Whereof we cannot speak

Silence as a Vocation — or, Whereof We Cannot Speak

Notes for the First Anniversary of 9-11

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything.

Milan Kundera[1]

A few weeks after 9-11, a friend, a New Yorker, asked me “Why don’t you write about it?” I could not clearly tell her why, but I knew I didn’t want to. Not then, so soon after the event, anyway. It felt wrong.

Roland Barthes once defined trauma as “a suspension of language, a blocking of meaning.”[2] I now know, I think, exactly what he means. In the face of 9-11, I was stunned into silence. I suspect that much of humanity — that part of humanity, at any rate, that wasn’t dancing in the streets — was in the same condition. 9-11 was not an event of which we could make any sense. There were no explanations that seemed remotely commensurate to its enormity. Indeed, it was difficult to speak about it at all. It was not simply that we did not have the words to express what we felt. It was that any choice of words felt like a betrayal, because the words always came freighted with associations, none of which seemed appropriate to the magnitude of what had happened. “Disaster” is a term we normally employ to refer to natural calamities like earthquakes, or human accidents like nuclear meltdowns, not to the cold-blooded killing of thousands; “murder” or “atrocity,” if more accurate, fail somehow to encompass the scale; “tragedy” brings to mind a literary genre that stretches from Oedipus to the Mayor of Casterbridge, whose defining feature is that the hero is undone as a consequence of his own actions. Whatever name we put to the thing already seems to diminish it, reducing it to an ordinary scale of thinkability.

The problem is that the languages available to us to describe these events are drawn from and refer back to a world in which events like these do not occur. Words, therefore, cannot but fail us, their inadequacy palpable before what we can all, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, see happening on our television screens. “Holy fucking shit!” gasped an onlooker caught on video as the first plane hit, and I have yet to come across a more eloquent response. Nowhere was that chasm between signifiers and referents, between the words we are constrained to use and the worlds to which they purport to refer, more poignantly or ironically exhibited that in the sight of George W. Bush standing on a mound of rubble at what we have come to call Ground Zero, shaken to the core, promising the fire-fighters around him “We’re gonna get the folks who did this.” Folks?

A year on, the one designation that seems to have stuck is just a date in the calendar — a date to which no year now need ever be attached; a vacancy in language that we may fill with whatever we feel to be most appropriate, in the privacy of our own hearts. Referring to these events simply as 9-11 is in its way as moving a memorial as any, a tacit acknowledgment of what was massively evident at the time, but is now, perhaps, already beginning to be forgotten — that what was done that day was unspeakable; and that giving it any more descriptive a name erases that unspeakability, normalizing these events by rendering them commensurable with things for which we do have the words. The signifier 9-11 conveys the unspeakability of what it signifies by its refusal to locate what happened within the ordinary universe of meaning. A mere pointer, it confesses its own inability ever adequately to signify that which it denotes. It shows, to adapt Wittgenstein, what cannot be said.

There is a dignity in this linguistic minimalism, and it is the same dignity as is exhibited when we remember the dead not with encomiums, but with a moment of silence — with an acknowledgment that no words will suffice. 9-11 belongs to that dimension with which, having exhausted the limits of language and logic, Wittgenstein ended his Tractatus: the realm of that “whereof we cannot speak.” [3]

On my last visit to New York City, in April 2001, I took a several hundred photographs. Since 9-11, two of them have taken on a wholly unexpected significance. One, which I thought unremarkable at the time, I have found myself gazing at often during the last year. It looks straight down a street in Soho, late in the afternoon. The sun on the walls is gold and the shadows are lengthening. To the forefront is a house-size billboard on which a pretty female model is advertising Bebe clothes. Shimmering in the distance are the twin towers of the World Trade Center. This photograph is the sole personal reminder I have of the towers, which I ascended only once, on my first visit to the United States back in 1978. That visit was one of those rare moments when reality unexpectedly broke through, to pierce the veil of abstractions that in the academic world can so easily come to substitute for thought. Raised in Britain in the Vietnam War era to expect an America like that conjured up in Harold Pinter’s recent rant in Granta — “a fully-fledged, award-winning, gold-plated monster,”[4] he calls it — I instead found candy-stripe awnings reaching gaily out over the sidewalk from restaurants on Fifth Avenue and wrought-iron fire-escapes zigzagging their way across the fronts of the brownstones in Little Italy, a city of stunning and disarming physical beauty. And I remembered that this America, this New York, the New York of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, of Bob Dylan and Miles Davis, was as formative of who I am as anything on the other side of the Atlantic. This was an America that, in its fragments that I had long ago made part of me, I loved.

