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Mastering the Matrix
The Enuma Elish and Plato’s Timaeus
That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?
—Ecclesiastes 7:24
[Marduk] crossed the sky to survey the infinite distance; he stationed himself above Apsu, that Apsu built by Nudimmud over the old abyss which now he surveyed, measuring out and marking in.
—Enuma Elish
Before that, all these kinds were without proportion or measure. . . . Such being their nature at the time when the ordering of the universe was taken in hand, the god then began by giving them a distinct configuration by means of shapes and numbers.
—Plato, Timaeus 53b
Everyone says that place is something; but [Plato] alone attempted to say what it was.
—Aristotle, Physics Book 4
I
Once we admit that the panic-producing idea of the void is always (in advance) a matter of place—and is thus not reducible to the daunting nothingness, the strict no-place, that occasions the panic—we must face a second major issue. This is the propensity not merely to fill the void as a way of allaying anxiety but, more especially, to master the void. To master is not to bring into being in the first place but to control and shape that which has already been brought into existence. It is still a matter of creation, at least in that sense of creation inherent in the Hebrew word bará used in I Genesis: a word whose cognate meanings include “to carve” (e.g., the tip of an arrow) or “to cut up” (e.g., a carcass).1 What is now at stake is not creation ex nihilo—an action we have discovered to be as rare as it is problematical—but creation ex datis, “out of the given.” Yet how is creation carried forward once we are willing to acknowledge that the void has content, that something is already given in and with (and even as) the void itself?
What is pregiven is usually considered to be material, a matter of matter. But in ancient and traditional cosmogonies, “matter” does not signify anything hard and fast—anything rigorously physical in the manner of determinate and resistant “material objects.” On the contrary: matter connotes matrix, one of its cognates and certainly something material (even if not something completely definite in its constitution). In its literal sense of “uterus” or “womb,” the matrix is the generatrix of created things: their mater or material precondition. As such, it is the formative phase of things—things that will become more fully determinate in the course of creation. Vis-à-vis the generative matrix, the task of creation becomes that of crafting and shaping, ultimately of controlling, what is unformed or preformed in the matrix itself. Creation becomes a matter of mastering matter.
Just as chaos has proved to be a place, so a cosmogonic matrix is a place as well. Beyond its strictly anatomical sense, matrix means “a place or medium in which something is bred, produced, or developed,” “a place or point of origin and growth.” In the matter of the matrix, place remains primary. As the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, the definitions just cited are traceable to at least the middle of the sixteenth century A.D. But they are seen to possess a still more ancient lineage if we reflect that a text such as Genesis opens with the description of a state of affairs that is neither chaos nor void but a matrix: “Darkness was upon the face of the Deep.” As the initial moment of cosmogenesis, the dark Deep is a material, or more precisely an elemental, matrix. The world starts with an “embedding or enclosing mass” (in yet another OED definition of “matrix”) that is aqueous in character; it starts with “the waters” as the generative matrix of things-to-be, things-to-come.
We may trace things even farther back. Tehom, the Hebrew word for “deep [waters],” itself stems from Tiamat, the Mesopotamian proper name for that primordial oceanic force figuring at the very beginning of the Enuma Elish, a tale of creation that predates the reign of Hammurabi (ca. 1900 B.C.). Tiamat is in place as an elemental matrix from time immemorial, and therefore creation must begin with her antecedent and massive presence.
When there was no heaven,
no earth, no height, no depth, no name,
when Apsu was alone,
the sweet water, the first begetter; and Tiamat
the bitter water, and that
return to the womb, her Mummu,
When there were no gods—
When sweet and bitter
mingled together, no reed was plaited, no rushes
muddied the water,
the gods were nameless, natureless, futureless, then
from Apsu and Tiamat
in the waters gods were created, in the waters
silt precipitated.2
Unlike Genesis, the Babylonian text does not mention earth, not even an earth “without form and void.” Nor do we find any gods—certainly not “God,” or Yahweh—much less any words by which a god could summon up creation. In this nameless scene, no one says “Let there be light.”
On the other hand (and here in contrast with Hesiod’s Theogony),3 in the Enuma Elish there is no chaos to start with, nor is there any primal separation between heaven and earth. All that is present is water: two kinds of water, salt and fresh, “Tiamat” and “Apsu.” Even Mummu, the originary mist, is aqueous. All begins with/in water. The gods themselves are created from it: creation occurs without creators. Instead of arising from a decisive act of scission, creation takes place with the imperceptible mixing of waters; everything begins with the merging of two regions of water in an elemental commixture. For Apsu and Tiamat are less the names of gods than of primeval places; they are cosmogonic place-names. “Bitter water” is one kind of place and “sweet water” another kind of place. When they merge, they create a common place—a matrix—for more particular places, including the places of particular gods.
The silty mass precipitated in the intermixed waters is the first definite place to emerge from the Apsu-Tiamat matrix, and it brings with it the naming of the first four gods. Place and name are here coeval.
Lahmu and Lahamu,
were named; they were not yet old,
not yet grown tall
When Anshar and Kishar overtook them both,
the lines of sky and earth
stretched where horizons meet to separate
cloud from silt.4
From the place of silt, “primeval sediment,”5 comes the separation of earth and sky. Lahmu and Lahamu, barely distinguishable from each other as names (except insofar as the former is male, the latter female), are overtaken by the more distinctly differentiated figures of Anshar and Kishar, gods of the horizons of sky and earth, respectively. The comparatively belated distinction of earth from sky constitutes separation between heaven and earth that we have observed elsewhere—most notably in Genesis, where God “separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.” Unlike the Old Testament account, however, the Enuma Elish explicitly builds the feature of horizon lines into the proper names Anshar and Kishar, remarking oxymoronically that these gods are found “where horizons meet to separate cloud from silt.” The oxymoron is merited: every horizon at once conjoins and separates. In particular, the horizon at land’s end both holds earth and sky together as two contiguous domains of the same surrounding space and teases them apart as two conclusively different regions.
That Anshar and Kishar are indeed decisively different places is confirmed by the fact that the immediately following generations replicate the earth/sky distinction that these two gods embody. Ami, son of Anshar, is the god of “empty heaven,” and he begets Nudimmud-Ea, god of sweet waters and of a wisdom that is “wider than heaven’s horizon.”6 Nudimmud-Ea in turn slays his aqueous ancestor Apsu when the latter schemes with Tiamat to destroy the clamorous gods who have been born to them. In so doing, Ea “sounded the coil of chaos and against it devised the artifice of the universe.”7 Then, in an action that would not have surprised the Freud of Totem and Taboo, Nudimmud-Ea builds a memorial to Apsu.
When Ea had bound Apsu, he killed him. . . . Now that his triumph was completed, in deep peace he rested, in his holy palace Ea slept. Over the abyss, the distance, he built his house and shrine and there magnificently he lived with his wife Damkina.8
The “artifice of the universe” here appears in the form of Ea’s palace-shrine, the first constructed dwelling place. The construction itself takes place over an abyss, and by this very fact it is a memorial to Apsu: apsu is the Semitic equivalent of Sumerian abzu, signifying “deep abyss,” “ocean,” and “outermost limit.” To build over an abyss is not only to create cosmos out of chaos. It is to bring constructed or “devised” place out of an unconstructed material matrix, and thereby to memorialize the matrix itself.9
It is out of this same abyssal matrix that Marduk, the ultimate architect of creation and the nemesis of Tiamat, is born from Ea and Damkina.
