Culture and value. (When words don't fail).

Fallen towers, falling idols. What has befallen the ideals of global progress now that the New York horizon is bereft of that towering ladder without rungs? Such days as September 11 confront our sense of progress with the challenge of the Unbuilt. The Unbuilt is not a place that you can reach with a ladder, as Wittgenstein might say. It cannot be seen in the endless media visibility given to the imploding towers and ground zero. The Unbuilt resists the eye's craving for a restored image. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein describes the construction of progress thus:

"Our civilization is characterized by the word 'progress.' 'Progress' is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. . . . I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings."

What we need is a perspicuous vision that reveals a space, a way in the world, that is often obscured by the onward and upward thrust of progress. Neither destruction nor deconstruction, the Unbuilt is the creation of a form whose virtual absence raises the question of what it would mean to start again, in the same place, as if it were elsewhere, adjacent to the site of a historic disaster or a personal trauma. Gardens of solace and towers of regeneration may heal the wound. But the Unbuilt that haunts the space is the spirit of those, firefighters and rescue workers, who climbed an endless ladder, descending into the circle of death, to do their duty to those who had to escape. In that moment there is a sense of "making progress," step by step, without the transcendent form of progress. And in that action there lies the un-utopian ethic of the Unbuilt. There are no available images of this act of ascent; progress here is a lateral or adjacent move toward the stranger as toward the neighbor. Of such a concern for the foundations of "possible" dwellers and dwellings we can have no visual assurance, only a perspicacity of what remains unbuilt. Pace Wittgenstein, we have to be interested in constructing a building; at the same time, we have no choice but to place, in full view of our buildings, the vision of the Unbuilt. Perhaps then we will not forget to measure progress as it creeps along the ground even when we find ourselves standing, or so we think, at the top of the tower.

Homi K. Bhabha joined Harvard University's departments of English and African American Studies this fall. He is currently completing A Measure of Dwelling, a study of vernacular cosmopolitanism.