The mystery — a mystery germane to the concerns of this argument, since it bears on the capacity of words to take flight from, and eventually usurp the place of, the worlds they supposedly describe — is how on earth I could ever have forgotten.

Reading Yeats I do not think

of Ireland

but of midsummer New York

and of myself back then

reading that copy I found

on the Thirdavenue El …[5]

I quote Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The second photograph was one of which I was inordinately proud. It was, as I have said, a sunny day — just like September 11 — and on such days the reflections in shop windows, which I like to photograph because of the surreal juxtapositions they sometimes yield, are sharp and clear. Between two tall buildings, silhouetted against an intense, pulsating turquoise blue, two small red figures appear to be skydiving beneath the words “It is bliss. It is energy. It is life.” It was, I thought, a wonderfully joyous image, which well captured my mood that day — a mood I remembered as the mood of the city itself. Since 9-11, what I can’t get out of my mind whenever I see this photograph is the sight of small human figures falling, in what seemed an agonizingly slow motion, from the upper floors of the World Trade Center, the people who jumped to their deaths rather than be burned alive. Impossible, unbelievable, and obscenely cinematic as it was, I like millions of others saw these people die. The photograph has now become painful for me to look at, a mockery of what I thought I was recording. At times it has felt close to a desecration, in which I am complicit.

As in all brushes with that whereof we cannot speak — those moments where words fail us, when the tapestry of sense suddenly unravels — nothing means quite what it did before. The world has changed irrevocably, in ways that alter the past as much as the future. Things need to be stitched together again, differently.

This is part of what the novelist Richard Ford was getting at in his elegiac response to 9-11, one of the few commentaries I have read that came close to plumbing the horror, the rent 9-11 tore in what makes our world meaningful, as surely as it did in the Manhattan skyline:

We stick gamely to our grammars, seek to bring tragedy and fear down to size, try to fit them into a life ongoing. “This is our Columbine,” some say. Though it’s not. We register the absence of the dead from the reading group, the soccer bleachers, the dance recital, and in so doing, we express calamity as a form of inadvertence, of losses we can take in stride. Only, we don’t really persuade ourselves. Our frame of reference is sprung, our old coordinates lead back to worry.[6]

In the days immediately following 9-11, I found myself unusually sensitive to others’ uses of language, and uncharacteristically inept in finding the words to communicate what I felt myself. It began with a poster advertising a public meeting at my university under the cute slogan “Making Sense/Making Peace.” What incensed me were the already obligatory inverted commas around the words “Attack on America” (“What the fuck was it then?” I exploded), coupled with an invitation to “deconstruct” the America that was being evoked here — a less than sensitive choice of verb, I thought, in light of what had just been done to Lower Manhattan, where the ruins of Osama Bin Laden’s version of America were still smoking. As my e-mail filled up with solicitations for my signature on petitions urging George W. Bush and other world leaders to exercise “reason” and “moderation” (with snide, knowing covering letters that described the U.S. President as a “frat-boy” or “cowboy”), I began to realize, with growing incredulity, that we were already back to politics as usual.

