Seeing tragedy in the news images of september 11

Wendy Bowler

pp. 85-99

in: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Dominik Bartmański, Bernhard Giesen (eds), Iconic power, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

September 11, 2001, New York City: the day terrorism impresses a powerful sequence of pictures on television viewers worldwide. Leading the image assault are depictions of the World Trade Center's (WTC) Twin Towers at the moment a ball of fire erupts from one of the buildings. News reports name it a "tragedy," and it looks like one, the day's events causing suffering, death, and loss on a scarcely conceivable scale. On the newspaper front pages of September 11 and 12, what we might call the "moment of attack" appears as the dominant news picture-type, commonly at the expense of all written reportage apart from an evocative headline, sometimes only a single word.¹ It is as a poster telegraphing a news-drama with many of Aristotle's components of tragedy: magnitude and gravity, completed action, an ordered sequence of events (strong plot) and spectacular effects. The fundament of tragedy in Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy—Dionysian destruction, a terrible depth beneath the sphere of Apollonian surfaces, images and beauty—may also be seen to appear in the shape of the giant flames and ominous smoke.

Cited authors

Nietzsche Friedrich

Aristoteles