In that room, at the point of decision where what is to come is predetermined, he was conceived, the most sagacious, the one from the first most absolute in action.
In the deep abyss he was conceived, Marduk was made in the heart of the apsu, Marduk was created in the heart of the holy apsu.10
To be conceived in the abyss is to be generated in the matrix of creation—“in that room” where “what is to come is predetermined.” The depth of this matricial abyss is resonant with the depth of Tiamat, the depth of her womb (she is continually bringing forth new gods and monsters) and the depth of her oceanic being (Tiamat means literally “primeval waters,” including stretches of water, sea, or lake). “The coil of Tiamat,” the Sumerian gods admit, “is too deep for us to fathom.”11
It is precisely because Tiamat’s coil—her troublesome tumult—is too deep to fathom that Marduk must rise up against her. For Marduk can only deal with measurable depth. His confrontation with Tiamat is thus foredoomed: their difference is literally “cosmic.” The confrontation itself comes when “he surveyed her scanning the Deep.”12 He surveys her—makes her into an object of conquest—while she is embroiled in scanning something that never can become an object and with which she is ultimately identified. Precisely as an amorphous nonobject, that is, as herself the Deep, Tiamat can be conquered in a cosmomachia wherein the architectonic triumphs over the unstructured and the mastery of the matrix is asserted. If Ea is the first architect in this cosmogony—“archi-tect” signifying “first builder”—Marduk is the master builder.13
Marduk proves himself master of the matrix by brutally crushing Tiamat in battle. He “shot the arrow that split the belly, that pierced the gut and cut the womb.”14 Marduk’s arrow, symbol of his phallic manhood, invades the womb-matrix: death penetrates to the seat of life. Only by destroying an organic matrix, source of generation, can the inorganic work of building proceed. As Paul Ricoeur remarks apropos of Marduk, it is “by disorder that disorder is overcome; it is by violence that the youngest of the gods establishes order.”15
As master builder—as “Lord of the Land,” as “Son-of-the-Sun”16—Marduk must construct out of something: nothing ex nihilo here! He finds his building materials in Tiamat’s slain body, whose corporeal depths become the (re)source of the civilized cosmos.
The lord rested; he gazed at the huge body, pondering how to use it, what to create from the dead carcass. He split it apart like a cockle-shell; with the upper half he constructed the arc of sky, he pulled down the bar and set a watch on the waters, so they should never escape.17
In this violent action—which takes place precisely as bará, or cutting up—Marduk repeats the initial separation between Anshar and Kishar by creating the horizon line or “bar” that distinguishes sky from sea. To “set a watch on the waters” is to take a definitive step toward delimiting them by placing a cosmic boundary over them. Such delimitation is place-making in its power—as is the creation of the “arc of the sky,” a bowlike outer limit that makes the sky into a region of its own. Thanks to this new place-setting, we no longer need to refer to the open sky as “Ami,” or to the shared horizons of earth and heaven as “Anshar” and “Kishar.” The evolution from primeval elements to gods has given way to cosmic places no longer requiring mythical names.18 But the story goes on.
He crossed the sky to survey the infinite distance; he stationed himself above apsu, that apsu built by Nuddimud over the old abyss which now he surveyed, measuring out and marking in.
He stretched the immensity of the firmament, he made Esharra, the Great Palace, to be its earthly image, and Anu and Enlil and Ea had each their right stations.19
Following the creation of gods earlier in the epic—theogony proper—we are now presented with the creation of places for the gods, their “right stations.” Through Marduk’s actions, the gods “are assigned their places.”20 Once again, topogenesis follows from cosmogenesis. As a condition of this locatory action, the “infinite distance” of the abyss must be surveyed and the “immensity of the firmament” stretched out. To stretch out is the corporeal equivalent of visual survey: in both cases, the full scope of something is swept out in advance, “sized up” as we say, by a preliminary action of literal circumspection. To do this, Marduk must establish a stable position from which to do the stretching and sizing. Such a position is found in the station assumed by Marduk “above apsu": above the abyss. His stationing there is in effect a double superpositioning: first over Ea’s house and shrine and then over “the old abyss” of the elemental Apsu, an action now surveyed in its infinite extent.
More than survey is at stake here. Marduk also sets to work by “measuring out and marking in” the abyss. He moves to mensuration, a measurement at once spatial and temporal.
He projected positions for the Great Gods conspicuous in the sky, he gave them a starry aspect as constellations; he measured the year, gave it a beginning and an end, and to each month of the twelve three rising stars.21
Just as the gods are given spatial positions, so temporal positions are also marked out—positions primarily taken by the sun and the moon in their respective cycles.22 In addition to these positions (which are in effect visible and countable places), Marduk bestows basic directionalities on the new world: “Through her ribs he opened gates in the east and west, and gave them strong bolts on the right and left; and high in the belly of Tiamat he set the zenith.”23 An entire landscape is drawn out from the dismembered Deep.
Then Marduk considered Tiamat. He skimmed spume from the bitter sea, heaped up the clouds, spindrift of wet and wind and cooling rain, the spittle of Tiamat.
With his own hands from the steaming mist he spread the clouds. He pressed hard down the head of water, heaping mountains over it, opening springs to flow: Euphrates and Tigris rose from her eyes, but he closed the nostrils and held back their springhead.
He piled huge mountains on her paps and through them drove water-holes to channel the deep sources; and high overhead he arched her tail, locked-in to the wheel of heaven; the pit was under his feet, between was the crotch, the sky’s fulcrum. Now the earth had foundations and the sky its mantle.24
Marduk here creates the very topography of the earth, its atmosphere and terrain, from the megabody of Tiamat. Originally a sea region, this gigantic body is displaced and transmuted into the created earth, an earth no longer hanging in the abyss but endowed finally with firm “foundations.”
The last two things to be fashioned by Marduk are human beings and their dwelling places. It is striking that the latter are created before the former—as if to say that housing is a precondition of being human. Ea is employed as architect of temples and in particular of the city of Babylon.25 Humankind is then created out of the sacrificial blood of Kingu, Tiamat’s second spouse and the captain of her monstrous forces. It is at this point that Marduk makes his strongest claim to be a creator-god.
Blood to blood
I join,
blood to bone
I form
an original thing,
its name is MAN,
aboriginal man
is mine in making.26
Despite this possessive and self-congratulating proclamation—and others like it earlier27—Marduk is not altogether omnipotent in his creative powers. He certainly does not create anything out of nothing. Humankind, his proudest ens creatum, is created out of the blood of a preexisting god: even here, he “moulded matter.”28 Marduk does not bring forth matter out of the nothing of nonmatter: “From the wreck of Tiamat’s rout, from the stuff of fallen gods he made mankind.”29 Everything is created out of the body of Tiamat—a body that is the primal stuff of creation.
Tiamat’s body is not only primal. It is inexhaustible—so much so that it is not entirely consumed in the course of creation. At the very end of the Enuma Elish a propitiatory prayer implores
let her recede into the future
far-off from man-kind
till time is old, keep her
for ever absent.30
Tiamat may have been “disappeared” from the current scene of creation—her intact body does not survive—but she is not completely vanquished. Her matter, her matrix, persists. Any subsequent act of creation will have to draw upon it.