I got into not so much an argument as a talking-past-one-another with a colleague, who had recently finished graduate school in the United States. I found myself unable to explain why I did not agree with her that the overriding issue that should concern us now was not 9-11 itself but the “American jingoism” it was bound to evoke. It was not that I was indifferent to these questions. I got into a heated exchange with another colleague, a specialist in religious cults, whose remarks about the supposed inherent violence of Islam in an interview he had given to the local press seemed to me less than helpful in the circumstances. But what bothered me most was not the particular political positions that colleagues were taking, so much as the fact that so many of them seemed to feel that the only appropriate, and even obligatory, response to 9-11 was to take a political position at all. I felt that something important — the thing I could not articulate — was being missed, buried beneath the torrent of words; that there was, once again, a monstrous disproportionality between the unspeakable thing that had happened, and the everyday languages within which it was already being dissembled.

I am not by nature a flag-waver. Yet, for the first time in my life, I went to the internet, located a US flag, printed it out, and pinned it to my office door. Still another colleague, dismayed by my action, asked me “How can you, of all people, do that?” I replied that if he needed any explanation, than any explanation I could give him would clearly not suffice. The last thing I wished for at that point was to get into political argument, not because I do not think US policy played its part in creating Al-Qaeda, but because I felt that 9-11 could not be adequately spoken of within our normal vocabularies of political debate. But once I attempted to voice this reluctance, I would inevitably be dragged back onto the discursive terrain I wanted to vacate. How can one argue from an insistence on unspeakability? The wordless gesture seemed to say it better. In Wittgenstein’s terms, it made manifest what could not be said. As with the photographs I had shot in New York City the previous April, the stars and stripes meant something different to me after 9-11 than it had before. The least important thing about the flag I put on my door, in that moment, seemed to be its official status as a symbol of state. Signifiers, as we all know, slide.

Interviewed for our university website less than a week after 9-11, a professor in the Faculty of Education, described as a “campus leader,” began with the words “As intellectuals, we must speak.” Must we?, I wondered. What was most evident, to me at any rate, was the utter shallowness of most intellectuals’ responses (which on close inspection, whether on the right or the left, turned out to be variations on the theme of “I told you so”), precisely insofar as they spoke as intellectuals, in the face of an event that had left much of the world speechless.

One of the most striking things about the wider public response to 9-11, in contrast, has been a retreat from the verbal to the visual, a hunger for images. I can think of no recent historical event that has unleashed such a flood of specifically visual commemorations (if, and again we encounter the difficulty, “commemorations” is the right word). Many books of photographs have now been published, and there are countless websites. A particularly moving example is the Here is New York exhibition, which was installed in 116 Prince Street in New York City’s Soho two weeks after 9-11, with a virtual counterpart on the worldwide web.[7] This exhibition has now traveled widely, and was the centerpiece of the 2002 annual Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie at Arles,[8] where I saw it last summer. New York’s Museum of Modern Art is among many other institutions that have since mounted similar exercises.

The Here is New York exhibition is unusual, among other things, in what the organizers call its “democratic and populist nature, which we feel is not only appropriate to what has happened but intrinsic to its understanding.” “Anyone and everyone who has taken pictures relating to the tragedy,”[9] were invited to contribute, and their images were scanned, printed, and displayed alongside the work of professional photographers and photojournalists. Prints were sold at a flat $25 each, irrespective of their provenance, with all profits going to relief for the bereaved families. A second exhibition, entitled History Unframed, extended the invitation to “anyone and everyone … whether amateur or professional, New Yorker, American or citizen of the world,”[10] who had relevant photographs. We may, of course, choose to read these invocations of democracy (or of rebuilding community, which the website also stresses) cynically, as part of the problem, reiterations of a smug, self-deluded vision of America, which 9-11 should surely have punctured once and for all. Whether or not this is the case is beside my point here. My interest lies in the pervasive recourse to the visual image itself; the apparent preference, when it comes to dealing with 9-11, for pictures over words.

