active as both the idea that violence can serve transformative political purposes and as the ruling doctrine that less violence is both a possibility and a requirement of political action. Politics now promises to address the existence and amount of violence. The basic political problem in modernity is the existence and distribution of violence. And this is a problem talked about. The modern imperative is what Hans Joas aptly calls the dream of a modernity without violence (Joas 2003). When violence becomes a product of man, an accidental or non-necessary part of life, its continuance also becomes a scandal. Violence is now becoming a quality not of man or nature as such but of the social and its institutions. It comes within the reach of man to rid the world of violence. Violence becomes an issue for mans action. Its abolition becomes a demand. One can no longer (as easily) refer to the violent nature of the world as justification of ones own violence. The violent narrative has to include a promise to abolish, minimize or prevent violence. Violence now has to justify itself as anti-violence (Mayer 2000, p. 71). In his book Rebel from 1951, Albert Camus starts by saying that there are two kinds of crime: the emotionally induced, crimes of passion, and the logically contemplated, crimes of logic. The difference between the two lies in whether the crime is premeditated or not, and Camus remarks that we live in an age of premeditation and perfect crime, an age that kills on purpose and never lacks a justification for violence: Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy which can be used for any purpose even for transforming murderers into judges (Camus 1957, p. 3). The perfect alibis are the voices of modern violence. In modernity, even violence is supposed, obliged even, to speak. New conceptualizations

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of contemporary public violence like the ones discussed below claim a radical break with this speech dimension and then implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, with modernity also. II In 1993 the German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger published Aussichten auf den Brgerkrieg [View of the Civil War] which depicted a future of the formless, the unfathomable, the black holes, the meaningless violence. Enzensberger draws a distinction between the conflicts of yesterday, when politics and ideology mattered, and now: In todays civil wars every legitimatization has evaporated. The violence has c ompletely cut itself off from any ideological reasoning . Violence has become its own purpose: What gives the present civil wars a new, scary quality is the fact that they are literally about nothing (Enzensberger 1993, pp. 20 & 35, his italics). Thirteen years later, in 2006, he revisits the theme in a small booklet, Schreckens Mnner: Versuch ber den radikalen Verlierer [Men of Horror: An essay on the radical loser]. The violent perpetrator is now wholly psychologized. He is intent only on destruction, his own and everyone elses. The Islamist terrorist or Islamism
is not interested in solutions to the dilemma of the Arab world; It is pure negation. It concerns in strict sense an unpolitical movement because none of its demands are open to negotiation. Put bluntly, it wants the majority of the worlds inhabitants, consisting of infidels or apostates, to capitulate or be murdered. (E nzensberger 2006, p. xviii)

Enzensberger stands aghast in front of what his perspective cannot understand. Or more precisely: he silences whom he takes to be voiceless . 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 wanton destruction (religious fanaticism in the new terrorism, primordial hatred and private looting in the new wars) but here I want to focus exclusively on the new terrorism thesis.4 I do not mean to criticize or debunk 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 terrorism differs on important points from its previous forms, though perhaps less in its methodology than its historical context. Often we find the future or present being described as the return of a pre-modern past, the return of ancient hatreds, religious fanaticism and other allegedly pre-modern and pre-political causes. Many even distinguish the new terrorists from the old by the the shedding of all moral restraint and even by one of the most effective modern taboos, the joy generated by killing and destruction (Laqueur 1999, p. 231). The return of the past is also the abandonment of restraint and voice in favor of triumphal mayhem.