N. K. Sandars, the English translator of the Enuma Elish, is certainly right to claim that in this epic “matter is eternal, [and] Tiamat and Apsu provide, from within themselves, the material of the whole universe; a universe which will evolve into ever greater complexity.”31 But it does not follow from this (as Sandars also claims) that “in the Babylonian poem there is, strictly speaking, no creation at all.”32 As we have seen abundantly from Sandars’s own translation, creation takes place, indeed it occurs continually, throughout the poem. The creation itself, however, is subject to two constraints. First, it is always a creation from something, that is, from a material matrix (and in particular Tiamat’s own body). Second, it is a creation primarily of places. The evolution of the created world into “ever greater complexity” is an evolution into ever more particular kinds of places, as the world becomes increasingly habitable for humankind.
In fact, the Enuma Elish proposes three major stages of creation, each of which is distinctively place-specific, (1) To begin with, we are presented with a watery world composed of two fluids, sweet and bitter, in intimate conjunction. From this aqueous admixture the early gods emerge—gods of the horizons of sky and earth, of the waters of the earth, and of the empty heaven. Theogony occurs as a differentiation of regions out of the primal scene of parental intercourse between Apsu and Tiamat. (2) Places of antagonism and conflict supervene as an Oedipal drama is enacted among the gods: Ea kills Apsu, and Marduk slaughters Tiamat. (3) Finally, the creation of the cosmos per se happens in and through Tiamat’s hulking carcass as the place-of-creation. Marduk, assuming his preordained role as “King of the cosmos,”33 constructs an ordered universe in which everything, gods and heavenly bodies, earth and human beings, has its proper place. “His glory touched the abyss”34 by virtue of the fact that he builds elaborately over the abyss itself. He fills it in with the plenary presences of particular places.
Throughout the Enuma Elish, place figures as a generative matrix. Although there is one reference to the “void” and two references to “chaos” in the text, each of these occurs as a retrospective interpretation of what has already taken place.35 What actually takes place, that is, arises as place, occurs in the form of a matrix—or, more exactly, of place-as-matrix. Just as there is no strict void at the start of this cosmogony (the void in question is the relative void of a not-yet-existent earth; but waters already exist), so there is no genuine chaos either: Tiamat is fluid but not chaotic. Nor is she disorderly—except when routed by Marduk!36 Taken on her own terms, she is an orderly being: orderly enough to give rise, thanks to Marduk’s eventual shaping actions, to the cosmos, the ordered world.
Order, and especially the order of place, is nascent in the matrix. Not just at the stage of elemental waters but also at the subsequent stages of conflict and creation, place occurs as matrix. Indeed, creation itself arises in the very place of destruction, the bloody scene of Marduk’s res gestae: “The creative act, which distinguishes, separates, measures, and puts in order, is inseparable from the criminal act that puts an end to the life of the oldest gods, [and is] inseparable from a deicide inherent in the divine.”37 In the final stage of this cosmogony, the two previous matrices, the elemental and the destructive, give way to the built matrix inherent in Marduk’s construction of a fully ordered world from the materials furnished by Tiamat’s dead body. A superfetation of gods, goddesses, and monsters from Tiamat’s womb-matrix is replaced by a superproduction of human beings and buildings on Marduk’s phallogonic part: continual birthing gives way to assiduous architectural ordering.38 Instead of void or chaos, everywhere there is plenitude and place, a plenitude of places, indeed plenitude-as-place, arranged as an ascending series of ever more specific matrices.39
And there is, to end with, the place of reenactment. For the Enuma Elish was recited at the beginning of the New Year festival at Babylon. It was recited not just anywhere in Babylon but “in a particular place, the inner room or holy of holies of the god Marduk, where his statue lived throughout the year.”40 This room was regarded as identical with the Ubshukinna, the Chamber of Destiny wherein Marduk was proclaimed “Great Lord of the Universe.”41 The Ubshukinna, too, is a matrix—a matrix of reenactment. In the complete ceremony, actors staged the combat between Marduk and Tiamat, the officiating priest crying out, “May Marduk continue to conquer Tiamat and to shorten her days!” More than a mere representation or recollection of aboriginal confrontation was at issue in this ritualized performance. The reenacted combat brought the world, as it was entering a new year, from a state of perilous preorder or nonorder, more radical than disorder, back to a renewed state of order. As Eliade remarks,
This commemoration of the Creation was in fact a reactualization of the cosmogonic act. . . . The battle between two groups of actors . . . [re]actualized the cosmogony. The mythical events became present once again. . . . The combat, the victory, and the Creation took place at that instant, hie et nunc.42
To this we need only add that the reactualized events also took place at that place, Marduk’s inner room at Babylon. Much like Tiamat’s own fertile body, this room served as a womb for continual rebirth—and not just as a scene of destruction and creation. The generative and the architectural, the primal matrix and the master builder, otherwise so fiercely antagonistic, combined forces in a common room of reenactment.
II
Much like Marduk, the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus has the unenviable task of converting an originally refractory space into a domain of domesticated places. Just as concertedly “male” as Marduk, the Platonic power figure substitutes the straight lines of geometry for the lethal arrows of pitched combat. But in both instances, a precosmic “female” body is at once the source and the limit of creation, and its massive preexistence demonstrates that the intervening god is far from omnipotent. Both epics make it clear that creation takes place only under certain circumstances—precisely those embodied in the hulk, the heft, of the world-body as it is initially given. Creation must occur in and with this body, which Plato names Necessity (anankē)—and also Space (chōra).
Space, then, is what must be there in the beginning, even before the act of creation occurs. In this respect, Plato only formalizes what we have found to be true in many previous accounts: the necessity of preexisting spaces (i.e., places, regions) for the occurrence of creation. For whatever comes to be must “come to be in a certain place.”43 Compared with such spatial necessity, time is secondary in status—merely a “moving image of eternity”44 that is devised by the Demiurge to keep track of the circular motions of the heavens. No more than in the first stanzas of the Enuma Elish is time essential to the primal state of the Platonic universe. In both cases, time is a distinctly late addition to the scene of creation. What matters first and foremost is the fate of space, its original standing and its subsequent vicissitudes.
Plato also uses the term “Receptacle” to designate the pregiven space with which the Demiurge must begin. As “the ‘nurse’ of all Becoming,”45 the Receptacle is no less deep, and no less fertile, than Tiamat. And it is no less maternal, since both the mythic and the philosophic entities require that creation involve a return to the womb, the womb of Nature (phusis) itself. It is altogether by and in the Receptacle construed as “mother”46 that the phallogonic paternal action of the Demiurge occurs—occurs within a matrix.
It never departs at all from its own character; since it is always receiving all things, and never in any way whatsoever takes on any character that is like any of the things that enter it: by nature it is there as a matrix for everything, changed and diversified by the things that enter it.47
The Platonic matrix is not, however, strictly material in character. Although it takes on material qualities, it is not itself composed of matter. As exhibiting or reflecting these qualities, it is more like a mirror of the physical than a physical thing itself.48 It has no qualities of its own, for, if it did, it could not be altogether receptive of the qualities of the things that occupy it, nor would it reflect them faithfully: “that which is to receive in itself all kinds must be free from all characters” (50e). Thus we cannot even characterize the receptive matrix as aqueous—as we are certainly encouraged to do at the beginning of the Enuma Elish and in Genesis. In fact, none of the four elemental qualities can be said to characterize the Platonic matrix: “the mother and Receptacle of what has come to be visible and otherwise sensible must not be called earth or air or fire or water” (51a). If the Sumerian and Old Testament matrices are expressly elemental, this is no longer possible in the Greek instance. As preelemental, Space or the Receptacle is “a nature invisible and characterless” (51b). Yet the Receptacle is neither a void nor placeless.