It would be a grave mistake, I believe — as crass an error as interpreting the flags displayed everywhere in the United States since 9-11 as signs merely of jingoism, or even of patriotism — to see in all this only voyeurism, testimony to the fact that we live in and cannot live without a society of the spectacle. I would suggest, rather, that the pull of the visual image, like the appropriateness of the designation 9-11 itself, resides exactly in its dislocation from the ordinary world of sense — from the world, that is to say, in which events like 9-11 do not occur. The image retains a connection to that whereof we cannot speak because it does not, or at least it does not manifestly, impose an extraneous meaning on 9-11, a meaning that would erase that awful unspeakability. It seems instead to carry within it the authentic imprint of the event itself, in ways that words can only obscure as they translate it into something other than we feel it to be.

This is particularly true of the photographic image. As Roland Barthes, again, has observed, what distinguishes the photograph from other signifiers is its apparent collapse of the signified into its real-world referent.[11] Specifically, a “traumatic photograph,” in the sense in which he defined trauma above, is “the photograph about which there is nothing to say,” a photograph that is “captured ‘from life as lived.’”[12] Unlike words, especially when those words are combined to form narratives or arguments, photographs seem to offer an unmediated glimpse of the realities that lie beyond language, a trace that can be consumed privately, speaking directly to the viewer, without the intrusion of an interpreter. They can thereby give us the illusion of keeping hold of that which we are not yet willing to forget, to move beyond, to get over, and ultimately to efface, in the narrative reconstructions that constitute social memory. Photographs appear to suspend the transformation of presents into pasts, experiences into memories, worlds into words, which is an inextricable part of the human condition; they seemingly freeze the moment for eternity, stopping the flow of history in its tracks.

I am aware, of course, that a photographic image can never literally be identical with the reality it depicts; it is only the appearance of mimesis that allows this collapse of what is signified into its referent. The camera does not give unmediated access to a reality unsullied by external attributions of meaning. Photographs are framed by their takers and read by their viewers; they no more escape the historical flow than anything else in the life and death of human beings. Even with Barthes’ so-called traumatic photographs, we bring culturally conditioned understandings to bear. Barthes is careful not to say that such photographs speak for themselves. These are photographs about which there is nothing to say, only against the backdrop of some horizon of meaning which renders what they portray unspeakable. They are beyond the bounds of what makes sense for us. None of the examples that Barthes gives (photographs of fires, shipwrecks, catastrophes, violent deaths) would be traumatic if we did not place the value we do both on human life and its orderliness. I doubt that photographs of 9-11 would be traumatic for Osama Bin Laden: they would not signify that point where there is “a suspension of language, a blocking of meaning,” because, unlike us, he does have a language within which 9-11 makes eminent sense.

But this appearance of identity between signifier and referent gives the photographic image its immediacy, its ability to haunt, its privilege of bearing witness, and its power. Reality seems to have left its mark directly on the paper, and this physical trace of what has happened in the world beyond words confers on the image an aura of fidelity that words alone will never possess. This is especially so when, as with 9-11, words fail us and we intuit a chasm between language and life. The capacity of the camera to capture images of what, within our horizon of meaning, makes no sense, allows photographs to address — to show, not state — the truth of that whereof we cannot speak.

This in turn opens up the possibility that, in such circumstances, images may be invoked against words, providing a standpoint from which we can continue to insist on the unspeakability of the realities to which the images point, and resist their being drawn back into that everyday realm within which the world makes sense.[13] The organizers of the Here is New York exhibit counterpose visual images against verbal narratives in exactly this way:

If one photograph tells a story, thousands of photographs tell not only thousands of stories but also perhaps can at least begin to tell the story if they are allowed to speak for themselves, to each other, and to the viewer directly, unframed either by glass, metal, or wood, or by preconception or editorial comment.

The nadir of that discrepancy I felt between the unspeakability of 9-11, and the languages in which it was already being written and spoken about, came in the now notorious 4 October 2001 symposium on 9-11 in The London Review of Books.[14] Just why this symposium provoked such outrage bears examination.

