In March 2008, at the Derrida’s Legacies conference at LSE, Nemonie Craven and Shahidha Bari invited Devorah Baum to respond to Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade’s Support Structure project. Many thanks to Devorah for allowing us to publish her remarks here.

A Response to Céline Condorelli

As a Lecturer in Jewish Literature and Critical Theory at Southampton University in the Discipline of English, one might be forgiven for thinking me not all that well placed to respond to architecture. So what I plan to do here is to examine certain relevant issues within my own research with reference to some of the ideas I have read and been stimulated by in the Support Structure project. Specifically, I’m interested in the suggestion that architectural practices may be interpreted as “a form of political imagination.” And I also wish to reflect on Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade’s conception of a support structure as a

form of interface towards the making of place, which does not produce objects but relationships to context.

These formulations will be guiding my remarks.

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For around two thousand years Jews have lived in and as a Diaspora, and life in the Diaspora has traditionally been viewed in a rather negative light, most often equated with lack of space, or lack of control over space. Indeed, until fairly recently, the image of uprooted strangers wandering around strange lands, inhabiting temporary abodes rather than permanent settlements, has been taken to imply that the Jewish relationship to place is somewhat tenuous. Thus, for the most part, Jews have tended to stress the dimension of time over that of place. “Judaism”, as theologian Joshua Heschel once famously remarked, “is the art of architecture in time.” Indeed, from a religious perspective, the Diaspora experience has been intimately bound up with expressions of Jewish messianism: the messianic dream of an end to exile and a return to Zion as a return home (with “home” here linked to the messianic fulfilment of historical time). So, by the same token, life in the Diaspora, no matter how long it lasts, has been supposed a temporary or passing phase: a period of prolonged waiting, displacement and deferral.

One consequence of living for so long in the precarious position of a minority outside the borders and protections of their own State, is that Jews, historically, even where they haven’t been coerced into ghettos, camps or other enclosures, have tended to enact their religious rituals in private. Once dispersed across the Diaspora, Jewish leadership was no longer a matter for kings or princes, but for community rabbis or teachers, who, following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, relocated the majority of religious practices into the domestic setting. The home thus became the epicentre of the Jewish religion. Whence, as Gershom Scholem has analysed, the esoteric flowerings of mysticism tend to flourish amongst a people in exile – people who have nowhere else to go but the interior.

So the first space of architectural imagining I’d like to consider is that of the home. What is a home? With sturdy walls made of bricks and cement and a well-tiled roof, the home shelters us from the inclemencies of the weather and hides us from unwanted visitors. It is a place of recollection - where I can be myself, at home with myself. The home is a private dwelling to which I can retreat, away from the public eye. Though I may gaze through windows at the world outside, I myself am in private; like a god who sees all but cannot be seen. My home is my corner of the world - it exists both inside the world and outside it. My address may serve some civic function, but nobody really knows what goes on behind closed doors. At home I can enjoy my home comforts, and especially the comfort of feeling confident in familiar surroundings - surroundings in which I feel I belong. My home welcomes me - it settles me. It offers me cover for my occasional desire to become invisible - withdrawn from the world into which I may, if I like, go forth, risking myself in its flux and flow because I always know that there is a fixed place, a permanent abode where I may return. At home I can shut out the uncontrollable mass outside and put it on hold until another day. My being at home is thus my way of suspending my involvements in the world - my way of recollecting myself to myself and postponing the future. This sense of feeling at home is a kind of heavenly dream - a place in which I want for nothing, for I have everything - everything belongs to me and I belong to the place I am in. Only the fact that my home has windows and doors can remind me that the world outside still beckons and the inevitability of tomorrow has not gone away. As if the “real” world were located outside, and home were an imaginary place – a place that I need to believe in, and to create, in order to survive the harshness of reality.*

This dream of home (whose description has been partly inspired by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity) isn’t hard to identify with. Nor, therefore, should it be difficult to sympathise with the plight of the homeless. Edward Said warned against the romanticisation of exile as a term that should never fail to register the profound suffering and loss to which it historically alludes (Said, E. W. (2001) Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta Books, 173-186). And Leo Strauss, in a different way, noted how the position of the exile suited him well because philosophers, on the whole, prefer not to be tied down or bound to any particular place or position. Yet, he said, he would hesitate before advocating any politics based on such personal preferences – for most people aren’t philosophers and so most people would rather be at home (Strauss expands on this idea in his (1952) Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