The Receptacle not a Void. Plato’s primary opponents in the Timaeus are the ancient Atomists, who held that cosmogenesis occurs by the interaction of discrete bits of matter within a circumambient empty space (kenon). Empty space itself possesses no predetermined routes, much less any qualities of its own. Nor does it possess places or regions; in its radical placelessness, it is a prime candidate for what I have called the “strict void” and “no-place.”49 In contrast with this model, the Receptacle is richly plenary. The only emptiness it knows occurs in the form of the tiny interstices at the edges of the regular figures that come to fill it out.50 Neither outside itself (for there is nothing outside the Receptacle) nor within itself is there any sheer emptiness.51
The Receptacle not Placeless. The Receptacle “appears to have different qualities at different times” (50c; my emphasis). To appear at all requires a place-of-appearance. In other words, the Receptacle, even if it has no place of its own (i.e., being Space itself, it is not located in some more extensive space), offers place to sensible qualities. Just as the initial state of things in the Enuma Elish is place-providing, so the Receptacle proffers place, thereby “providing a situation [hedran] for all things that come into being.”52 Such place-provision occurs for both formal and substantive reasons.
(1) Formally, even sensible qualities (and a fortiori the material bodies they will inhabit) must be exhibited somewhere. F. M. Cornford remarks that “the Receptacle is not that ‘out of which’ [ex hou] things are made; it is that ‘in which’ [en hō] qualities appear, as fleeting images are seen in a mirror.”53 Plato echoes Archytas here, and even seems to be paraphrasing him when he says that not just appearances but “anything that is must needs be in some place and occupy some room. . . . [W]hat is not somewhere in earth or heaven is nothing” (52b). Some kind of place must therefore always be on hand—and already on hand within the Receptacle itself. But what sort of place is this?
We have just seen that, in contrast with the body of Tiamat, the Receptacle cannot be a strictly material locus of creation, a physical realm of the sort that is at stake when Marduk “piled huge mountains on her paps and through them drove water-holes.” Intrinsically characterless, the Receptacle can contain no features comparable to mountains or water holes. Not only must it not be designated as “earth” or “water,” but, Plato adds shrewdly, it does not even consist of “any of their compounds or components” (51a). Of what then does it consist? The answer is regions, that is, primal zones in which elementary sensibilia cling to each other in momentary assemblages. Thanks to the cosmological rule that like seeks like, groups of these qualities gather into primeval regions.
Now the nurse of Becoming, being made watery and fiery and receiving the characters of earth and air, and qualified by all the other affections that go with these, had every sort of diverse appearance to the sight; but because it was filled with powers that were neither alike nor evenly balanced, there was no equipoise in any region of it; but it was everywhere swayed unevenly and shaken by these things, and by its motion shook them in turn. And they, being thus moved, were perpetually being separated and carried in different directions. . . . [The Receptacle] separated the most unlike kinds farthest apart from one another, and thrust the most alike closest together; whereby the different kinds came to have different regions, even before the ordered whole consisting of them came to be.54
I cite this long passage to underscore the fact that in the Platonic cosmology regions, or perhaps better, protoregions, arise in the very beginning. The shaking or “winnowing”55 action of the Receptacle, carrying like into the company of like, is itself an action of regionalization: it renders the Space of the Receptacle regional in status.
(2) A region is not just a formal condition of possibility. It is a substantive place-of-occupation. Chōra, translated both as “region” and as “space” by Cornford, connotes occupied place, for example, a field full of crops or a room replete with things. A region includes both the container and the contained—terms Aristotle insists on keeping separate—and we can make ostensive reference to it as “this region” (whereas, as Plato insists, we cannot refer to a merely evanescent sensible quality as “this”). A choric region is substantive without being a substance: rather than a thing, it is a locatory matrix for things.56 Such a region is finally a matter of place rather than of space—if “place” implies finite locatedness and “space” infinite or indefinite extension. Despite its curious adumbration of the modern idea of space as something invisible, the Receptacle remains above all a scene of implacement.57
The Receptacle is place-providing twice over. First, as we have just seen, it is inherently regionalized and regionalizing. In this capacity, it “clears space for” groups of similar qualities, furnishing them with their “leeway.”58 Regions in this sense are primal zones—not altogether unlike the major “zones” of psychosexuality identified by Freud. Just as the psychosexual zones are located on (or, better, in) the lived body while not being sharply demarcated there, so the cosmological zones structure the body of the Receptacle and are not strictly bounded (in a region, like draws to like; but likeness is a matter of degree and so cannot be rigorously delimited). Second, the openness and vagueness of a region call for a much more particular sense of place: place as topos. Although Plato does not always bother to distinguish between chōra and topos, he needs this very distinction when he comes to discuss the “primary bodies” constructed by the Demiurge. For each such body, formed as it is from sensible qualities and regular geometrical shapes, “is something coming to be in a certain place” (52a)—that is, in its own topos as determined by its outer form along with its volume. But this topos is in turn located in a region, an encompassing but delimited portion of choric space.59
Just as chōra precedes creation—it is what the Demiurge encounters upon his intervention into the scheme of things: hence its Necessity—so particular topoi ensue from creation. Demiurgic creation consists in the configuration and specification of things in particular places within a pregiven (and already regionalized) Space.
III
In the Enuma Elish as well creation consists in the production of particular places out of preexisting regions, even if it is true that the kind of particularity differs in the two cases: in the Sumerian epic the particularity belongs to architectural and civic entities, not to simple physical bodies. Where the Enuma Elish is resolutely finite and historical—being finally about the founding of Babylon—the Timaeus purports to be transfinite and nonhistorical. Moreover, the kind of generality varies in the two accounts: the down-to-earth materiality of the precosmic regions (e.g., sweet and bitter waters) posited in the earlier text is superseded by the purely receptive regions of the Greek tale of creation. Yet the overall movement from diffuseness of region to concision of place is found in both stories—as is the root notion of matrix, which characterizes the notion of region in each case.
