Though terrorist activity of some kind can be argued to have existed for as long as human history, modern group terrorism as I am theorizing it here can be first seen in the Russian modern state in 1869 (Stratton, “The State and the Time of Terror,” 22). What characterized this type of terrorist activity was its attempt to transform the modern state into an Ideal State from within. This depended upon a historically specific understanding - and an approximately equivalent constitution - of the modern state as an independent, autonomous entity, a centralized, homogeneous political totality, whose contours were marked in terms of its power and control. That is, it was anchored by territory, and this territory seemed Natural and essential to its identity: its space and place were coexistent. The modern state saw itself as an extra-capitalist space in which its capitalist production was contained. “While there was capitalist exchange between nation-states . . . each state viewed its own capitalist order as under its own control, to most intents and purposes distinct from that of any other state and inherently bound up in the distinctive destiny of that state” (Stratton, 4). It denied any material base, and maintained an idealistic heritage, a kind of Platonic Form from which it had descended and was slowly returning to: as a concept, the State was continuous with Reason, progress and evolution. Modern group terrorists, with a largely Marxist heritage, can be seen as having operated on the belief that the State they envisioned was the destiny, the Natural, linear progression of, the state. This destiny would be manifested through terrorist activity in so far as terrorism was continuous with the Marxist concept of state revolution, in which human agency was seen as an objective factor.

However in the second half of the last few decades we have seen some major changes, which can be understood as a shift from modernity to postmodernity, from modern to postmodern states. The most effective way to theorize this change is to incorporate all of the different, sometimes contradictory, theorizations of its various identified determinants. This foregrounds postmodernism as an overdetermined process or an heuristic term, and so prevents us from generalizing about a single postmodern formation. But since capitalism is the most relevant determinant when it comes to this shift - in as far as this argument is concerned - I will just discuss the postmodern state in terms of capitalism's effects. The key term here is globalization, or Integrated World Capitalism. At the International Meridian Conference of 1884 which established a prime meridian at Greenwich. From that point on, “each state's local time was only meaningful in relation to every other state's time. The state itself became a part of a greater, global temporal order” (Stratton, 5), and economic regulation between states, the development of compatible modes of production, and some uniform ideological shifts, followed. Technological developments in travel and communications were important here, for it was only as the globe became more accessible that the new temporal order could be taken advantage of and spatial differences could become secondary to temporal differences. Stratton notes:

as rigid bodies, states occupy particular geographical spaces. However as communications systems develop the space of each state is reduced to the existence of a point in the global circulatory order. The state becomes a representation, for example, a name in a computer system where funds are electronically parked or transferred to take advantage of interest rates, exchange rates and so on. (“Making Sense of Cyberspace,” 15)

A state's economy operates outside geographical borders in a global hyperspace, as if it were just another trans-national company. Of course initially, given the America's economic power, it seemed that globalization would be synonymous with Americanization. But the 1974 oil crisis which led to the present system of floating exchange rates, and other crises of over-accumulation, have helped to create a global economy in which the use of state power depends more on random power drifts and the contradictory forces of large capitalist groups than on the representation of individual voters in any one state. While states still have political power over the citizens inside their geographical borders, “the complexity of the global order mean[s] that such control [is] less important to the economic organization of the state than developments in the global system” (“The State and the Time of Terror,” 11). States have lost their hegemony, their self-definition, and become defined by their difference from - their relation to - other states in the common order of exchange in which they function. Consequently, they can no longer claim any individual destiny.

