“Edward Casey has written a brilliant, elegant, and meticulously thorough analysis of the ‘hidden history of place’ . . . destined to become the standard reference for all those interested in rethinking space, place, location, and containment.”―Elizabeth Grosz, author of Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism

“The problem of ‘place’ and ‘space’ is a crucial one and its lineage in western philosophy has never been traced with such commanding clarity as in Edward Casey’s work. Encyclopedic in range, it is also a splendidly informative book, full of insights and surprises.”―Anders Stephanson, Columbia University

“[This book’s] historical scope is breathtaking; its historical scholarship is prodigious.”―David M. Levin, editor of Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision

“Focusing on the body as a route to recovering a sense of place . . . this book enables us to ‘join’ the supposed poles of realism and idealism, objectivity and subjectivity, sociality and individuality. Scholars will find Casey’s work highly stimulating and groundbreaking in many ways.”―Lawrence Hatab, author of Myth and Philosophy

Edward Casey is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the author of many books, including Getting Back into Place (2nd Ed., 2009).

The Fate of Place

A Philosophical History

By Edward S. Casey

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 1997 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27603-1

Contents

Preface: Disappearing Places, ix,
Acknowledgments, xvii,
Part One From Void to Vessel,
1 Avoiding the Void: Primeval Patterns, 3,
2 Mastering the Matrix: The Enuma Elish and Plato’s Timaeus, 23,
3 Place as Container: Aristotle’s Physics, 50,
Part Two From Place to Space,
Interlude, 75,
4 The Emergence of Space in Hellenistic and Neoplatonic Thought, 79,
5 The Ascent of Infinite Space: Medieval and Renaissance Speculations, 103,
Part Three The Supremacy of Space,
Interim, 133,
6 Modern Space as Absolute: Gassendi and Newton, 137,
7 Modern Space as Extensive: Descartes, 151,
8 Modern Space as Relative: Locke and Leibniz, 162,
9 Modern Space as Site and Point: Position, Panopticon, and Pure Form, 180,
Part Four The Reappearance of Place,
Transition, 197,
10 By Way of Body: Kant, Whitehead, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, 202,
11 Proceeding to Place by Indirection: Heidegger, 243,
12 Giving a Face to Place in the Present: Bachelard, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Irigaray, 285,
Postface: Places Rediscovered, 331,
Notes, 343,
Index, 479,

CHAPTER 1

Avoiding the Void

Primeval Patterns

But, first, they say, there was only the Creator, Taiowa. All else was endless space, Tokpela. There was no beginning and end, time, shape, and life in the mind of Taiowa the Creator.

—Hopi creation myth

At first there was neither Earth nor Sky. Shuzanghu and his wife Zumiang-Nui lived above. One day Shuzanghu said to his wife, “How long must we live without a place to rest our feet?”

—Dhammai legend

1

Following Nietzsche’s admonition, in The Genealogy of Morals, that “man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose,” there is an area of human experience in which, indeed, the void plays a constitutive and recognized role. This occurs in theories of creation that concern themselves with how things came into being in the first place. “In the first place”: a quite problematic posit. For if there is a cosmic moment in which no things yet exist, it would seem that places could not exist at that “time” either. Although places are not things in any usual (e.g., material) sense, they are some kind of entity or occasion: they are not nothing. If, at this primeval moment (which might last an eternity), absolutely nothing exists, how could anything like a place exist, even if that place were merely to situate a thing? Such a situation is not only one of nonplace but of no-place-at-all: utter void.

It is by dint of this distinctive “cosmologic” that the notion of no-place becomes something with which any thoughtful account of creation has to contend. Despite its status as an apparently ineluctable inference from cosmological reasoning, the notion of sheer void is akin to the empty place that gives rise to so much existential angst among human beings. It has even been proposed that the Judeo-Christian creator God may have experienced an analogue of this anxiety: a divine separation that is just as intolerable as the predicament of a person separated from secure place. If so, the creator might well have been as desperate to populate the cosmic void with plenary presences as mortals are to fill in their own much more finite voids. Indeed, He or She might well have been willing to engage in an act of self-emptying in order to generate contents available nowhere else. In this paradoxical action of kenosis (from kenon, “void”), the creator would have created a void within as a first step toward filling the void without.

Place is especially problematic from a cosmological perspective if the world or universe is held to be something created to begin with. On doctrines of noncreation that affirm the permanent presence of things, place-along with everything else-will have been in existence forever. “Know that the world is uncreated” runs a passage from the Jain Mahapurana. Despite its espousal of eternal plenitude, such a claim characteristically adverts to the notion of varying manifestations of a single uncreated universe, thereby allowing for change and development. For instance, in Hindu cosmogony we find that “no original creation of the universe can be imagined; but there are alternations, partial and complete, of manifestation and withdrawal.”