The deeper difference between the two epics, one composed before the second millennium and the other in the fourth century B.C., is found elsewhere: the transition from cosmogony to cosmology. Where genesis is the constant concern of a cosmogonic text such as the Enuma Elish, “becoming” (by which one may translate genesis) is only one of three main concerns in the Timaeus. Put most pithily, these concerns are “Being, Space, Becoming—three distinct things” (52d). A thing that becomes (to gignomenon) is distinguishable from that in which it becomes (to en hō gignetai), that is, Space; and both in turn are distinguishable from the Form that supplies the timeless pattern of the becoming-thing. While sensible things are perishable and Space is “everlasting,”60 Forms are eternal. The mere fact that Forms are expressly considered as equiprimordial with Space and Becoming indicates that we have now entered the domain of cosmology, moving from muthos to logos. For the created cosmos is what it is only insofar as it is permeated by a logos, a permanent structure; and the proper account of such a cosmos is a “rational account” (another of the basic meanings of logos). Philosophy furnishes such an account, and it is in this respect that it differs most markedly from myth. Even if Plato himself considered the Timaeus as no more than a “likely story” (29a), and even if contemporary philosophers may take him at his word and despair over the status of such a story,61 it remains undeniable that with the Timaeus we have taken a fateful step into cosmology. What is merely “likely” (eikos) about the account is precisely what survives within it of the cosmogonic: for example, the matricial status of the Receptacle, the role and actions of the creator, the quasi-narrative ordering of the tale, the stress on material qualities. When we read that the Receptacle “was everywhere swayed unevenly and shaken by these things, and by its motion shook them in turn” (52e), we can almost imagine this to be a description of Tiamat herself (especially in her monstrous, sea-serpent phase). But the lack of proper names—the fiercesome “Marduk” has been replaced by a faceless “Demiurge”—is a sign that we are in a different genre of discourse with different aims and different stakes. If the Receptacle is said to be, much like Tiamat herself, “watery and fiery,” still the Receptacle only receives these qualities and reflects them: not actually characterized by the qualities it receives, the receptacle is not what it appears to be. Since it is the prelogical collocation of regions where such qualities appear, the Receptacle certainly can seem monstrous and chaotic, a matter of wild sensibility; but it is not sensible, indeed it is not even matter. As Derrida remarks, “Chōra receives all the determinations, so as to give [a] place [to them], but it does not possess any of them properly. It possesses them, it has them (since it receives them), but it does not possess them as properties, it possesses nothing properly.”62
What then is the Receptacle in the end? Hupodochē, one of its names in Greek (besides dechomenon, literally “the recipient”), gives a crucial clue. The Receptacle is what lies under (hupo) that which appears in the physical world. It is an underlying “region of regions”—to borrow a concept from Husserl (who, however, applied it to consciousness, not to the material world).63 Not being that “out of which” (ex hou) things are made (as is Tiamat), it is the “in which” (en hō) on which things (qualities, powers, motions: ultimately perceptible things) come to appearance, exchange positions, and gain their place. Not strictly heterogeneous itself (for it is not material enough to be diverse), it nevertheless underlies the heterogeneity of the physical universe and makes this heterogeneity possible. Its violent rocking guarantees that its occupants will be changing places continually.
All are changing the direction of their movement, this way and that, towards their own regions; for each [primary body], in changing its size, changes also the situation of its region. In this way, then, and by these means there is a perpetual safeguard for the occurrence of that heterogeneity which provides that the perpetual motion of these bodies is and shall be without cessation.64
This passage makes it clear that even the primal regions of the Receptacle are by no means stationary or secure. For the region of a given kind of body cannot be considered a fixed sector to which it adverts as to something settled: “There [is] no equipoise in any region of it.”65 In fact, both the generic region and the particular place of a given body are in a state of ongoing mutation. This is due to the character of the Receptacle as “all-receiving (pandeches)” (51a), that is, reflecting every kind of change: changes in motion, quality, quantity, and so on.
The Receptacle is accordingly the bearer (but not the begetter) of all that occurs in the sensible world.66 It bears up (under) all that is located in (elemental) regions and (particular) places, thereby “providing a situation for all things that come into being” (52b). But despite its considerable locatory power, the Receptacle remains the referent of a bare cosmological “this.” There is, after all, no Form of Space.67
A strange beast, a half-bred hybrid, this Receptacle. It is at once locatory and yet not itself located, permanent and yet invisible, underlying and yet nonsubstantial. Plato avers that it is “apprehended without the senses by a sort of bastard reasoning, and [is] hardly an object of belief” (52b), and he analogizes its perception to that of a dream.68 The Receptacle is also a hybrid entity in another, still more encompassing, sense. It stands between, even as it combines, myth and science. In particular, it stands between the Enuma Elish and Aristotle’s Physics. It has too much “reasoning” and too little “belief” for the Sumerian epic, and yet exhibits too desultory a form of thinking and possesses too little materiality for the Aristotelian treatise. If Tiamat gives way to chōra in the Timaeus, chōra will cede place to Topos in the Physics. The Platonic cosmology of regionalized Place precariously and provocatively straddles the tenebrous middle realm between the mythics of elemental matrices and the physics of pinpointed places.
IV
Imagine the shock of the Demiurge, that eminently rational creator who intends to model the world on the pattern of an unchanging Form, when he confronts the crazy-quilt, irregular motions of the Receptacle: motions generated by “errant causes” (48a). Given his wish “to make this world most nearly like that intelligible thing which is best and in every way complete” (30d)—that is, a Form—he cannot but be chagrined by the tumultuous spectacle, indeed threatened by it in ways that recall the disorientation and fear that an angry and defiant Tiamat occasioned in the objects of her wrath. In the Mesopotamian legend, Tiamat had to be killed and her carcass transmuted before ordering could begin. In the Platonic tale, however, persuasion rather than physical force is invoked to bring the unruly Receptacle into rationally regulated behavior: “Reason overruled Necessity by persuading her to guide the greatest part of the things that become towards what is best” (48a). The mastery of the matrix arises from the rule of reason rather than by the application of brute force.
It was just because of the nondistinction between primordial space and material body—between Tiamat-as-place and Tiamat-as-body—that her body had to be destroyed, physically obliterated, in order to make way for a world-ordering use of space such as Marduk instituted in building Babylon. Insofar as chōra and the sensible qualities appearing in it are distinguished in the Timaeus from the start, there can be an ordering of these qualities without recourse to acts of outright obliteration. Furthermore, even before the intervention of the Demiurge a significant amount of structuring—if not rational ordering—has already taken place, thanks to the apportioning of the sensible qualities in accordance with the assimilation of like to like. Rough and ready as this assimilation is (it never reaches a settled state), still it does present the Demiurge with a prospect that is not utterly chaotic. The prospect remains challenging, however.
Desiring, then, that all things should be good and, so far as might be, nothing imperfect, the god [i.e., the Demiurge] took over all that is visible—not at rest, but in discordant and unordered motion—and brought it from disorder into order, since he judged that order was in every way the better. (Timaeus 30a)
But if the motion in the Receptacle is indeed tumultuous, it is nevertheless a local motion, that is to say, a motion that occurs in distinctive places and regions.69 Such “locomotion” guarantees a minimal coherency even in the precreationist moment. (Conversely, at least some of this same wandering motion, this errant causation, survives creation: the errancy continues to haunt the created cosmos as well.)70
However ill- or unordered the aboriginal state may be, the Demiurge must set to work with what he is given. Not being omnipotent, he is constrained by this pregivenness: he can introduce only “as much order and proportion as Necessity allows.”71 The act of creation thus brings about structure and not simply things that did not previously exist. Creation is the creation of order. The Demiurge urges—urges Necessity to bring forth order, if not “with the greatest possible perfection” (53b), at least to the extent of an ordering that is effected by the infusion of the mathematical into the sensible.
It is striking that both Marduk and the Demiurge have recourse to mathematics at approximately the same critical point. Once Marduk is able to survey the scene of his triumph over Tiamat, he can “measure out and mark in” positions and directions within “the immensity of the firmament.” In the case of the Demiurge, the inspiration and source of mathematics also reside in the sky, that is, in the periodicity of celestial motion.72 The special power of mathematics to shape a cosmos proceeds from the sky downward: “The operation of Reason is carried, so far as may be, into the dark domain of the irrational powers.”73 Seemingly against all odds, what Aristophanes had called “deep Dark’s bottomless wombs”—the womb of Tiamat’s generativity as well as the womb of chōra’s agitated motion—come to yield order, a distinctively mathematical order at that.