Terrorism functions differently in this context. It can be argued here that the Angry Brigade, the Red Brigade, the Baader-Meinhoff group and the Weathermen are cross-over groups between modern and postmodern group terrorism, with groups such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization specifically postmodern because they developed in this context or survived the shift into it. The major difference is that while modern terrorists tried to transform their state into their Ideal State from within, postmodern terrorists act against other states in an effort to gain visibility. In this lies a hope that the Ideal State will be recognized, and hopefully realized, because other the other states will be too terrified to ignore the terrorist's demands for it. Terrorists here operate under the faith that the postmodern state is still a modern state, and that terrorism against another state operated like warfare for modern states - as if terrorism, as a descendent of revolution, was still capable of creating a new State. But the formulas of force in the modern state don't hold in the postmodern state. Warfare in the military sense is now secondary to warfare in the economic sense: states fight through “trade wars over the protection of markets, and trade agreements between blocks of states” (Stratton, 10). Violence on a territory no longer means gaining power over territory, since space does not relate inherently to state power; the space of a state relates to the power of the state in relation to that state's economic structure. As postmodern theorists like Foucault and Baudrillard show us, the operations of power in postmodernism are highly sophisticated. In this sense modern terrorism can be considered utopian, futuristic, while postmodern terrorism is nostalgic, regressive. Postmodern terrorism acts out a lost relation of power in and between states. It asserts the continuance of some kind of state destiny, of a simple vision of State revolution, when capitalism has yoked states to an interdependent system.

Group terrorism operates to create a climate of terror, whereby the degree of destruction is secondary to the intensity of terror it causes. But terror has a function in the state itself, and this complicates the argument. Hobbes, in Leviathan, offered the myth that, prior to the social contract, individuals lived in a State of Nature - a condition of continual war between possessive, unregulated individuals who lived in “continual fear, and danger of violent death” (Stratton, 186) by each others hands. The social contract, and consequently the state, comes into existence when individuals give up some of their individual rights to the state so as to gain mutual security, liberty and freedom to live without fear. The state monopolizes murder by denying its members the right to murder each other, whereby those who commit murder or any other act considered criminal by the state are considered criminals and the state has the right to execute them. Lefebvre's distinction between a terrorized society and a terroristic society is useful here. For Lefebvre a terrorized society is a society in which terror is used as a specific means “by a specific faction to establish and maintain dictatorship; political terror is localized, it cannot it cannot be imputed to the social ‘body'“ (147). We should note that while a terrorist group may terrorize a society, it does not specifically create a terrorized society because, as we shall see, group terrorism is not political and is associated with terroristic societies. In these terroristic societies, according to Lefebvre:

terror is diffuse, violence is always latent, pressure is exerted from all sides on its members who can only avoid and shift its weight by super-human effort; each member is a terrorist because he (sic) wants to be in power (if only briefly); thus there is no need for a dictator; each member betrays and chastises himself (sic); terror cannot be located, for it comes from everywhere and from every specific thing; the system . . . has a hold on every member separately and submits every member to the whole, that is, to a strategy, a hidden end, objectives unknown to all but those in power, and that no one questions (147).

The French Reign of Terror is a historical moment which provides a clear view on the way terroristic states both create and control terror. On the 17th of December, 1873, the National Convention passed the Law of Suspects, which stated that all those suspected of hindering the French Revolution - founded on the Cult of Reason which would ideally lead to a “Republic of Virtue” based upon humanitarianism, social idealism, and patriotism - were to be executed. The French state used terror to establish its own power, and naturalized that terror in the name of the virtues the state represented. All modern and postmodern states perform this terroristic function to some degree. We can thus re-read Hobbes' myth and argue that individuals adhere to the laws of always-already social contract of the terroristic state they are born into out of terror that they would lose some degree of security, liberty or freedom - at the extreme they would lose their life - if they didn't. Here states, rather than ending terror, institutionalize it. “[T]he state legitimates itself through the regulation of terror which is an effect of the possibility of power which the fact of the state offers” (Stratton, “The State and the Time of Terror,” 16). Individuals desire to be beyond the threat of being terrorized, beyond suspicion; they desire to gain access to the panopticon so that they are in control of the terror. To have this power is to, theoretically, be free of terror, of suspicion; this is perhaps one way of theorizing the rise of terrorist groups and dictatorships, and, consequently, the rise of terrorized societies. But in a terroristic society everyone is a potential criminal, and access to the panopticon is only a temporary, or illusory. Terror remains displaced, diffused through the population, with everyone a potential criminal working as a conspirator against everyone else on behalf of the state. This works to bind the state together.

