The Fate of Place - Edward Casey

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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.2

      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.3 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.”4

      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.5 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 spiritual6 medium of the eternal or evolving topocosm. Cosmogenesis is topogenesis—throughout and at every step.7

      “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.”8 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,”9 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.10 Second, there was a corresponding

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