Nick Couldry has outlined with great clarity the unequal symbolic landscape within which the events of 11 September worked as communicative acts. His comments on the unevenness of the global media system, and the need for a fundamental shift in the agendas, investments and strategies of Western media organisations, invite almost immediate consent. Yet a closer inspection of the events’ symbolic resonance, and of the role of television in their dissemination, raises important questions about some of the fundamental terms of his argument. These concern his notion of global endgame, his critique of the image, and his ideal of a media system devoted to intensified dialogue and distanced reflection.

Symbolism of destruction

Why has the symbolic power of the attack on the Pentagon been so dwarfed by that on the Twin Towers in Manhattan? There are a number of answers, among them the organisational and the fortuitous (dramatic footage of the actual crashes was captured in New York more successfully than in Washington); as well as the tragic weight of numbers (many more died in New York than in Washington, and the towers were utterly destroyed).

Yet there is clearly a difference in the symbolic resonance of the two targets and the attacks upon them, which goes well beyond the dull and literal claim that the Pentagon “merely” represents US military and political strength, while the World Trade Center stood for the vast economic power upon which all other forms of American might are based.

For western observers, the Twin Towers were virtually mythological, as was their destruction. Avoiding the (nonetheless pertinent) cliché of their sexual symbolism, they combined power, aspiration and arrogance in a monumental spatial form that appeared to defy a “natural” order and its requisite and proper human scale. This symbolism has antecedents that are antique in origin but remain visibly active today. Most potent is the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, whose erection challenged the territorial sovereignty of God over the celestial sphere (Genesis, chapter 11: 1-10). As a model for the symbolism of hubris and apocalypse, the Babel narrative works on the level of thematic structure: unlike the Tower of Babel, the Twin Towers were not directly destroyed through the miscommunication of those who constructed them; but in a profound sense their end was the result of incommensurable speech between different cultures, a division of languages so extreme that only violence could communicate.

Models of apocalypse

Yet any skyscraper could be considered the concrete modern manifestation of human technical hubris. What made the Twin Towers different? Worldwide visibility: the mass media dissemination of their spatial form through the representation of the Manhattan skyline as a globally intelligible icon. It was this global currency that – along with a number of other symbolically resonant monumental buildings – made the towers recognisable and symbolically meaningful for those who would never see them in person. And as Couldry noted, this currency is intimately connected to the unequal global media landscape in which America remains the horizon of the world.

Thus the Twin Towers were apocalyptic in their global intelligibility as symbols of power and its challenge to “the gods”. The endgame that Couldry describes constantly accompanies Western material and symbolic power as a kind of cultural shadow, and this shadowing occurs irrespective of the beliefs or origins of those responsible for its ultimate irruption. The higher you climb, the harder you fall: symbolic power is inseparable from symbolic vulnerability. In fact, nowhere has the potency of that paradox been more anxiously and pleasurably recapitulated, or more profitably exploited, than in the products of American media organisations themselves – in countless disaster movies and television programmes distributed worldwide over many years.

Television coverage of the destruction of the towers replayed this paradox in unusual ways. The incessant repetition, over several days, of footage of the planes crashing into them, and of the images of the towers’ disintegration and collapse, obviously conformed to a fascination with the spectacle of apocalypse so familiar from films such as Independence Day. This fascination is horrifyingly encapsulated in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, that humanity’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order”.

But above and beyond this, I would argue, the global television dissemination of these images performed an important public good: it enacted, over several days, a conspicuously compulsive reality-check. Repetition communicated the incredible news that this was not a film, and rather than fusing the real and the symbolic in some amoral virtual vacuum, the images insistently performed their radical and awesome separation. Television images magnified the symbolic paradox (of power and vulnerability) already latent in the towers’ construction and global representation, and at the same time broke through the habits of symbol-making by which such events are executed, framed and tamed, by which they are formed (as they subsequently have been) into communicative acts.

For a moment TV conveyed the material catastrophe at the heart of such communication, and it was this apocalyptic “silence” that was so emotionally disturbing and powerfully involving.

Quarantining words

This point leads me to my main area of serious disagreement with Couldry’s analysis. For while I understand his reservations about our “image-saturated” political environment in other contexts, I think that in this case the images have been far more positive, and far less dangerous, than the words – the “print and commentary” – with which he would have us “quarantine” them. His choice of metaphors is instructive here, as is his move from television – with which he opens his piece – to the example of print (the Guardian and Le Monde, no less): visual images are infectious, unstable, liable to break out. They need to be policed and kept at a distance by a framework of words.

Couldry’s sudden iconoclasm is disturbing because it seems so out of tune with his sensitivity to television as the key medium of the global endgame. How can we hope to find a way out of the endgame if we do not systematically mobilise the symbolic potency of televised visual images on behalf of the symbolically disadvantaged, as part of a reorientation of global media agendas?

Moreover, his linguistic turn ignores the fact that it is words rather images which seem to be most out of control (and most in need of quarantining) at the moment: just think of the use of “civilization”, “war” and “terror” as vehicles of mystification and belligerence.

I am certainly not in favour of the foregrounding of images “for their own sake”, as if it were ordinarily possible to communicate visually without the intervention of words. But overall I feel that what we need at present is more, and more varied, images, not less – certainly more of Afghanistan.

Democratising dissemination

The opposition to images is actually part of a larger problem, one which separates the strengths of Couldry’s diagnosis of the endgame from the weaknesses of his exit-strategies. It amounts, in fact, to a surprising retreat from constructive engagement with the reality of television’s audio-visual symbolic potency, in favour of a word-biased ideal of communication as distanced, reflective, verbal and dialogic. This not only betrays a naïve faith in words as tools of rational self-awareness (rather than self-deceiving rationalisation), and in our power over words rather than their power over us. It also makes verbal dialogue the normative model for global communication, a role that it cannot support and which absolutely goes against the grain of television, both as an audio-visual composite and as an organised system of non-reciprocal message distribution.

To paraphrase the argument of John Durham Peters, dissemination – in which messages are distributed uniformly, addressed to no one in particular, and are open in their destiny – may be a far better (and less constrictive) communication ideal for large-scale social organisations, let alone for those who would intervene politically in the global media landscape.

The problem, as the earlier part of Couldry’s piece makes clear, is not the image or the word or the lack of dialogue. The problem is the uneven flow of dissemination, the high-entry costs (in terms of media attention and resources) for those who are not seen and heard, as against the relative ease with which they can disseminate signs of their presence through communicative violence.

Seeing and hearing them on television may not lead to conversation, reflection or self-awareness. But it just might disclose them as moral agents in a shared world (as it has begun to, unwittingly, in coverage of Afghanistan). Making this routinely likely is a Herculean task in itself, given the concentration of resources and interests in the global media system. But to ask much more of television – intense dialogue with the Other, reflective knowledge of the self – would be to confuse it with apocalypse’s twin: the Kingdom of God.