While both modern and postmodern states are terroristic in this sense, terror in the postmodern state is significantly more diffused and entrenched. As I have already mentioned, while the modern state could act out military war, the postmodern state privileges economic war - trade sanctions and so forth - since states have become inter-dependent. To declare war on a state is to disrupt the globalization of capital upon which states have come to depend and so to threaten the economy of all the states involved. But also, with the advent of nuclear weapons, any serious act of war would most likely be fatal to all states involved. Any state that dares to risk a declaration of military war risks both economic collapse and annihilation. Virilio argues that, consequently, we have shifted from war to deterrence. This is most obvious in any military response by states to terrorism: since military action against terrorism or perceived terrorist activity - such as breeches of UN “human rights” - cannot risk being recognized as war, it becomes national delinquency. In the Falklands war, no war was declared, so all action was terrorist; likewise: “The raids on Entebbe and Mogadishu were . . . acts of terrorism. By what right did the German special forces go Mogadishu? By what right did the Israeli air force go to Entebbe?” (27). These acts of war without war are: “the equivalent of terrorist acts by one state against another” (26). States can only respond to terrorism by becoming terrorists themselves, which means who wins the conflict is not an issue. The real question is: “What do we do now?” What act of terrorism will answer the last terrorist act? Since the alternative to this terrorism is nuclear war, these acts of terrorism have the potential to escalate enormously.

Baudrillard argues that, in this postmodern state of deterrence, we are are all hostages and terrorists. First, the world is collectively responsible for its own fate, a hostage to humanity; second, the populations of states are used as “dissuasive arguments in nuclear or other military strategy” (2) and so are hostages of those in power of the state; thirdly, individuals are held hostage by each other because of their co-existence in the state. In the last case, Baudrillard says that we are “affective hostages” of one another: “‘If you don't give me that, you will be responsible for my depression - if you don't love me, you will be responsible for my death' . . . In short, a hysterical envelopement” (7). In this ecosystem of terrorists and hostages anyone or anything is susceptible to death or destruction by terrorism and so can represent a terrorist cause: since individuals are complicit with the system in which terrorism is produced, all and sundry can answer for terrorism. Terrorism thus acts out the concept that anyone is responsible for anything at any given moment - a concept of universal responsibility which underlies the postmodern scene in which power is so diffuse it is virtually lost in the system. The fate of hostages, of everyone, is up to chance, because no one is in complete power, and no one really knows what will trigger the violence: causes and effects have virtually disappeared.

The taking of a hostage can be read as staging an impossible exchange which exposes this terror of the postmodern state. For at the global level, all human existence is on the line; at the state level, a state's existence is on the line; at the individual level, a human life is on the line, and human life, for the state - if not its economics - is priceless. If the state does not make the exchange, it contradicts its fundamental function of trying to protect, to make secure, its members, and so invalidates its social contract. The death of the hostage is thus symbolically equal to the nuclear annihilation of the state. The exchange must be made, and so the hostage becomes a kind of universal currency which can be exchanged for anything; the terrorist enters a fantastic realm of exchange in which he/she can demand anything he/she wants. But the hostage's value is only temporary. If killed, the hostage is useless, so there is no exchange; if the hostage is returned alive, then the hostage and the exchange cease to exist. The hostage-exchange is always-already invalidated, a transient, token gesture; it is a tactic, not a strategy, and only gives the terrorist illusory power. Most importantly, it produces no political change. Rather it shows the historical loss of the scene of exchange in terms of the social contract. If we identify with the hostage we, unlike Hobbes' individuals, realize that no one can surrender themselves to the social contract because everyone is already a hostage. We do not invest in a rational exchange, a state, to gain liberty and freedom; we are born into a state powerless to protect us because it is overdetermined by trans-state processes beyond its direct control. During the hostage negotiation we can recognize that there is no longer any revolutionary moment of freedom, no political profit from the exchange, just terror, permanent suspense: “What next? When? Me?”. The hostage and terrorist implode, part of the same uncomfortable visibility: “How dare you take him! How dare you be taken!” Group and state terrorism here refers to a postmodern global terror - indeed we could almost call it global terrorism if we consider global capitalist processes, and the military technology which these processes have worked to develop, as constituting a virtual global-state which all humanity is terrorized by.