If creation is to work, it must bring together—must literally articulate—the most advanced state achievable by the Receptacle “even before the Heaven came into being” (52d) with the most elementary form of mathematical ordering. As Cornford comments, “from the abyss of bodily ‘powers’ in complete abstraction from the works of Reason, we now ascend to the lowest level at which the element of order and design contributed by the Demiurge can be discerned in the turbulent welter of fire, air, water, and earth.”74 To depict this situation graphically, we can imagine two triangles touching at their respective tips. The bottom triangle (“N” for Necessity) represents the “abyss” and “turbulent welter” of the Receptacle—recalling the abyss of Apsu and the tumult of Tiamat—and the upper triangle (“R” for Reason) the “order and design” of mathematical rationality.
The point of overlap (“d”)—that is, where the two factors of Necessity and Reason touch at their tips—is “depth” (bathos), which Merleau-Ponty has termed “the dimension of dimensions.”75 For depth is a dimension of every spatial span and spread, no matter how such a stretch may be determined or measured. It is even an important dimension of motion, including that primal motion by which, in the Receptacle, like seeks like and unlike drifts away from unlike.
Depth is also a feature of every surface, and it is by virtue of depth-of-surface, even more than by depth-of-motion, that the fateful step is taken from the realm of sheer sensible qualities (the proper constituents of the Receptacle) to the material bodies whose stereometric shapes are supplied by the Demiurge in his first and most definitive world-creative act. Depth is at once the mediatrix between sensible quality and body and that which enables the application of geometry to material body itself.
In the first place, then, it is of course obvious to anyone that fire, earth, water, and air are bodies; and all body has depth. Depth, moreover, must be bounded by surface; and every surface that is rectilinear is composed of triangles.76
It is from the combination of two such triangles—the right-angled isosceles and the half-equilateral—that all four of the solid geometrical figures of the primary bodies are constructed. For the pyramid (fire), octahedron (air), icosahedron (water), and cube (earth) are each three-dimensional figures whose surfaces are constituted from these triangles (the surfaces of a cube from the isosceles; those of the other figures from the half-equilateral). What matters in such applied mathematics is less its intrinsic plausibility—for which a convincing case can in fact be made77—than its earnest effort to mathematize what in the original state of the Receptacle remains rudely rough in character. It is this effort that is the proper work (ergon), the sole creative task, of the Demiurge (construed literally as a “working for the people”).78 It is the mathematizing of the Receptacle that counts, for here alone Reason is able to win over Necessity to its own aims.79
V
We witness in Plato’s “likely story” a general movement from a space that is radically heterogeneous to a space that is on its way to becoming homogeneous. In Eliade’s terms, this is a movement from a “sacred space” of discontinuity and difference (e.g., between a temple and the profane space outside it) to a “secular space” of homogenized and all-too-predictable equiformity.80 On Heidegger’s assessment, it is an adumbration of a distinctly modern conception of space.81 In the language of the Timaeus itself, it is a movement from the erratic (and rectilinear) motions of sensible qualities to the regular (and circular) trajectories of geometrized physical bodies that imitate the motions of the heavenly bodies. But likely or not, prophetic or not, where does this story leave us with regard to the question of place? What does the Timaean cosmogenesis have to say about topogenesis?
What it has to say is that place itself—topos—is a derivative and comparatively late moment in a sequence of three stages whose first two moments are concerned with chōra.
Space: a matrix for particular places that is ingredient in and coextensive with the Receptacle as a whole; to be placed herein is to be placed in Space (chōra), that is, to be placed somewhere (but at no specific place or region) in the Receptacle regarded as a massive spatial sphere, beyond which there is Nothing, not even the Void. Thus Space “signifies total implacement”82—but only in the most nascent state.
Primal Regions: areas within the Receptacle constituted by the changing clusterings of like sensible qualities—areas that never attain strict homogeneity; were they to do so, motion would cease: “Motion will never exist in a state of homogeneity” (57e); such stasis is in any case precluded by the continual transformation of one primary body into another.83
Particular Places within Primal Regions: the discrete topoi that fully formed sensible bodies occupy. Each such place is thus a locus within a primal region composed of similar bodies; the locus itself is not stationary but is in effect the traced trajectory of the movement of these bodies as they change place from moment to moment.
The Timaean tale is thus a story of increasing implacement. The first two stages both preexist and succeed the intervention of the Demiurge: choric spatiality and regionality remain throughout. The last stage is not so much created by the craftsman-god as fashioned by him out of the material supplied by the first two. For the shape-bestowing geometrism of the Demiurge affects only the form of sensible bodies—not their quality, power, depth, matter, or motion. In endowing these bodies with stereometric form, the Demiurge is more of a micro-manager than a creator-god. His efforts are restricted to forming the exact fit required by any particular topos, since the shape and size of a material body situated in a given place cannot be incompatible with the surfaces of surrounding bodies. The Demiurgic action is mainly a matter of the configuration and covariation of an already (and always) existing choric Necessity.
The pertinacity of chōra illustrates a quite general point. In the Timaeus we find—in keeping with a classical Greek concern for maintaining well-ordered equilibria, usually in the form of means between extremes—a delicate but firm balance between such polar terms as Reason and Necessity, homogeneity and heterogeneity, the disorderly and the mathematized. This balance is most saliently seen in the complementarity that exists between the irregularity of aberrant bodily motions before the Demiurge intervenes and the regularity of geometric shapes grafted onto the erratically moving bodies. As Albert Rivaud remarks,
The theory of elementary figures is destined to explain how order is introduced into the moving chaos of qualities. By their definite and invariable properties, these figures infuse a certain fixity into Becoming. But they do not form its substance, which remains constituted by changing qualities.84
It is not so much that the initially wild motions are “subordinated”85 by the Demiurge—such a term would be more suitable in describing the martial confrontation between Marduk and Tiamat—as that errancy and regularity cooperate in the constitution of a world that is a conjoint product, a literal bi-product, of their disparate tendencies. For this reason, it is difficult to say whether the Demiurge imposes order on the Receptacle or draws out what is already immanent in its pregiven necessities. Perhaps, as Alfred North Whitehead suggests, both claims are true.
Plato in the Timaeus affords an early instance of wavering between the two doctrines of Law, [i.e. between] Immanence and Imposition. In the first place, Plato’s cosmology includes an ultimate creator, shadowy and undefined, imposing his design upon the Universe. [But] secondly, the action and reaction of the internal constituents is—for Plato—the self-sufficient explanation of the flux of the world.86
VI
when everything wassunless desertdowncast soundless night
things-not-thingsunfilled
by the still empty MotherTimberStuff
for this was a slack time her lovely bodyforms had yet to employ
then WorldMother Start worked everything into her fashion
drawing them for safety and health into her body
to give them birth
she bore the universe her beauty’s/cosmos which is also order
unhooked earth from sky unfurled endless land and sea
untangling them from each other
after she’d considered everything
before shuffling each into place
the god . . . since she had no clear choice
separated into shape her once aimless body 87
This Hellenistic poem of creation sets forth an important variant. “MotherTimberStuff” (hulē), the matrix of creation, fills herself with things that are not yet fully things—with what “had not yet had its character struck”88—and proceeds to create. She creates first by separating regions from each other, dislodging earth from sky and dissevering land from sea. Thanks to this primal diairesis (division), she is able to find determinate places for created things, “shuffling each into place.” As in Genesis and the Theogony, the Enuma Elish and the Timaeus, creation of the world occurs as the creation of regions and of places; and in every instance as well the creation of regions (chōrai) precedes the creation of places (topoi). But there is a decisive difference in the above text of Heraclitos the Grammarian. Instead of calling for the intervention of another figure—a male creator-god, a master of creation: Yahweh, Zeus, Marduk, the Demiurge—the “WorldMother” does the creating on her own and from her own. She creates the world out of her own “lovely body-forms.” It is a matter of autochthonous birth, birth from a self-ingesting and self-generating matrix. This mater-mother, far from needing the external assistance of an independent master, creates sui generis. She separates herself “into shape,” mastering her own matrix.
