Spaces Stretch Inward: Intersections between Architecture and Minor Literature
Until Monday morning, September 12, 2005, the border between Israel and Egypt ran through the basement of a private house in the town of Rafah. The house is located in one territory, with a doorway, a floor, ceiling, walls, and a tunnel leading from it into another country. No fence, no watchtower, no bilingual signs exist there, and whoever arrives there must have evaded the surveillance of the border crossing and of passport control. From a mere sign on a map, from a spatial marking with no space, the border has expanded to become a place in its own right and thus has dismantled the territory that appeared familiar. The term architecture can be used only tentatively to describe the common spatial language that has been adapted to unusual uses in the occupied Palestinian cities and refugee camps. The everyday syntax of building, digging, creating openings, and paving roads has been intensified in this environment, which is subject to constant restrictions, and has taken on functions requiring new interpretive tools that are difficult to locate in standard architectural discourse. The search for concepts that might help interrogate the spatial reality that has developed beyond the fences and roadblocks led to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s characterization of the uses of a minor language, as exemplified in Franz Kafka’s writing.1 The impossibility of the minority’s using the ruler’s language is not dissimilar to the impossibility of the refugee’s taking action within the restricted spatial conditions he or she has been allocated, and perhaps the physical lines of escape are not that different from the linguistic ones.
Three salient features distinguish minor literature from any other form of literal expression. Because it is constructed not from a minor language but within a major one, minor literature’s first characteristic is the deterritorialization of the language it uses, caused by the problem or the impossibility of using it in a common way.2 Thus the impossibility itself becomes a creative tool that tears minor literature from its own means of expression, forcing language itself to follow a revolutionary path.
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Notes
An early Hebrew version of this essay was published in the journal Theory and Criticism, no. 30. I thank Ilana Goldberg for her help in its translation.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), especially chap. 3.
- This is not an abstract problem but one related to specific conditions such as the literature of Prague Jews, which Kafka refers to as something impossible — the impossibility of not writing (because of national consciousness), the impossibility of writing in German as the language of an oppressive minority, and the impossibility of writing otherwise (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 16 – 17).