This is from a critical perspective. From a popular perspective, the taking of a hostage, and terrorist activity in general, works to naturalize terror in the state. For Baudrillard:

because nothing any longer has meaning, everything should work perfectly . . . because there is no longer a responsible subject, each event . . . must be desperately imputed to someone or something - everyone is responsible, some maximal floating responsibility is there, waiting to be invested in any kind of incident. Every anomoly must be justified and every irregularity must find its guilty party, its criminal link. This too is terror and terrorism: this hunt for responsibility without any common measure with the event - this hysteria of responsibility that is itself a consequence of the disappearance of causes and . . . effects (2).

In short, we answer terrorism with morality. The terrorist act gives us a visible, reified effect which we can point to (“that is terror, over/out there”) and easily associate with a cause, the (politics of the) group responsible. We ex-nominate this cause with a moralistic, essentialist claim of good/evil. Terrorism thus provides a reactive channel for terror, and justifies our adherence to the state. It enables us to see terror as coming from outside the state rather than from within it. The State can thus continue to be seen as the site of Reason, of security, liberty and freedom, with everything beyond the borders of the State - including other states - existing in some kind of State of Nature, a state of pure, unregulated terror. The terrorist act also works here to justify State terrorism as if it were an enactment of the old familiar violence-interdiction equation - it allows us to take sides in a war that doesn't exist. The media is especially active here, and Baudrillard goes as far as saying the media are hostages to terrorism because they provide the visibility which terrorism desires. In this sense, the media makes visible what we want to disappear, then makes of it a spectacle which we want to see more of: it stages the staged exchange. Of course postmodern states do not work to maintain state coherence - a sense of each state's individual identity and destiny - specifically because of terrorism. The media performs a necessary ideological function for the postmodern state. This is perhaps most evident in a media event like the Olympics, in which it seems that each nation is still able to compete as individuals against other individuals, each with their own culture, embodied by flag, anthem and other signifiers; in fact the event operates to reify the continuity of states in a common system of order which requires, and maximizes, difference to maintain itself. But when the media advertises the postmodern state as a unified modern state, it nonetheless provides the same regressive, nostalgic view which terrorists depend on when they persist in their outdated games of power.

The argument underlying all these observations is that terrorism - modern and postmodern, group and state - is reactionary and has reactionary effects not related to its intentions. Indeed both Virilio and Baudrillard see it as the only trans-political act. We should foreground Guattari and Negri's argument that:

Each historical period can be affected by the birth of elitist poles and by extremist surges of self-exhaltation which develop to the detriment of the interests of the movements whose interests they pretend to represent.(84)

That is, inside each state - modern and postmodern - are various groups which desire to transform that state, and under extreme pressure and frustration certain sectors of these various social movements and ideologies get frustrated and act against the state to effect political change. Political movements have to expose terrorist extremes as: “a paradoxical form of conservatism” (89), as unrealistic and utopian in the derogatory sense - not only because terrorism is an ineffective political force at present, but because it misrepresents, and so can be fatal to, the movements which can provide effective revolutionary force. This is of course to imply, against Baudrillard's pessimism, that politics is not entirely dead and that history is not at its end. Baudrillard only maintains his pessimistic view by viewing capitalism as a completely homogenizing product, when it and globalization are fissured, fragmented and multiple processes. Globalization does have homogenizing effects, and helps to produce the postmodern situation in which it does seem that there is no longer any real power, but theorists from postmodern, postcolonial, feminist and other fields, show that political power is still active between the cracks - if the contradictions are carefully navigated. Despite the shadow of terrorism, we should not abandon revolutionary force. Terrorism has forced us to recognize that force does not function as it used to, and that if we do not keep the paradoxes of force in mind when we put transformative processes into motion in the postmodern state, we risk working, like terrorism, to maintain the state we are trying to change.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Hostage.” Fatal Strategies . (Photocopy. Since the page numbers were cut off, I have treated the page on which the chapter begins as page 1)

Guattari, Felix and Negri, Toni. “The Terrorist Interlude.” Communists Like Us . (Photocopy.)

Lefebvre, Henri. “Terrorism and Everyday Life.” Everyday Life in the Modern World . (Photocopy.)

Stratton, Jon. “The State and the Time of Terror.” Modern Time . (Manuscript.)

--------, ---. “Making Sense of Cyberspace.” (Manuscript.)

Virilio, Paul and Lotringer. “Technology and Trans-Politics.” Pure War . (Photocopy.)