Far from offering an exception to the pervasiveness of place, doctrines of noncreation only reinforce place’s necessity. For if neither creation nor a creator is responsible for the way things are, then the existence, concatenation, and fate of things will owe much to place. Archytas of Tarentum maintained that to be (at all) is to be in (some) place. Modifying this Archytian axiom only slightly, we may say that if the things of the world are already in existence, they must also already possess places. The world is, minimally and forever, a place-world. Indeed, insofar as being or existence is not bestowed by creation or creator, place can be said to take over roles otherwise attributed to a creator-god or to the act of creation: roles of preserving and sustaining things in existence. For if things were both uncreated and unplaced, they could not be said to be in any significant sense. Given a primal implacement—a genuine “first place”—that is independent of creation or creator, things would fulfill at least one strict requirement for existing. If separation is a condition for creation, implacement is a sine qua non for things to be—even if they have never been created.

But let us focus on the cosmogonic circumstance in which the universe considered as a topocosm is held to come forth from an act of creation. I borrow the word “topocosm” from ethnologists, who use it to designate the comparatively stable world system, the cosmology, of traditional societies. The word fortuitously brings together “place” and “cosmos,” thereby suggesting that in the complete constitution of a cosmos, that is, a well-ordered world, place has a prominent role to play. In fact, as we have just witnessed, place figures centrally even in scenarios of noncreation; and (as we shall soon see) it is indissociable from the notion of utter void. In all of these instances, place presents itself not just as a particular dramatis persona, an actor in the cosmic theater, but as the very scene of cosmogenesis, the material or spiritual medium of the eternal or evolving topocosm. Cosmogenesis is topogenesis—throughout and at every step.

“Cosmogony” names this double genesis. It means an account of how the created universe came to be. “Genesis” (a word that lies buried in “cosmogony” itself) implies becoming in the most capacious sense, and is not to be reduced to temporal development alone. This is why cosmogonic myths and tales are rarely consecutive in any consistent, much less chronometric, manner. The narration they proffer is not chronological; their logic is a cosmologic, not a chronologic. Cosmologic deals with the elemental interpenetration of simultaneously present entities rather than with their successive evolution from one stage to another. For this reason, the transition from cosmogony to cosmology—a transition I shall trace out in the next chapter—is somewhat less abrupt than certain historians of ideas have suggested. For the genesis of the cosmos already contains highly configured and densely conjunctive elements that at least portend logos, or rational structure. Place is basic to such protostructuring, since it is place that introduces spatial order into the world—or, rather, shows that in its formative phases the world is already on the way to order. In this way place provides the primary bridge in the movement from cosmogony to cosmology.

Nor is this merely a matter of speculation—of theogony or theology. Concrete rituals of implacement often serve to reaffirm and reinstate the cosmogonic accounts. Upon moving into a new place, as Mircea Eliade recounts, many native peoples perform ceremonies that amount to a reenactment of a cosmogony. For example, the nomadic Australians of the Achilpa tribe carry with them a kauwa-auwa, a sacred pole that they implant in each new campsite. By this act, they at once consecrate the site and connect-by means of a situated axis mundi—with the cosmic force of their mythic ancestor Numbakula, who first fashioned a kauwa-auwa from the trunk of a gum tree. As a result, “the world of the Achilpa really becomes their world only in proportion as it reproduces the cosmos organized and sanctified by Numbakula.” Such a ritual bears on a particular place not in its idiosyncrasy or newness but in its capacity to stand in for a preexisting cosmogonic Place. If it is true that “settling in a territory is equivalent to founding a world,” the settling is a settling of place in terms of place. It is a modeling and sanctifying of this place in view of, and as a repetition of, that place—that primordial Place of creation (and not just the primordial Time of creation: in illo tempore).

Such concrete actions of primal place-instauration stand midway between the abstractions of cosmogonies/cosmologies and the existential predicament of place-bereft individuals. That predicament is one of place-panic: depression or terror even at the idea, and still more in the experience, of an empty place. As some people find the prospect of an unknown place—even a temporary stopping place on an ordinary journey—quite unsettling, many others experience a wholly unfamiliar place to be desolate or uncanny. In both cases, the prospect of a strict void, of an utter no-place, is felt to be intolerable. So intolerable, so undermining of personal or collective identity is this prospect, that practices of place-fixing and place-filling are set in motion right away. In the one case, these practices amount to public rituals reenacting cosmogenesis; in the other, they occur as private rituals of an obsessive cast—efforts to paper over the abyss by any means available. The aim, however, is much the same in both cases: it is to achieve the assurance offered by plenitude of place. The void of no-place is avoided at almost any cost.

It is evident that in any thorough cosmogony the issue of place, and in particular, of no-place, will arise. For one of the most fundamental cosmogonic questions is, where did things begin to be? The response “nowhere” is tempting, especially if the cosmogony is conceived as a strict ex nihilo theory of creation. If the nihil is to be in full force-if there is to be an entirely clean slate before the moment of creation-there can be no whereabouts to begin with: nowhere, nusquam, for to-be-created things to be located. Rather than being a merely nugatory notion, the void here plays the positive (and quite economical) role of satisfying a demand of ex nihilo theorizing.