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Silencing, I will argue, is the most common maneuver in descriptive efforts to understand present violent threats. A distinction is being made between an old violence or terrorism which may have been horrible and bloody but which was also communicable and understandable and then a new violence or terrorism fundamentally at odds with any rationality or proper politics. The politicized terrorism is most often part of the usual suspects when writing the history of terrorism, sometimes with a pre-start on the Zealots of the first century Palestine, then jumping a thousand years to the eleventh century Persian Assassins before jumping some seven hundred years again (Chaliand & Blin 2007) to continue with the anarchists of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century and the red, urban terrorism of the sixties, seventies and eighties before giving way to the allegedly new, apolitical terrorism of religious fundamentalism. My aim here is not to debate or question this history of terrorism. There was earlier what Paul Wilkinson calls a potentially corrigible terrorism restraining its use of violence and then an incorrigible terrorism with absolutist and maximalist aims aiming ultimately at world domination or destruction (Wilkinson 2006, p. 4, his italics).5 This is a powerful and often repeated claim about the new, more dangerous terrorism facing us today with fanatics who do not seek a seat at the table, as Paul Bremer, then ambassador, later head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq wrote; they want to overturn the table and kill everybody at it. The new terrorists are motivated less by narrow political goals and more by ideological, apocalyptic or religious fanaticism (Bremer 2001, p. 24). Terrorists today are most often motivated by religious enmity, blind hatred or a mix of individually idiosyncratic 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 perhaps their followers (Hoffman 1999, p. 28). 6 This analysis is echoed in an article in the military journal Parameters stating that for many radical organizations, terror has evolved from being a means to an end, to becoming the end in itself, meaning that todays terrorists increasingly look at their acts of death and destruction as sacramental or transcendental on a spiritual or eschatological level [] Religious terrorists are often their own constituency, having no external audience for their acts of destruction. For the new terrorists violence is itself the objective (Morgan 2004, pp. 30, 32, 34). The difference between terrorists is historicized with old terror groups portrayed as basically understandable from a political point of view whereas the new groups, Al Qaeda in particular (often made the template of all new terrorist groups), are rooted in some metaphysical or religious commitment immune to argumentation, pragmatism or compromise. We have, therefore, moved from a political confrontation to one of political societies threatened by the unpolitical or antipolitical, from order vs. order to order vs. chaos. The conclusion from this is basically that whereas before we could understand the motives of the violent opponent and possibly engage in 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 (Wilkinson 2006, p. 4); a mayhem often depicted through the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of what Jessica Stern calls the ultimate terrorists (Stern 1999). Religion is back with a vengeance. It seems one just has to say religious in order to conjure up images of crusades, fanaticism, eschatological violence and suchlike. The messianic foe is confrontingand killingus as this is his sole motive in life. What religion does here is supposedly to explain a greater lethality and danger, an enemy unwilling, unable even, to give up his struggle before final victory. 7 But it does also something else. It places us, the spectator and victim, in the strange role of the trembling subject confronted by a wrathful deity striking without warning or apparent reason. The decoupling of (our) action and (their) reaction implodes all accounts of causality leaving only the terror incident as inexplicable horror. The core assumption in most theories of a new terrorism is that the absence of a plausible agenda is related to the absence of constraints on violence (Simon & Benjamin 2001/2, p. 6; See also Simon & Benjamin 2000; Simon 2003). Terrorist violence becomes pervasive and unhinged. There are no blockages to pure destruction. The terrorists have de-coupled themselves from all restraint and the new religious and technological reality of terrorism means that we as societies have fewer, if any, means to stop the destruction. All developments 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 than ever before. No development seems to make it safer. For instance, one could interpret network-organization as a choice which weakens terrorists, diminishing their control, command and coordination, but it is almost unanimously depicted as especially dangerous and elusive, enabling the terrorists to act with stealth and strike at will. Or one could rejoice at the end of the super power nuclear rivalry and the threat of an actual global total war. Instead were told that the world is now entering a new phase in its history, more dangerous than any before (Laqueur 2001, p. 82, my italics). I shall return to this later but the shared assumption seems to be that contemporary societies are dependent upon an infrastructure which is increasingly more concentrated, more interconnected, and more sophisticated, making them ever more vulnerable and difficult to protect. The sole emphasis on our non-knowledge and their seemingly all-powerful ability to attack makes it a confrontation highly skewed in their favor leaving us to merely await our imminent slaughter. The danger of catastrophic terrorism is being emphasized while the resilience and defensibility of our societies is being devalued. Filling the opening gap is a new sense of insecurity and vulnerability (Flynn 2001, pp. 184-5). Or rather, it is the insistence that we should feel insecure. The new threat, as Anastassia Tsoukala

