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9 Modern Space as Site and Point Position, Panopticon, and Pure Form When we say that a thing is in a given place, all we mean is that it occupies such a position relative to other things. -Rene Descartes, Principles ofPhilosophy The silence of these eternal spaces terrifies me. (Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.) -Blaise Pascal, Pensees Leibniz displayed a special alertness to the metaphor of organism-its dynamical aspects, its animating force, its inherent vitalism. Far from being something merely mechanistic, the organic body of the monad-which we have seen to be intimately tied to place-is a "living being" or "divine machine." 1 Since every monad is in effect a world filled with monads at increasingly minuscule levels, organicity extends to everything in the end: "There is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls, in the smallest particle of matter.,,2 Hence every bit of matter can be compared to a pond filled with fish or a garden replete with plants-provided that we imagine that each part of each fish or flower is itself a pond or garden in turn, and so on, ad infinitum.3 The double infinity of the universe, at once infinitely large and infinitely small, is held together by an all-pervasive organic bonding of each part to every other part, where "every other" signifies not just a formal relation of substitutability or a physical relation of distance but a comprehensive and enlivening order of nature. As Collingwood remarks, "Leibniz's nature is a vast organism whose parts are lesser organisms, permeated by life and growth and effort, and forming a continuous scale from almost unmitigated mechanism at one end to the highest conscious developments of mental life at the other."4 Leibniz's doctrine of panorganicism-which, viewed differently, can be 180 Modern Space as Site and Point 181 considered a form of panpsychism--offers a viable alternative to the Cartesian choice between Matter and Mind as two entirely separate forms of substance, by pointing to a middle region in which the material and the mental are inextricably intertangled: a region of animate matter in which place, so long as it is not reduced to point or position, might regain its own animation, its own dynamis. "I do not think that we can consider souls as being in points," remarks Leibniz; instead, "they are in a place through a connection."5 In its role as mediatrix and carried to a biological limit, place would become something like a "bioregion" or "ecological niche"-as it might be called in more recent nomenclature.6 Whitehead, directly inspired by the example of Leibniz, set forth an entire philosophy of organism in which place is finally liberated from the restrictive bonds of simple location.7 Auspicious as is Leibniz's thinking in this respect, and leaping over two centuries to distinctively twentieth-century sensibilities as it does, its immediate sequel was much less encouraging. Another fold in the vast fabric of this thinking-for example, the reductive tendency to regard monads as "incorporeal automata," God as the "architect of the machine of the universe," 8 and more especially place as analytically equivalent to position or point-triumphed less in his own writings (where a delicate but continual equipoise is established between mechanism and purpose, the perspective of God and of other monads, and place and position or point themselves) than, more fatefully , in the ensuing course of eighteenth-century thought. The strand of "almost unmitigated mechanism" in his own thought-in which mechanism is never entirely unrelieved by considerations of soul, final causality, life, and "grace" (i.e., by what Deleuze calls "the second floor")9-becomes unmitigated materialist mechanism in the remainder of this century, which Thomas Carlyle called the age of "Victorious Analysis." The philosophy of organism so pervasive in the Monadology and elsewhere was set aside in an obsessive concern with a philosophy and physics of matter understood as altogether unalive and unperceptive. Philosophers and physicists seized on a single fold--or, better, fault line-in the Leibnizian corpus to carry out their reductive scientistic schemes. Collingwood and Whitehead, despite having ultimately quite different interests and aims, concur on this assessment of the neoclassical, post-Leibnizian era in Europe. For this era, as Collingwood says scathingly, the world is "a world of dead matter, infinite in extent and permeated by movement throughout, but utterly devoid of ultimate qualitative differences and moved by uniform and purely quantitative...

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