A handful of contributors, all of them Americans, confined themselves to personal expressions of bewilderment, emptiness, and grief. Terry Castle described how he “stagger[s] numbly around my house in San Francisco, hardly able to read or eat or think,” talks every few hours to his lover who “lives in a big high rise off Lake Shore Drive” in Chicago, and goes to bed each night “wearing my usual old striped T-shirt to sleep in, but it feels pretty fucking useless.” He is unable to finish the review he was writing on September 11 for the LRB, of a book called The Devil’s Cloth, a social history of striped fabrics: “It’s a week later now and I still can’t make up my mind if any of it matters — or will matter for very long. There are stripes everywhere, of course: Old Glory and bunting all over the streets, big sad flags draping down from windows, little bristly plastic ones sticking up from people’s car antennas.” Hal Foster begins “All I have to offer, in this distracted time, are stray thoughts and overheard lines” — a first-grader at Public School 234 on Chambers Street saying “the birds are on fire” as he sees workers plunging to the ground from the WTC, the debris covering the grave of Alexander Hamilton. J. Hoberman, who lives ten blocks from the WTC but was abroad when it happened, relates “a series of time-consuming missions”: eight hours to reach his wife on the telephone, forty hours for the US/Canadian border to open, eighteen hours by train to a jittery New York. None of these writers draw any conclusions. They dwell on small and often personal details. It is fair to say that these are the least intellectually coherent contributions to the entire symposium. But they were also, for me, the pieces that came closest to communicating the awful reality of 9-11 — not least, because of the dislocated, disjointed, fragmented character of the writing itself.

Most other contributors to the symposium clearly had no difficulty either in thinking, or in articulating those thoughts in smooth academic prose. Some discussed the impact of US policies on various regions of the globe. Others essayed grander themes: Max Weber’s opposition of the calculating-rational and the symbolic-religious outlooks, Islam and globalization, terrorism as a mode of modern warfare. Many concerned themselves with the extent to which, as Mary Beard put it, “however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming … World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price,” and some argued that there was a moral equivalence between 9-11 and US actions elsewhere. Several, like Edward Said, urged moderation in the US government response to 9-11, and expressed fears for the fate of civil liberties or Moslem minorities in the United States. It is, I think, crucial to recognize that most of what these writers had to say, by the standards by which we normally judge sense, was not in itself unreasonable — not even Mary Beard’s or Fredric Jameson’s insistence on US culpability in its own misfortune, whether one agrees with them or not (and I do not). The difficulty was rather their reasonableness itself. There was nothing in the writing to acknowledge what so many people inarticulately felt: namely, that 9-11 had ruptured the world in and of which such writing — and such reason — could make any sense at all.

The ensuing storm of protest included this curt letter from Todd Ojala, published in the LRB’s next issue, which I quote in its entirety:

When I visit England sometime I’m going to stop by your offices and shove your loony leftist faces into some dog shit.[15]

The crude vulgarity of the dog shit image, and the crass populism of the “loony lefty” epithet, are about as far as we can semantically get from Terry Eagleton’s “dialogics,” Fredric Jameson’s “textbook example of a dialectical reversal,” and Neal Acherson’s conceits with computers (“Manhattan that morning was a diagram, a blue bar chart with columns that were tall or not so tall. A silver cursor passed across the screen and clicked silently on the tallest column…” he begins). This contrast in modes of expression is telling, for LRB readers are not normally illiterate. Ojala has chosen in this case to remain on the side of inarticulacy, to stay in the place where “Holy fucking shit!” is the most that can decently be said, to keep faith with the unspeakable. Though Acherson goes on to say that 9-11 was “the most open atrocity of all time,” and compares its perpetrators unfavorably to Hitler (“Once there was a time when the most evil people on earth were ashamed to write their crime across the heavens”), the damage has already been done. The medium, in this case, is the message. This was not the time and place for doing clever things with words. The twin towers did not come down with the quiet click of a mouse, but to the accompaniment of human screams — we all saw, and heard, and know it.