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has shown, is portrayed as extraordinary, limitless and completely unpredictable, and she quotes Rohan Gunaratna as saying that we do not know where the enemy is, or its numbers. We have no idea when 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 be symptomatic of one of the dominant theories of the risk profile of our contemporary societies, namely a broader trend to emphasize the silence, even the anti-voice, of contemporary violent (non-state) actors whether insurgents or terrorists (possibly also common criminals but that is beyond the scope of this article). It is beyond the scope of this article to give any answers to the reasons behind this shift from a preoccupation with voice/comprehension to one of silence/incomprehension, but one could speculate that it has something to do with a broader feeling of fluid perception categories which 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 a fragile and mortal body exposed to forces beyond ones control. The body produces affective categories zooming in on this body, this situation. The restthe world, the structural explanations are immaterial to a body gripped by fear. These bodily reactions seem to compensate for a lack of strong conceptual control over the situation and it produces new perceptions of danger where the important thing is not to understand but to react. The feeling of me exposed translates into them attacking. Nothing else is needed in a concrete danger situation but at present it seems there are no overarching conceptual resources to get us safely beyond the feeling of being under attack from the invisible and the horrible. This view deemphasizes the rationality and constraint of the attackers and forcefully (over-)emphasizes the horror they constitute and perpetrate. In that sense terror returns as unfathomable fear and dread. My argument is that we are witnessing a silencing of violent actors as part of a broader perception of the dangers and vulnerabilities of contemporary life. Martha Crenshaw is correct in her claim concerning the rationale and appeal behind the idea of a new terrorism, 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 try to understand the reasons for the underlying perception of our society as increasingly threatened by hidden and catastrophic dangers. To summarize this section: My argument is that claims of new terrorism (and new wars) gain credibility by tapping into a more comprehensive proliferation of fear as angst, a fear disconnected from any visible and comprehensible source.

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III Terrorism, and to a lesser extent war, are now woven into what Ulrich Beck (2002) calls the world risk society already in place before the 9/11-attacks. Terrorism is suddenly thought to threaten us all; and not only that, it is now thought to be something more and else than a criminal justice issue threatening specific targets as it was mostly thought in the previous terrorism waves. It is now in real Hobbesian terms thought to be an egalitarian threat to everyone everywhere, exposing our basic vulnerability as persons and societies. We had learnt to live with the bomb earlier but the precondition was that the terrorism didnt really threaten us all existentially. It was a terrible but manageable threat. In 1983 Louis Horowitz wrote about the routinization of terrorism and said: 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, in 1991, Noemi Gal-Or wrote in the introduction of the book Tolerating Terrorism in the West: Terrorism has ceased to be an attraction. Political terrorism inflicted upon the international community, in particular 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 open society. It was not described as an existential phenomenon necessitating 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 mostly considered something localizable and relevant for specific government agencies rather than for the general public as such. It was seen as something requiring a strengthening of international cooperation, not an overthrowing and complete redrafting of the rules of international law (Mgret 2003, p. 328). The low -level terrorism disturbance of the late decades of the twentieth century, described by Horowitz and Gal-Or, was an acquired terrormindedness8 based on a criminological understanding of terrorism. By contrast, the predominant interpretation now whether using the terms war on terror or notis a war interpretation, maybe even a global civil war perspective, having a profoundly more intrusive effect. Despite the mass casualties of the 9/11-attacks there was nothing inherent in the threat meriting a war-response or a description as an attack on civilization as such (Kapitan & Schulte 2002). Terrorism became terror when a specific attack and a specific enemy were transformed or read into a general system of fear. It was re-described as inexplicable horror. The language of terrorism degenerated into a psychological and moral language of our horror and their barbarity. Basically, it was no longer a language of terrorism, understood as a description of illegitimate yet comprehensible violence. It became a language of terror as horror, a language about our reactions rather than the motives or actions of the perpetrators.