The disparity between this account and previous phallogocentric versions of creation is momentous (it bristles with gender issues), but the choice between them may be as undecidable as whether the Timaeus presents us with a paradigm of Imposition or Immanence. Just as we may wonder indefinitely which of these latter is the truer term, so we may inquire without respite as to whether a matrocentric or phallogocentric model is the truer one. In keeping with the logic of undecidability, we may very well be led to say: neither one nor the other, and both.89
The same undecidability pertains to a still more pressing question: Does place precede the creation of the world—being presupposed by it—or is place a result of creation itself? Place is definitely not precedent if by “place” is meant something like a particular locale or spot: anything of this order of specificity, that is, of the order of topos or of thesis (position), misses the mark. For it would be manifestly absurd for world-creation to be inaugurated in a scene in which places already existed in complete determinacy: creation then would be superfluous, since the world would be already constituted in large measure as a world, being place-ordered in advance. Just as there is no place without a world for, and of, places, so there is no world without places, without definite loci in which things and events can appear: every world is a place-world. (This latter claim is merely an extension of the Archytian axiom.) Given the intrinsic, internal relationship between place and world, it is senseless to say that place precedes world or is presupposed by the creation of the world (whether this creation is autogenous or interventionist in character).
Yet, by the same token, it is not the case that place is a mere product of such creation. We have found, massively, that place in one sense or another is continually at stake throughout the process of creation: if not in the form of discrete topoi, then as predeterminate (and often quite indeterminate) parts of the scene of creation. Such pregivenness can be thematized as such—as occurs precisely in the Timaeus, which posits a precosmic Space (the Receptacle) and various regions (chōrai) within this Space. But it also can be left quite implicit, as happens in Hesiod’s allusions to a primal Chaos, a state we have found to possess its own peculiar place-predicates. Even when the role of place seems to be expressly denied—as at the beginning of the Enuma Elish (“no heaven, no earth, no height, no depth”) or in a Sumero-Akkadian purification ritual that begins with the words “No place for the bright house . . . no land [or] sea”90—we may still detect the presence of place in a prospective or residual sense. Close inspection reveals a primordial process of implacement at work, whether by claiming that “in the waters gods were created” or by referring to “motion in sea cunt.”91 Indeed, wherever an “in” is employed, place is already at stake—if not literally, then as an active force all the same. This is what we learn from Plato’s careful description of the Receptacle as a Space in which things happen and appear, including the event of creation itself. If places are thus always part of creation and coextensive with it, they cannot be regarded as its mere outcome—as on a par with, say, the creation of the human species in Genesis or the city of Babylon by Marduk. In these latter cases, something is brought forth that was not present beforehand, not even in an amorphous format.
But we can also say, and for a not dissimilar set of reasons, that place is both presupposed and produced in the course of creation. On the one hand, there can be no altogether ex nihilo act of creation if by this is meant an act of creation taking place nowhere at all. As we have seen, the very same lines of Genesis that are so often cited to confirm ex nihilo cosmogonies contain the unambiguous conditional clause that even the most exalted monotheistic God can create only if He moves over “the face of the Deep.” Just as depth implies place—depth brings with it depth-of-place, qualifying distance, motion, surface, size, and shape—so place implies depth, something of sufficient extent into which to step. No wonder that Tiamat, that creature of cosmogonic depth par excellence, continues to haunt the Old Testament.92 In this instance, place is presupposed conceptually and linguistically and mythically (not to mention religiously). If other instances are less dramatic or overdetermined, they are no less crucially dependent on place as a condition of creation.
On the other hand, it is also true that place is an ens creatum; it is something set forth by creation, where by “set forth” I do not mean brought into existence for the first time (i.e., as a new product) but endowed with enhanced emphasis or structural specificity. Such endowment is just what happens in the Timaeus, where the ingression of geometrical shapes gives greater exactitude to the primal regions occupied by emergent material bodies within the circumambience of the Receptacle. To the extent that a given topos, that is, a discrete place, fits and reflects precisely (and only) what it holds and locates—and thus is changed decisively if what it situates changes shape, however minutely—then indeed we can speak of the literal production of places out of resident regions. In the Platonic text, this drawing forth is less ontological than geometrical, since it consists in the grafting of formal shapes onto vagrant entities. It is this engrafting that pro-duces the determinate places whose pregeometrized forebears are found in the loosely assembled and spontaneously engendered regions of the Receptacle.
Neither/nor, both/and: not only can we not decide in any definitive manner between these two options as ways of expressing the relationship between creation and place, but, still more significantly, we must affirm each option. The either/or of a forced choice between such alternatives, either one or the other, yields to the inclusive “or” of affirming both together. It follows that creation is at once of place and from place. From creation, place proceeds; but it, creation itself, takes place only in place.93
VII
If the immediately preceding reflections seem to rely too readily on the undecidable, I would suggest that they in fact only carry forward into reflective discourse what is already present, at least implicitly, in various texts examined in this and the previous chapter. Even in quite fragmentary utterances, such as the text of Heraclitos with which I began the last section, we find a stance of “having it both ways.” There, too, place (the WorldMother’s body) was both presupposed and produced (i.e., as earth and sky, land and sea, and more particular places). And we see the same dual cosmologic at work even in the following suggestive lines from the Orphic Argonautica.
everything was born
everything pulled apart
from one another.94
If everything has been born, this must apply to place as well as to things-in-places. Place itself would have to be a created product. But if everything is born as “pulled apart from one another,” then equally everything is born in some place (for there can be no pulling apart except from or into a place). Everything is born placed: to be born at all is to be born as a separated being with its own place. The process of birth itself is no exception to this rule, since there is parturition only from within place. This is not only to presume place at the origin of things, along with other pregivennesses; still more audaciously, it is to posit it as this origin.
It is evident that the frequent invocation of water or waters as there from the beginning—most conspicuously in Genesis and in the Enuma Elish, but also in many other ancient accounts of creation (“in the beginning there was nothing but water, water, water”)95—is an invocation as much of a place or a region as of a generative source. It is an invocation of place-as-source. The same is true of such other nonaqueous elements as the “sunless desert” in Heraclitos’s “Homeric Allegory” or the earth on which there was not “even a wild bush” in the older Hebrew cosmogony of the Yahwist tradition.96 In both of these latter cases, a precosmic Place is posited as/at the very source of the creation that will take place on it. Such a place is indispensable to the taking-place of creation itself. In and from this place will come myriad items of creation that will at once populate the created world and occupy singular topoi within it. In this manner places will be added to Place; or, better, the latter will be seen as harboring the former.
