"Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse - a gruesome reality literally took place in front of a global public"
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Habermas is doing something characteristically unnerving here: stripping away the consoling fog of “tragedy” and treating 9/11 as a media-structural rupture. Calling it the first “historic world event in the strictest sense” isn’t ignorance of earlier cataclysms; it’s a provocation about publicity. The novelty, in his framing, is not the scale of violence but the configuration of witnessing: a planet synchronized around the same images, the same sequence of shocks, the same slow-motion comprehension that the laws of everyday life had been suspended.
The sentence stages a grim rhetoric of spectatorship. “Impact, explosion, slow collapse” reads like a broadcast rundown, almost obscene in its procedural clarity. Habermas foregrounds duration (“slow collapse”) because it converts the event into a kind of compulsory theater: not a single flash of horror but a narrative unfolding in real time, with the audience held in place by cameras and repetition. The subtext is a warning about how modern publics are constituted not just by debate but by shared exposures - and how easily that exposure can be weaponized.
Context matters: Habermas, the theorist of the public sphere and communicative rationality, is measuring what happens when the world’s attention is captured through images rather than arguments. The “global public” he names is both achievement and vulnerability: a new scale of common reference that can, in the same moment, invite solidarity, justify sweeping security states, and tempt politics to substitute spectacle for deliberation.
The sentence stages a grim rhetoric of spectatorship. “Impact, explosion, slow collapse” reads like a broadcast rundown, almost obscene in its procedural clarity. Habermas foregrounds duration (“slow collapse”) because it converts the event into a kind of compulsory theater: not a single flash of horror but a narrative unfolding in real time, with the audience held in place by cameras and repetition. The subtext is a warning about how modern publics are constituted not just by debate but by shared exposures - and how easily that exposure can be weaponized.
Context matters: Habermas, the theorist of the public sphere and communicative rationality, is measuring what happens when the world’s attention is captured through images rather than arguments. The “global public” he names is both achievement and vulnerability: a new scale of common reference that can, in the same moment, invite solidarity, justify sweeping security states, and tempt politics to substitute spectacle for deliberation.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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