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In the present age terror signifies less an act than a condition. We seem to have moved from a perception of terror as terrorism , that is, a specific and local phenomenon, back to one of terror as terror in its original sense of dread and horror, that is, as an abstract, pervasive and universal fear of unknown and invisible dangers. Perhaps this is partly due to what Patrick Porter (2009, p. 288) identifies as the prevalent vision in the war on terror during the Bush-administration, being less a strategy than tapping into some sort of theological argumentation, an all-consuming total vision of existential threat and doom from forces beyond known and containable measure. When the Bush-administration called it a war on terror many critics pointed out that war against a tactic means perpetual warfare; that the war metaphor leads to the wrong approach and to political paranoia; and that terror was too vague a concept, it meant too much and too little (Ackerman 2006, ch. 1; Lakoff 2008, ch. 6). Actually it would seem that the Bush-administration tapped into a terror concept developed in the decade prior to 9/11 as the threat shifted from the recognizable foe of the Soviet Union to what the first George Bush, after an US-Soviet summit in 1990, called instability and unpredictability (in Barash 1994, p. 44). This new threat was a near total abstraction and it quickly gave way to various representations of instability and unpredictability, such as warlords (Somalia), oldfashioned dictators (Iraq war 1 and 2), terrorism (first attack on WTC), international crime (narcotics, mafia) etc. Terror was being re-defined from identifiable terrorists to abstract terrors. This process has been accelerated after 9/11 in an abstraction and globalization of the terrorist threat. The threat has been described as elusive, invisible, pervasive and globalpeople in 60 countries trained to kill us, as George W. Bush once said. The important change in present day descriptions of terrorists is that while the anti-colonial and red terrorism of the 1970s and 60s claimed to be fighting a global battle with many fronts, they were not believed (despite some, largely government-financed, claims of a Soviet conspiracy). The threat was localized in its description and counter-offensive. The 9/11-attacks were in a certain sense the confirming event for the feeling of abstract horrors: Unexpected, brutal, materializing in all its horror before our bewildered eyes. It seemed to confirm and therefore augment the diffuse feeling of some strange tectonic shift in our society: that we are gradually, almost imperceptibly, losing control of our own society and its development. 9/11 showed this diffuse fear to be true. So, it was in no way the reason behind the shift that this article documents but it did serve to tip the scales in favour of what we could call an affective reading of dangers rather than an ideological or political one. Today, Western policymakers and journalists tend to mirror the radical, violent Islamist claim that any Muslim throwing a bomb for whatever purpose and in whatever place is part of one unified, antiWestern campaign. As Frank Furedi says in his highly readable and provocative book, Invitation to Terror: [T]he threat of todays homegrown 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 the violent 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 the sense that they less describe a specific action than a relation of power but also in the sense that they can serve inflationary political purposes. They are potent concepts as evidenced in the manic attempts to connect whatever other political issues to the terrorism agenda in the way various actors re-describe their field in the threat terms of terrorism. It seems that if terrorism and terrorists cannot connect or be connected to your field then youre in budgetary troubles. This terrorist expansionism has generated a proliferation of categories of terrorism, engulfing our societies in fear of potentially anything. 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 about any technology. We have seen sustained attempts to warn about: cyber-terrorism/information terrorism; bio-terrorism; nuclear terrorism; eco-terrorism/environmental terrorism; ethno-terrorism; narcoterrorism; network terrorism; agro-terrorism; existential terrorism; pyro-terrorism; how long is it before some entrepreneurial journalist or researcher starts peddling climate terror, nano-terror or gene-terror? They emphatically serve less to describe something which actually happens but something we should fear may happen. This is also the case with the second form of new terrorism: terror threatening to extinguish life and civilization as such. This is evident in various warnings of the great terror: mass terrorism , mega-terrorism, superterrorism, apocalyptic terrorism, cosmic terrorism, catastrophic terrorism, hyper-terrorism, etc. All of these terrorisms are less descriptive than performative. They do not describe a terrorism happening but a terror feeling. This is also true of the pre-terrorism anti-radicalization approach and preventive policing (Toscano 2009) heralded in Western government circles as well as the constant refrain (expressed almost instantaneously on 9/11) that the world changed today (Birkland 2004). What they actually perform is a terror act, in the sense that their (unintended) effect is to make terrorism pervasive; they tell us to fear everyday conveniences and to prepare for the absolutely catastrophic. We are always, everywhere and from everyone, threatened by purposeful, extreme violence. The political system now predominantly views the individual subject not as a citizen endowed with capacity for reflection and action but as a victim, actual or potential, in need of a support and security the person cannot provide for him or herself. Security and safety 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 one of 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 echoed in the Quadrennial Defense Review issued just 19 days after the terror 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 Americas interests will be threat ened, when America will come under attack, or when Americans might die as the res ult of aggression. (US Government 2001, p. iii, my italics)