In the era of globalisation, on the other hand, Strauss’ concession to “most people” begins to look beside the point. When the integrity of the nation state appears evermore compromised, it is hardly surprising that Diaspora communities have been an increasing source of interest and concern for scholars looking to gain insights into our current situation. So, notwithstanding the centrality of the home as both religious site and symbol of religious longing in the Jewish Diaspora, what I intend to do now is to consider Jewish spatial practices in the Diaspora outside of the home, in shared, public or communal spaces. Let’s concentrate on one religious spatial practice in particular (and I’ll be understanding religion in this context as a form of practice in terms not dissimilar to those Support Structure uses when addressing contemporary artistic and architectural practices).

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The Sabbath is a weekly event: it’s a day of rest and reflection when labour is strictly prohibited. And the spatial practice I’m about to describe exists in relation to this temporal event: as a space which gets activated only on the Sabbath. This may sound rather strange, and, indeed, the practice I’m referring to is the somewhat bizarre but rabbinically sanctioned procedure of erecting an architectural structure called an eruv. There are many such constructions around the world. Some of you may recall the controversy that surrounded the construction of an eruv in North London, when, in February 2003, six and a half square miles of the Borough of Barnet was leased to a representative of London’s Jewish community for a nominal sum of approximately one British pound.

So what is an eruv? An eruv is a ritual means of forming a community. Really, it’s a kind of boundary-making device – the eruv’s boundaries can include already existent landmarks, but these need to form a continuous border around a designated communal space. The North London eruv is barely noticeable; it consists primarily of some wooden poles with an almost invisible wire running atop between them.

The religious function of the eruv, which we need simply to know here rather than comprehend, is to allow those who participate in it to carry any kind of object out of their houses on the Sabbath into the space the eruv circumscribes (for, according to Jewish law, one is not permitted to carry objects outside of the private realm on the Sabbath). The effect of this Sabbath prohibition can be very hard on those who would not be able to leave their homes without carrying objects – orthodox Jewish women especially, who carry babies or push prams, or those who require walking sticks or wheelchairs. Without an eruv, all of these effectively become prisoners in their own homes on the Sabbath.

So the purpose of the eruv is really to carry over or extend the boundaries of the private space into the public domain. Thus the eruv might be regarded as a support structure enabling a changed relationship to context. For the eruv does not produce an object – although it allows the free movement of objects within its borders (one could say that it supports or produces many different objects). Critically, though, what the eruv ultimately supports is the imagination of certain of its residents for whom its symbolic borders mark the enlarged space of their possible participation. It offers these inhabitants permission to roam freely on their day of rest. Or, in other words, for those who have been trapped behind closed doors, the eruv is an invitation into the world outside: it’s thus a way of turning the inside out; of feeling at home outside the home. In this sense, then, the act of walking becomes a religious act, and an expression of religious freedom. I mention this point in order to connect this idea to Andrea Phillips’ discussion of the importance of walking for some contemporary art projects, in her article “Doing Democracy” on the Support Structure website. Indeed, the degree of controversy generated by the Barnet eruv reveals how an altered relationship to context can make even the most everyday acts appear provocative to some. As Jennifer Cousineau records:

Having made every effort to ensure either the invisibility of the perimeter or at least a sensitive integration into the surrounding landscape, the eruv markers were unprepared for the intensity of some of the responses to their urban vision. In evocative images published in the local and national popular press, Jews were often portrayed as aggressively claiming the space of the street simply by walking in it. (Cousineau, J. (2005) Rabbinic Urbanism in London: Rituals and the Material Culture of the Sabbath. Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space, The New Series, (11, 3), 51)

In Hebrew the verbal root for eruv connotes commingling, joining, mixing, amalgamation. This alludes to the process of spatial integration as a dissolution of the boundaries between spaces. In her elucidation of the political symbolism of the eruv, Charlotte Fonrobert notes how the rabbis declared the communal space of the eruv as legitimate only when the wider community (referring to the neighbourhood’s non-Jewish or non-orthodox members) had formally agreed to recognise it as such. This recognition is represented by the symbolic renting of the space – whereby e.g. the local mayor or chief of police accepts a nominal sum of money. The fact that a local representative “agrees to the symbolic interaction ultimately reflects his or her acknowledgement and even support of the legitimate presence of a Jewish community in the neighbourhood or city.” (Fonrobert, C. E. (2005) The Political Symbolism of the Eruv. Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space, The New Series, (11, 3), 28.) As was eventually achieved, despite opposition, in the Borough of Barnet.