What was so offensive about the LRB symposium, I am suggesting, was less the particulars of what anyone said, than the fact that they were saying it, there and then, at all. It is apparent from Terry Castle’s piece that the LRB commissioned these responses almost immediately after 9-11, and that they must have been written the same week, before, literally, the dust of the three thousand dead (it was then still feared to be more like ten thousand dead) had settled over Manhattan. What I think drove many to want to rub faces in dog shit was the precipitate filling of the yawning vacuum of unspeakability — Barthes’ moment of suspension of language and blocking of meaning — with this superfluity of words. The values that normally construct academic sense — lucidity, clarity, coherence, elegance, detachment — a way with words — seemed especially out of place here, and therefore all the more disrespectful to the dead, in the face of an event that apparently so did not make sense. Fredric Jameson lectures us that “the event in question, as history, is incomplete,” while they are still digging for bodies; David Runciman muses philosophically on how many deaths make a terrorist act into an act of war, while people are still frantically posting photocopied notices with pictures of missing family and friends all over New York City. Could we ask for a more insensitive response, a reaction more out of tune with the numbing, dumbing trauma of the event, in the here and now of September 11?

Of course I am quite capable of understanding, on their own level of intellectuality, what these writers were saying. These might even have passed for acute observations, perhaps, in another time and place, when the event itself was far enough behind us. We can intellectualize the French Revolution to our heart’s content, as Milan Kundera has reminded us, because Robespierre does not eternally return, chopping off French heads — “the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one.”[16] But less than a month after 9-11, when my mind remained still frozen in Barthes’ limbo where language is suspended and meaning is blocked, on another level I did not understand at all. While my reason was perfectly capable of following the LRB contributors’ arguments, my intuition — that insistent intuition that we are in the presence of the unspeakable — told me that if this is where reason takes us, then we have hit the limits of reason, and found it sadly wanting.

As intellectuals, it seems, these people had to speak, come what may; and they spoke, for the most part, precisely as intellectuals are wont to do. But — unlike the photographs in the Here is New York exhibit — what they had to say remorselessly dragged us away from September 11 itself, away from that which made it unspeakable, and back into their discourses. They made sense of the senseless, and in so doing inexorably made out of 9-11 no more than what Fred Jameson says it is, just another textbook example of a just another theory. It was intellectually disposed of before we have even had time properly to feel it. That, I would say, was the ultimate problem — and what many felt to be the ultimate inhumanity, the ultimate obscenity — of the LRB symposium. This translation of trauma into text, of a silent blocking of meaning into a deafening babble of intellectuals making sense, was — if nothing else — premature.

But was it any more than that? The tacit assumption of most of the contributors to the LRB symposium is that Barthes’ trauma is a temporary (and irrational) condition, and there is nothing intrinsically unspeakable about 9-11 (or, maybe, anything else). As Mary Beard puts it, “when the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in.” Fredric Jameson comes close to denying even the reality of the trauma itself, when he says that the one comment that he can immediately make about “the ‘events’ we imagine to have taken place on a single day in September,” concerns the “nauseating media reception” whose “cheap pathos seemed unconsciously dictated by a White House intent on smothering the situation in sentiment.” From this standpoint, 9-11 does make sense; there is nothing inexplicable about it. Indeed, portraying it as unspeakable — as “gratuitous evil” — is part of the problem. It isolates 9-11 from other, arguably no less horrific events in recent history, some of which have been perpetrated by the United States itself; and it cuts us off from understanding what actually did occasion 9-11, and thereby lessens the chances of our acting to prevent more such atrocities in the future. It is the responsibility of the intellectual, so the argument runs, to make sense, to resist the lures of mere sentiment, to speak the unspeakable. Eppur si muove.