Insecurity no longer just comes from the catastrophic and the rare but now also from the banal and everyday life situations. Threats are epidemic. Once one starts to look at the world through the security lens every thing seems threatening. Security creates insecurities (Zedner 2003a; 2003b). The notion of indiscriminate killings is precisely parallel to the fear of new risks and threats such as epidemics, pedophiles and global warming affecting whomever irrespective of guilt, status, geography or any other marker which might have been used to explain exposure to sudden death. It is also linked to a more general and increasing tendency to offer religion as an explanation. When the latter is put forward, when religion becomes the explanatory variable, concepts like messianic, apocalyptic, metaphysical, divine wrath and suchlike are thrown around detached from any strict theological basis. They serve the twin purpose of exposing the utter irrationality of the phenomena as well as its overpowering of the traditional politics of ideas, rational debate and compromise. Religion not only becomes the explanation. It also restates ancient theological tropes of bare man standing before the vengeful God. This is not really religion as an explanation. It is more religion in the absence of an explanation. Or to put it even more paradoxically: It is religion as the explanation of the absence of any rational explanation of the violent incident. IV We have witnessed the same process in the inflation of alleged terrorist targets, most absurdly in the way local governments in the US have gotten all kinds of landmarks and events on a list of possible terrorist targets in order to gain access to anti-terrorist funds, but also in the re-description of our societies as characterized by vulnerability: With the dramatic rise in wealth [] has come an equally dramatic rise in vulnerability (Bobbitt 2009, p. 95). Any feature of our society normally heralded as an achievementthe open society, the information society, the capitalist economy, welfare services, democratic institutions are now re-described as that which makes us vulnerable to attack. They are now critical infrastructure, the disruption 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 a possible target and there has been a simultaneous process of making an ever-increasing list of institutions and processes essential for the

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functioning of society while describing them as ever-more vulnerable to all-destructive attack. In a book critically examining critical infrastructure protection, Cavelty & Kristensen observe two interrelated ideas: 1) the perception that modern societies are by their very nature exposed to an ever-increasing number of potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities and 2) the perception of an increasing willingness of dangerous actors to brutally exploit these vulnerabilities (2008, p. 2). The things in our society we should be proud of and which could have been seen as the things protecting us from either attacks or the catastrophic implications of an attack are now seen as the very things exposing us to disaster. In an article, America the Vulnerable the authors say: Whatever happens next in the war on terror, mass destruction will remain only a mouse click, a credit card and a rental truck away (in Furedi 2007, p. 5) . Our strengths now turn on us, exposing the sinister dialectic of progress, radicalizing the critique of Enlightenment 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 disengage the visibly unthreatened lives most of us generally lead from the threat we should be aware of and alert to. They are invocations of everincreasing phenomena and groups of ever-smaller real-life proportions blown up to ever-growing size. They do not really constitute a separate cluster of phenomena but are rather to be thought of as an integral part of the general culture of fear which also brought us the millennium scare, the bird and swine flu hysterias, the media stories of pedophiles in every kindergarten, asteroids heading for earth, gene manipulated killer organisms and other such phenomena. Fear is what is becoming epidemic (Altheide 2006). Imagination becomes dead certain reality. The authors of an article on catastrophic terrorism write: Long part of the Hollywood and Tom Clancy repertory of nightmarish scenarios, catastrophic terrorism has moved from far-fetched horror to a contingency that could happen next month (Carter, Deutch & Zelikow 1998, p. 80). When faced with a risk we tend to respond with possibilistic fear rather than probalistic assessment (Furedi 2005; 2007; Lipschutz 1999; Clarke 2006). The invisible and unknowable until catastrophically evident is the new schemata 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 ex perienced as threats that are far worse than we suspect. They are also port rayed as threats about which in reality we know very little and about which we are not in a position to k now very much. (Furedi 2007, p. 53)