There are therefore political implications to this spatial practice. As Fonrobert writes, “a nationalist concept of collectivity assumes sovereign control over territory, and this control functions as a guarantee for the construction (or imagination) of national identity by the population living within the borders of that territory.” (Although I think we could argue that there are forms of nationalism that do not presuppose territorial sovereignty.) That said, the eruv presents a non-national relationship to territory, which it enacts in the absence of having control of any form of sovereignty over the space it inhabits. Thus, the eruv offers one possible model of a “territoriality without sovereignty.”

As such, this example of a spatial practice in the Diaspora may be contrasted to nationalist relationships to territory, constituted as sovereign spaces, including, of course, expressions of Jewish national identity; given that the modern “State of Israel has been seen as national territory with a plenitude of sovereignty, as space to be designed as the central Jewish place in the world.”

Thus, one way of representing the modern Jewish experience, if we think of it in spatial rather than temporal terms, is by imagining the effect on widely dispersed communities – with many different centres around the world – of the sudden transformation, according to an imaginative geography whose symbolic power is very hard to resist, whereby what had been a heterogeneous and fragmentary population found itself turned, almost overnight, into one continuous periphery or circumference surrounding a single unifying centre (or territorial base) anchoring the whole. The establishment of the modern Israeli State produced precisely this effect.

Moreover, one characteristic of the transformation of the Jewish Diaspora into a periphery of the Jewish State was the relegation of the Diaspora Jew to outsider status, even within the internal dynamics of his/her own community. As Israel became the leading actor, so the Diaspora was newly cast in a supporting role, expected to prop up the Jewish State from afar.

Diaspora communities often feel moved or obliged to provide support structures or support networks for the homeland, and the forms this support can take are manifold, including anything from lobbying governments, to raising funds, to media or political representation.

Recent scholars in Jewish Studies have sought to overcome the implied opposition between homeland and Diaspora, or centre and periphery, but it is, I think, important to understand why this structural lay-out continues to carry weight for those who dwell on either side of it.

In the case of Israel, its establishment immediately after the Holocaust underscored its heterogeneity to a Diaspora that had proven nothing but treacherous. Thus, those self-identifying Jews who remained in the Diaspora after World War II, looked upon Israel as the great redemptive figure and locus of all future hope and salvation. Israel was the place where the struggle for Jewish survival after Auschwitz was enacted with military conscription, wars constantly fought, death constantly risked and dealt out. Whereas the Diaspora, after the Holocaust, was, paradoxically, probably safer than it had ever been before. So, the least these guilty and well off Diaspora Jewish communities felt they could do was to stand up for their brave and embattled Israeli counterparts.

These historical conditions have often made the Diaspora’s supporting role appear rather unreflective and uncritical (support is generally understood as a form of defence). Fred Halliday has discussed how, in terms of conflict resolution, Diaspora communities, while committed, tend to be particularly unhelpful (See for example, Halliday, F. (2007) Palestinians and Israelis: a political impasse). Partly, one senses, this has to do with a lack of sophistication concerning what real support might entail. For it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that the very notion of support has appeared only weakly in the discourses where it has appeared, as if support itself, as a term and as a concept, required some theoretical scaffolding, as it were, to prop it up; to support support’s own critical potential for offering a rich variety of possible meanings and applications.

And this, of course, is something that the Support Structure project, originating in architecture but with such obvious interdisciplinary ramifications, is helping to bring about. Support Structure recognises the weak appearance of support as a potential source of strength – support, they argue, is tactically weak.

So, with the help of Céline Condorelli’s theoretical reflections about what it means to support, might it, then, be possible to imagine some new constructions of the Jewish Diaspora’s supporting role vis-a-vis Israel?

A support structure, to quote Céline,

is in a certain sense a questioning structure, a supplement, a somehow external organization, at least with a certain autonomy from the situation it addresses; this allows it to pose, expose and revise questions in relationship to its context and how to operate within it. Support is negotiation, not the application of principle but a conversation towards something that it does not define.