We should by now be familiar with this intellectual posture: it is the legacy of the Enlightenment, which postmodern theorists have been questioning, pointing out the socially-constructed, culturally-relative, and therefore inherently contingent character of all rationalities, for the last thirty years. This standpoint — this subject-position, which above all empowers the omniscient intellectual who must always speak — presumes that all that happens in the world can in principle be explained, and in terms that are comprehensible to us. There is, however, an alternative, which I wish to canvass here. From the Enlightenment standpoint, it is anti-intellectual heresy, since it advocates the privileging, under certain conditions, of inarticulate feeling over articulate thought. This is to take seriously the notion that 9-11 indeed is unspeakable, for us — though it is evidently not for Osama Bin Laden, or for those dancing in the streets of Cairo, Gaza, or Damascus — and consider what this unspeakability for some, but not for others, might mean.

Wittgenstein, whom I mentioned earlier, famously wrote in the Tractatus that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”.[17] He obviously is not saying that there is no reality external to language, but rather that the sense we can make of that reality, and what that reality therefore can be for us, is limited by our language. This is, he says, the core of truth in solipsism: “The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.”[18] It is but a short step to what is now the routine postmodern conclusion that what counts as the world, for us, is entirely constituted by language. As regards the social world, I completely agree. All social realities — a marriage, a country, a race, a class, a gender — are real only in virtue of the meanings they have for the participants within the language games, as Wittgenstein calls them, that give them their sense. If the concept of money were to be erased from our minds tomorrow, money as a social institution would cease to exist. As Peter Winch argued more than forty years ago, any sociology (or history, or anthropology) worth its salt must therefore take the linguistic turn: “our language and our social relations are just two different sides of the same coin. To give an account of the meaning of a word is to describe how it is used; and to describe how it is used is to describe the social intercourse into which it enters.”[19]

This is not to say, however, that the entire world of human experience is reducible to the social world that provides us with the only languages we have for making sense of it. As Georg Simmel put it, not everything “that occurs in society … is ‘society’.”[20] Jacques Derrida made the same point, more poignantly, when he observed that “I have only one language; it is not mine.”[21] There indeed are realities that our language does not provide us with the resources to think, and these realities for that reason lie forever outside our world, insofar as that world is shared and social. We all do experience things, as individuals, that we are incapable of articulating or making sense of — things we know very well are beyond the power of any words available to us adequately to express. Familiar examples include love, death, sexual ecstasy (which Georges Bataille for this reason calls “the little death”), [22] and experiences of the sublime, or, for some, the divine — mysteries, as we sometimes quite accurately call them. To verbalize these things is always, in a sense, to betray, to leave something, which we feel to be their essence, behind. Their exteriority to the social world is shown by their verbal incommunicability itself. We are doomed to experience them alone, intimating them to others, if at all, only in wordless gestures.

Since such experiences lie on the other side of the limit to (the linguistic expression of) thought, for Wittgenstein they “will simply be nonsense,” for “only propositions have sense”.[23] They therefore take us beyond the limits of reason. This does not, however, mean that they are either unreal or without value. Wittgenstein indeed comes close to suggesting that the source of what we most value in life lies not in the reason-governed world of “all that is the case,”[24] but precisely in our intuitions — which is what, since they cannot be verbalized, they must always remain — of that “whereof we cannot speak.” He argues, for instance, that ethics falls into this category of the non-sensical (“It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental.”)[25] — without for a moment dismissing the importance of acting ethically. He is actually rather humble in the claims he makes for what can be made sense of, in a way that recalls Max Weber’s well-known observation in “Science as a Vocation” that “We cannot ‘refute scientifically’ the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount.”[26]

“If a question can be framed at all,” Wittgenstein says, “it is also possible to answer it.” Nevertheless, he goes on, “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions [wissenschaftlichen Fragen] have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” He concludes:

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

(Is this not the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.[27]

As others since Wittgenstein have also argued, there are severe limits to what Jacques Derrida has identified as logocentrism. Much in human experience — including, perhaps, the most important values in human life — cannot, and never could, be put into words. Least of all can they be put into rational propositions.