Disasters are no longer rare, unusual events but everyday occurrences. Terrorism is just one of several kinds of disaster, all of which 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 itself into the present disbelief in the sustainability and defensibility of liberal democracies (now repeated with reference to the imperatives of global flows of finance capital). The inexplicable and unknowable does 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 of threat or missing conceptual resources. The idea of the invisible and unknowable threat is how we see threats as such today. This is the present language of disaster which the new terrorism fits into and which make the following a common way to portray our current predicament: The enemies of the United States in this global war are complex, adaptive, asymmetric, innovative, dispersed, networked, resilient, and capable of regeneration (Cassidy 2008, p. 5). How is one 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. This fits neatly into the general conceptualization of imminent, invisibly operating disasters of our present age and it is a claim repeated since at least the 1970s and probably since the anarchist age of terror. The notion of a new indiscriminate terrorism doesnt serve to distinguish present 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 inscribe terrorism within the general culture of fear. In other words, it is less terrorism necessitating a new description but a culture of fear unable to read terrorism in any other language than that of the invisible and the catastrophic. Waiting for disaster, any disaster, is what, speaking of terror, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America from September 2002 called a new condition of life (US Government 2002, p. 31). And what constitutes this new condition of life in respect to terrorism? Every nook and cranny of the democratic world is today threatened by [] apocalyptic global terrorism (Keane 2004, p. 27). In 1998 then American President Bill Clinton said that terrorism now has a new face [] The new technologies of terror and their increasing 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 of possible victim (in Survival 2000, p. 162, my italics). Simpler put: Anywhere can be the target (Sofsky 2003, p. 185). Terrorism is portrayed as unfathomable, nihilistic, speechless: The terror attack on 9/11 made no demands, it offered no explanations (Retort 2005, p. 26). Without even a demand that was put forth for negotiation, there wasnt the flimsiest of excuses for the destruction of ordinary lives (Neiman 2004, p. 284). Michael Ignatieff quickly dismissed it as anything 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 w as a deed committed 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 wit h it [] It transcended the political and moved int o the metaphysical. There was a kind of cosmic, demonic quality of mind at work here, which refused to have any interest in dialogue and political organization and persuasion. (in Falk 2003, p. 49)

The apocalyptic and the metaphysicalsomehow the idea that religion transcends or negates politics (and its civilizing effects) has become the truism proving that we are faced with an existential threat, ultimately threatening the destruction of all life. Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in response to suicide bombings in Iraq that: Once again, weve seen the truth that terrorists can attack at any time, at any place, using any tactic (in Furedi 2007, p. 8). This dramatic over-stating of terrorist ability places us all within reach of horrorand leads one to wonder why people with such allegedly exceptional skills havent already taken control of the world or blown it up. More importantly this kind of reasoning seems to endow terrorists with powers formerly reserved for God: the ability to strike anywhere at any time. These new conceptualizations of terror tend to return us to the original meaning of terrormans vulnerability faced with destructive forces beyond his or her comprehension and control. We seem to be shifting the concept from terrorism as a violence conducted for political purposes back to terror as the completely incomprehensible which leaves man vulnerable and isolated. The truly radical characteristic of the new description of terrorism is the claim that new terrorism doesnt speak. Modern political violence is characterized by its incessant desire to speak, to legitimate, to convince. Often monologues but speech nonetheless. Speech is also how we find something recognizable in the horror afflicted. Without the talk of violence, 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 of Aarhus Denmark.

Note s
1

Part of this article is adapted from my book An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and the State (Routledge 2010).

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Genesis 9.2: et terror vester ac tremor sit super cuncta animalia terrae et super omnes volucres caeli c um universis quae movent ur in terra omnes pisces maris manui vestrae traditi sunt .
3

This last expression was borrowed from a borderlands editor. I wish to thank both the t wo anonymous reviewers and the editors for many very helpful critiques, comments and suggestions.
4

For a critique of the new war thesis see K aly vas (2001); Henderson (2002); Duy vensteyn & Angstrom (2005). The latter quotes Alvin & Heidi Tofflers claim that we are confronted by a new dark age of tribal hat e, planetary desolation, and wars multiplied wit h wars and Donald Snows observation of the essential divorce of war from politics because the new warfare is pre-Clausewitzian, apolitical, and self-justifying (2005, p. 7).
5

See 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).
7

A 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 antisecularism see Westerlund (1996) and Juergensmeyer (2008). An important antidote to the thesis that religious groups are more lethal and dangerous because of their religious creed is Berman (2009). He argues that we should look at t he radical religious organization and group dynamics rather t han the theology of the terror group in order t o understand their greater longevity and lethality when compared to other terror groups.
8

A concept developed by Mats Fridlund.

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