Such theorizing has two operative premises. First, the universe of things is not permanent or eternal; there was a time when the things we know did not exist. As a consequence, a separate creative force had to bring things into existence: ex nihilo nihil fit. Second, there was a corresponding state of being so strictly void of anything at all that it can be described only as a condition of no-place. To progress from this initial state of no-thing-cum-no-place to the state of created existence—to ens creatum—calls not only for cosmically creative acts but also for a sequential temporality within which the transition from void to plenum can occur. The story of that transition is the narrative of cosmic creation, of cosmogony, itself. Not only does this narrative supervene upon, and express in words, the movement from placelessness to a place-filled existence; it is itself part of the cosmically creative process and inseparable from it: “In the beginning was the Word.” This claim is by no means limited to the Old Testament. The Dogon of Mali also attribute cosmogonic powers to the Word. They conceive of creation as a process of word weaving:

The Word is in the sound of the block and the shuttle. The name of the block means “creaking of the word.” Everybody understands what is meant by “the word” in that connection. It is interwoven with threads: it fills the interstices in the fabric. It belongs to the eight ancestors; the first seven possess it: the seventh is the master of it; it is itself the eighth.

Wherever cosmogenesis is taken seriously—that is, wherever it is not presumed that things simply are as they always were—we are likely to find a narrative of creation.

A cosmogonic narrative is not only a recounting of events in time. Of course, it does relate the act or acts of creation and thus presupposes a cosmic temporality whose minimal structure is that of Before/After: prior to creation/ posterior to creation. But such a narrative also tells of things in place, how things occupy or come to acquire places. It tells, too, of events in place. Events, those prototypical temporal occurrents, call for cosmic implacement: no event can happen unplaced, suspended in a placeless aither. This includes the event of creation itself. It, too, must have its place. Integral to cosmic creation is the creation not just of places for created things as such but of a place for creation (and thus for the creator). Inseparable from topogenesis is cosmogenesis itself.

To create “in the first place” is to create a first place. Perhaps it is true that in the beginning was the Word. But is it not equally likely that in the beginning was a Place—the place of creation itself? Should we assume that the Word precedes Place and brings it into being? Or does not the Word itself presuppose Place? Whichever direction we may prefer to take, it is evident that narrative accounts of creation must bear on place even as they rely on time and language. It behooves us to consider these accounts with an eye to place—and to no-place, that from which places themselves, along with all other things, are so often thought to arise. But how then does the placelessness of nonbeing give way to the placedness of beings? How do these beings gain their existence as well as their place from a primal act of creation that is itself self-placing in character?

II

So things evolved, and out of blind confusion each found its place, bound in eternal order.

—Ovid, Metamorphoses

Might everything have come from chaos? This idea has perennial appeal. Contemporary “chaos theorists” carryon a chain of speculation that stretches backward to some of the earliest extant accounts of creation. The Pelasgian narrative of creation, dating from at least 3500 B.C., runs like this:

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.

The insubstantiality of Chaos, its elemental confusion and gaping character, is what gives rise to the terror with which it is characteristically experienced—a terror closely affiliated with the place-panic occasioned by no-place. But is the “nothing substantial” of Pelasgian Chaos the same thing as nothing whatsoever? Is it equivalent to the sheer void? The proper name “Eurynome,” the creator Goddess of All Things, hints that we must answer both questions in the negative. For Eurynome, taken literally, means “the wide wandering.” A wanderer, even a cosmogonic primal wanderer, cannot wander amid nothing: to wander is to roam between places of some kind. Indeed, that Eurynome “rose naked from Chaos” indicates that Chaos has at least enough substantiality to be something from which to arise in the first place. If this substantiality is not sufficient for surefootedness, it can be made more determinate—as Eurynome proceeds to do when she “therefore divided the sea from the sky,” so as to dance “lonely upon its waves.” The “therefore” is revealing; it possesses the special cosmogonic force of something having to be the case if other things are to obtain.

Suddenly we recall that in I Genesis the separation of the heavens from the earth—and all that ensues from this separation—requires the primordial scission of “the waters from the waters,” that is, the creation of the firmament in an otherwise undifferentiated Deep. We shall return to Genesis presently, but for now let us only note that in the Old Testament and the Pelasgian account alike for creation to proceed differentiation must occur. Moreover, this differentiation is of one place from another. Could “chaos” be another name for this obligatory action of primeval differentiation of places? The opening lines of Hesiod’s Theogony, a text whose composition occurred between the Pelasgian narrative and the writing of Genesis, intimate that this is indeed so:

Verily first of all did Chaos come into being, and then broad-bosomed Gaia [earth], a firm seat of all things for ever, and misty Tartaros in a recess of broad-wayed earth, and Eros, who is fairest among immortal gods, looser of limbs, and subdues in their breasts the mind and thoughtful counsel of all gods and all men. Out of Chaos, Erebos and black Night came into being; and from Night, again, came Aither and Day, whom she conceived and bore after mingling in love with Erebos. And Earth first of all brought forth starry Ouranos [sky], equal to herself, to cover her completely round about, to be a firm seat for the blessed gods for ever. Then she brought forth tall Mountains, lovely haunts of the divine Nymphs who dwell in the woody mountains. She also gave birth to the unharvested sea, seething with its swell, Pontos, without delightful love; and then having lain with Ouranos she bore deep-eddying Okeanos.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Fate of Place by Edward S. Casey. Copyright © 1997 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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