Things of which we cannot speak manifest themselves precisely as unspeakable, as feelings or intuitions of the inappropriateness of words, and in so doing they show what otherwise cannot be stated, namely, the limits of our language itself. But these are also the limits, if we follow Winch, of our forms of sociality. The intuition of unspeakability is something that ought, therefore, to be taken very seriously indeed. For it is a sign that we are in the presence of something radically other — something that lies outside our social world, and is therefore beyond the capacity of our reason to embrace. I see no reason why this argument should not apply as much to other forms of sociality, and rationality, as to the more familiar examples — love, death, and so on — that I have given here.

9-11, I suggest, falls into exactly this category. The mistake — the category error, if you will — of the LRB contributors was to apply a rationality that is bound up in our language to things for which our language does not have the words; or, mutatis mutandis, to extend the norms of our sociality, our humanity, our world, to a form of life that remains utterly, unspeakably other. They ignored what our overwhelming feeling of unspeakability clearly signified, which was a radical incommensurability, an unbridgeable gulf, between our sense and theirs. (By “theirs” I refer, to be clear here, to Al Qaeda and its supporters, not to the Islamic world as a whole.) If this argument holds water, being “hard-headed” about 9-11, contrary to Mary Beard, would entail divesting ourselves of the fantasy of a universal rationality within which every otherness can and must be always made sense of, recognizing that 9-11’s unspeakability points to an irreducible difference — and acting accordingly. Nothing directly follows from here, of course, as regards what we should do in the sphere of political action. That is for individuals to decide for themselves, on grounds, if Wittgenstein is correct, that also have their source in that which cannot be spoken — much as we might seek to rationalize them afterwards.

But if I am right, we have no longer have any good reason to accept that facile equation of making sense and making peace.

In the small Tuscan hill town of Cortona, where I spent the early months of 2001 teaching, I was struck by an incongruity in the war memorial. Ascending the steep steps to the thirteenth-century town hall, you reach a door flanked by symmetrical white marble tablets, each containing a list of names. One, erected on 16 December 1945, lists the names of partisans from the Commune di Cortona who gave their lives “pro patria” in the war that had just ended, “vittime,” the inscription says, “della furiosa Teutonica.” The other, installed thirty-nine years later on 4 December 1984, remembers those whose valor gained them military decorations as they too fell “pro patria,” four of the twenty-three during World War I, the remaining nineteen fighting on the side of the Hitler-Mussolini Axis between 1939 and 1943. It was, I thought, an apt illustration of the way social memory works, retrospectively enfolding mortal enemies into a single narrative of community. To quote Milan Kundera again, “remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.”[28]

In the case of 9-11, it is far too early to forget; and what above all needs not to be forgotten about 9-11, I believe, is its unspeakability. Ground Zero is a vantage point — a rent torn by others in our common sense, as much as in the lives of its victims and the fabric of Manhattan — from which, instead of rehearsing old answers, we can and should begin to ask new questions. I still, therefore, prefer images to words. They remind us of what we have to face, and constitute a basis from which rationalization of the unspeakable can be resisted. Let me conclude with the simple credo of the Here is New York exhibit, displayed in the window of a store that doubled as a gallery in Arles last summer. In its insistence on squarely facing up to that for which our language has no words and our reason has no answers, it seems to me to go to the heart of the matter:

Photography was the perfect medium to express what happened on 9.11, because it is democratic by its very nature and infinitely reproducible. The tragedy at “Ground Zero” struck all New Yorkers equally, leaving no one immune to shock or grief. Although the disaster was the lead story in every newspaper in the world, and searing footage of the planes destroying the towers was running on television 24 hours a day, to New Yorkers this wasn’t a news story; it was an unabsorbable nightmare. In order to come to grips with all of this haunting imagery, the four organizers believed that it was essential to reclaim it from the media and stare at it without flinching. Terrorism is all too familiar in other parts of the world, but it has rarely happened in the United States, and never on such a scale. Besides announcing that this is the face of our city’s tragedy, the title here is new york declares that we understand the problem of terrorism to be a global one that respects no geographic or cultural boundaries. After 9.11, New York is Everywhere.[29]

Derek Sayer

September 2002