Could it be that this is what Plato had in mind when he in effect deconstructed the idea of obdurate physical body—the focus of earlier physiocratic speculation—as a candidate for the elementary unit of the Receptacle? Could it be that the most primordial items are not elements, much less atoms, but choric regions? Is this not what Aristophanes meant when he placed the “deep Dark” before “air earth or sky”? Could it be that Place (e.g., chōra as Space and Region)97 provides, perhaps ultimately is, deep Dark’s own “bottomless wombs”—matrices, however unillumined, that are place-bearers?
If the answers to such questions are in the affirmative, Archytas would be vindicated again, and even twice over. For place indeed would be (as Archytas put it pithily) “the first of all things.”98 It would be this not only for the formal reason that every physical thing must occupy some particular place but also for the substantive reason that the generation of the world itself must take place in, from, and as place. If so, place is cosmically and even precosmically privileged.
To affirm this privilege is to reinforce the quite basic idea, which emerged in the first chapter, that the notion of no-place, and in particular the conception of a sheer void preceding the creation of the world, is highly problematic. The facility of the rhetorical gesture by which such a void—whether termed “Gap” or “abyss” or “interval”—is assumed to constitute the aboriginal state of things should not obscure the fact that on close examination few, if any, accounts of world-creation consistently maintain a strict nowhereness at the origin of things. Consider these famous lines of Milton’s in Paradise Lost:
The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.99
At first glance these lines seem to offer a straightforward ex nihilo version of the state of the universe before Creation. To be “without bound” and “without dimension” is to be without depth—and thus to be, as I have just argued, without place. And yet Milton’s explicit allusions to Chaos and Night100 as well as to the “hoary deep” and to “a dark illimitable ocean”—to what the Romans called immensi tremor oceani—point us unmistakably to primal regions that precede any act of creation. It is also revealing that the poet says that “time and place are lost”: he does not say that they do not exist in this precreationist moment. To be lost is still to exist, however amorphously or covertly. In the Miltonic account, place is still very much around—as much as it is in Hebraic or Platonic cosmogonies. In no instance is the comparative shapelessness of place—its lack of “length, breadth, and highth”—a reason for doubting its preexisting and persisting being.101
I single out Milton because the account he presents in the above passage illustrates the continuing power of anxiety before the void. In the opening pages of this part I referred to the extreme measures we take to avoid confronting the possibility of there being no place at all in our lives—or even, as we may now add, in our speculation about the origin of the world. Milton’s elegant poetic-mythic synthesis is itself one such extreme measure, filling up the looming void with the “confusion” of Chaos and Night. Other extremes include those accounts of creation that posit places as existing from the beginning. In the latter case, the very intolerability of no-place influences the account itself, an account that, circuitously or directly, indicates that we never need fear reaching actual placelessness, not even at the very start of the known universe. For if creation is itself an ur-scene, it is ineluctably a Place of considerable cosmogonic significance.
Is this not the lesson of the Pelasgian myth that (as we saw in chapter 1) states, “In the beginning, Eurynome, the Goddess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, but found nothing substantial for her feet to rest upon, and therefore divided the sea from the sky, dancing lonely upon its waves"? Does not any such primal creation-and-division of place express an effort to escape, at all costs, from a situation of being altogether without place? Deeper than what Friedrich Nietzsche calls a “will to nothingness”—“man would rather will nothingness than not will”102—may be an effort to will place itself in place of the void. Such a will, I suspect, is the Ariadne’s thread connecting all the disparate views of creation we have considered: disparate in historical and geographic location, in conscious intention, and in explicit textuality.
This is not to say, however, that place is simply the opposite of void, as if it were merely a matter of replacing the void with a plenum. Even the place-proffering Receptacle, though it is expressly designed as a critique of the void of the Atomists, is not, strictly speaking, a plenum.103 Place includes much indissociable absence—as depth, as distance, as difference of location, as dislocation itself. Place neither fills up a void nor merely papers over it. It has its own mixed, ambiguous being. But one of its essential properties is its connectivity—its power to link up, from within, diversely situated entities or events.104 The placefulness of the Receptacle, “providing a situation for all things that come into being” (Timaeus 52b), is at one with its connectiveness, its choric capacity for furnishing an ongoing ambience for like and unlike alike. Although the Receptacle must appear to the rational mind of the Demiurge as “discordant and unordered,” we have found Plato’s actual account to allow for massive preordination: for an entire immanent order of things “even before the Heaven came into being.” This in-dwelling order is the basis for the Receptacle’s considerable connectiveness.
In the end—or more exactly, in the beginning—the Receptacle offers what Whitehead calls a “community of locus” for its various inhabitants, a “real communication between ultimate realities.”105 The Receptacle thus furnishes what I have elsewhere called “in-gathering.”106 Thanks to its connection-making capacity, the precosmic Receptacle gathers heterogeneous constituents into the arc of its Space, giving place to what otherwise might be depthless or placeless—thus allaying the most acute metaphysical anxiety. Its action creates implacement for everything, in-gathered within its encompassing embrace. In Plato’s own words, “it is always receiving all things” (50b).
In this way we rejoin the idea of place as matrix with which this chapter opened. If we have had to reject the notion of place as a material begetter, as a physical fons et origo—these literalistic meanings of “matrix” being questioned by the working of the Receptacle, which, unlike Tiamat’s monster-begetting body, lead us to distinguish between sensible quality, material body, and place—there has emerged a valid matricial sense of place that consists in the sheer connectiveness that place in all its guises uniquely affords. From Plato we learn that receptivity is connectivity.
But we are by no means restricted to the Receptacle as a paradigm of implacement, evocative and suggestive as this paradigm remains still today. Other models are possible if it is indeed true that placing and being placed are matters of connecting, whether in the context of cosmogony or cosmology, of phenomenology or metaphysics, or in everyday life. Just as there is no place without depth, so there is no place that does not connect the disparities of being and experience, of perception and language, of chaos and cosmos. And if it is also true that (as Kierkegaard said) “existence separates,” then we need to heed E. M. Forster’s celebrated counsel: “only connect!”107 Both Kierkegaard and Forster were thinking more of people than of places. But it is in and by places that the most lasting and ramified connections, including personal connections, are to be made.
If place is “there as a matrix for everything” (Timaeus 50c), it tempers any fear that a matrix of places—whether this be conceived as primordial waters, as night, as chaos, as earth, or as Receptacle—is a devastating void, an abysmal atopia. If we can think of the Receptacle as some kind of no-place, this is only because, as a reservoir of connections yet to come, or at least yet to be specified, its place-full and place-filling potentiality is always still to be realized in time-to-come. There is, after all, a right and full time for places to come into being, and even if we have found places to be pervasively present at the creation of things, their destiny is also to be ongoing and ever-increasing in their connectivity.
Place is thus, in Plato’s own word, “ever-lasting.” And, just as this last locution—aei on, the source of aiōnios, means literally “always in being”—brings together time and place, so the same two forces are conjoined in a telling Neoplatonic fragment of the sixth century A.D.:
everything you see PLACE or
TIME
which separate in Two
making a double pair
OROMESDESwho is Light
Ahura-Mazda
AREIMANIOSwho is Dark
Ariman
PLACE
(Topos)
——Zerauné akerené
TIME
(Chronos)108