Support is thus, potentially, a form of “constructive criticality.” To be properly supportive, constructive criticality is called for. But constructive criticism is much easier said than done. For it’s hard to criticise without partaking of an oppositional logic, which thus risks further entrenching already deep rooted prejudices and positions.

In the inflammatory context of Israel/Palestine, for example (for example!), support for both sides of this conflict (and the fact that support groups so often take sides) has tended to be marked by precisely this type of failure – support groups, even when they are acting in good faith, frequently reinforce the conflictual apparatuses they were intending to remedy. Indeed, the architectural aspects of the Middle East conflict – separation walls, checkpoints, settlements, etc. - carry such obvious symbolic weight that these features can often find their meanings over-determined. As such, intervening discourses (from the right or the left) can often overwhelm the political contexts to which they refer by de-contextualising in favour of much wider ideological mapping. Whereas, to negotiate, as Support Structure argues, requires taking context into account – for only the contextual (as that which is always conditioned by the temporal) may be open to compromise. As Céline remarks in her interview with Eyal Weizmann, architecture “participates in producing political space but [it] is unable to determine it.”

So where does this leave me? Well, as a Disapora Jew, I have been concerned with how to assume the responsibility of a presupposed supporting position vis-a-vis the Jewish State. I have found this position a tremendously difficult and, if I’m honest, tortuous one to uphold. It is tempting to reject the claims made upon me by a situation I did not choose to be in as fundamentally illegitimate. It is tempting to disown, disavow or at least distance myself from a place whose politics I have grown to deplore. For it has by no means been clear to me how best to support (rather than arrogate) the production of new relationships to context that might create new political and social realities. Nor has it been clear to me how best to express constructive criticality. After all, just as uncritical support serves no-one, so unsupportive criticism serves only to bolster already entrenched and uncompromising positions.

Yet one possible avenue may be to revise the received wisdom concerning the Jewish Diaspora as a purely negative situation marked only by pogroms, inquisitions and genocide. For the history of the Diaspora has not only included some golden ages of Jewish life and creativity, but it can also reveal ways in which Jews have been able to participate in public spaces over which they’ve lacked sovereignty or control. Places whose borders are largely symbolic, without need of walls, where there has been security in insecurity.

The eruv is an example of how Jews in exile have been able to feel at home outside the home, and thus been able to carry on their private lives in public. (And there are other such examples as well.) “If a right to the secret is not maintained”, says Derrida, “then we are in a totalitarian space.” (Derrida, J. & Ferraris, M. (2001) A Taste for the Secret. London: Polity, 59). So the movement I’ve here been analysing – which draws (enables or allows) the inside out, which permits the secret to appear as secret – would be absolutely critical from a democratic point of view.

Derrida, to my mind, can also be identified (this is not his only identity, of course, but it is a mode of identification I have with him) as a Diaspora Jew who did assume the responsibility of the supportive position I’ve here been outlining. (One thinks, for example, of his discussion of national exemplarity in his address to Jerusalem’s Hebrew University in 1988.) I have researched and written a great deal about Derrida’s interventions in both this and other such contexts, and I’ve tried to show how Derrida was able to invent a language of engagement that might fairly be described as constructive – genuinely constructive – criticality (another term for deconstruction perhaps?).

It seems to me that one of the ways Derrida approached seemingly intractable political problems was by recalling terms and ideas that have been forgotten, ignored or passed over by more mainstream political discourse. In many cases he returns to the religious source of those ideas – I’m thinking, for example, of his reflections on Hospitality, Forgiveness, Friendship, Mourning, the Gift. And one could add the Supplement to this list, the Derridean conception of which Céline sees as potentially analogous to her conception of Support. So I’d like to end these embryonic remarks by expressing my gratitude to Céline Condorelli for contributing to this distinctly Derridean form of engagement. Her analysis of support as a concept does seem to me to invite new forms of political imagination. And so I’m grateful to Céline, primarily, because the structure of support she theorises is one of which I personally feel the need.

Devorah Baum, all rights reserved

* I allude here to the dream of home rather than any known reality, which I invoke notwithstanding this dream’s susceptibility to various objections, and most particularly feminist objections. Suffice it to say that the home I have here in mind is not “that most dangerous place, the family home” of Adrienne Rich’s poem, Sources (1982), but, rather, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”.