The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History

Interim

Interim Place is superior to things in place, so that being in place is being in something superior. -Damascius, In AristoteLis physicorum Libros quinque posteriores commentaria No being exists or can exist unless it is related to space in some way. -Isaac Newton, "De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum" [In modern space] every place is equal to every other. -Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture" Descending from its position as a supreme term within Aristotle's protophenomenological physics, place barely survived discussion by the end of the seventeenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, it vanished altogether from serious theoretical discourse in physics and philosophy. At that moment, we can say of place what Aristotle believes has to be said of time: "It either is not at all or [only] scarcely and dimly" (Physics 217b34). How this radical dissolution and disappearance of place occurred-how place ceded place fully to space in the course of just two centuries-is the subject of the next four chapters, which by their via negativa will set the stage for later developments, to be treated in Part IV. Extending from Bergson and Bachelard to Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari, these later developments will vindicate the high esteem in which place was held in ancient philosophical accounts, but only against the backdrop of the decisive demise of interest in place under scrutiny here, in Part III. Integral to the genius of early modern 133 134 The Supremacy of Space thinkers from Descartes to Leibniz is a disdain for the genius loci: indifference to the specialness of place, above all its inherent "power." Where Aristotle took for granted the power of place-a special noncausal power found in its containing character, its qualitative differentiation, its heterogeneity as a medium, and its anisotropy of direction-Western philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assume that places are merely momentary subdivisions of a universal space quantitatively determined in its neutral homogeneity.1 Places are at best convenient and expedient pockets in the vast intact fabric of what Newton called "absolute space" in 1687. Even the competing idea of "relative space," as articulated by Newton's archrival, Leibniz, will leave little, if any, room for place. I do not want to imply that the marginalization of place as a significant concept arose exclusively during these first two centuries of modernity. Rather, the change took place in an ever-lengthening shadow of preoccupation with space, regarded as absolute and more particularly as infinite (and frequently both together). We have seen this preoccupation surface in ever more manifest forms in late Hellenism and Neoplatonism, in medieval thought of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and in much Renaissance thought. It occurred to an entire succession of thinkers, often of quite diverse backgrounds , that the spatial world could not be contained, and thus could not be conceived, as a matter of place alone. If place implies constriction and delimitation, and if it is always tied to the specificities of a given locale (hence its qualitative character), then some other factor must account for such things as distance and extension, indeed anything sheerly quantitative that refuses to be pinned down to place. Thus talk of "space" arose in the wake ofAristotle: at first, hesitatingly and with a backward glance at Plato (in his employment of chora to designate a roominess that place as topos could not sustain); later and more tellingly, in the invention of spatium (and its medieval variant spacium ) as a way of distinguishing the properly spatial from the merely local (locus taking over the delimited and delimiting role formerly assigned to topos ). It was in exploring the extensiveness of space, its seemingly undelimitable outspread, its unendingness, that the coordinate but distinguishable notions of spatial absoluteness and infinity began to seem irresistible. This is not to say, however, that interest in place was simply set aside. This interest continued apace-in the very face of the emerging fascination with space. Thus Damascius, writing in the sixth century A.D., could still say unblushingly that "being in place is being in something superior."2 Not that place is superior to space; it is only superior to what it contains: "Place is superior to things in place." 3 But place remains important enough to single out and to praise for its own singular power, however limited in scope it may be (its very power consists in its ability to be the limit for something else). Only fifty years after...