Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Pigeonholes

Pigeonholes 108 Here I want to stage a meeting between two terms. One of them, hedra, is a Greek word that survives in our word polyhedron. The other is an Arrernte word, utyerre, whose connotations are explained in a recent book by Margaret Kemarre Turner. These are words about pigeonholes, the natural locations for things, but they are also terms that are pigeonholed, like their cultures, thought to be of merely local or anthropological interest. A discussion of them illuminates what might be meant by characterizing the meeting place as “a more convenient place.” At the same time, it also illuminates another term that up until this point has remained sketchy: I mean the crowd. Ever since the ancient Greeks applied the word agora equally to the place of assembly and the people who assembled there, any discussion of the physical site has been inseparable from an examination of its discursive formation. Places are talking points, as the old topic/topos doubleremindsus .Andoneofthetalkingpointshereisthenegativecrowd,the crowd that, instead of gathering together, disperses itself carefully throughout the world. The Greek word hedra fell out of philosophical usage. It is retained in words like polyhedron but without any strong semantic nuance. In the Timaeus, hedra is used interchangeably with the more familiar terms, chora and topos, to describe variously “a place that something occupies or moves to or from, in or through,” “the proper place of something,” or “a region or part of the human body or soul.”1 But the prestige hedra enjoys in the Timaeus is exceptional. Subsequently it disappears from the lexicon of natural philosophy; possibly its vulgar association with connotations such as “rump, fundament” disqualified it as a vehicle of serious thought.2 Sitting place, seat, chair, stool, abode (especially of gods), sanctuary, proper place pigeonholes 109 of anything, quarters of sky in which omens appear, back of horse (as saddle ), seating, breach . . . and fundament or rump: able to connote any and all of these, hedra may have been too hydra headed semantically to serve natural science. But something fundamental comes through in this neglected term, an idea that placing is inherent in the object to be placed. A topos is a place occupied by an object: the place of the object. The chora is the space manifold within which objects and places stand or are located. (There is also the Void or kenon, associated with the religious experience of kenosis or “emptying out”). Terms like topos and chora (and kenon) establish space and its objects oppositionally. Place is not inherent in objects; localization is not inherent in the chora. The chora creates the setting in which objects find their places. The rapprochement of the chora and the topoi is operationally effective but does not presuppose any natural fit. By contrast, the hedra is a place conjugated, as it were, in the Greek Middle Voice, simultaneously active and passive. It is where objects are seated, designed for their reception on condition they are designed to sit there. In this sense, the hedra is a preimpression of what the body will leave behind when it leaves. Now these spatial terms have their discursive counterparts. In urban terms, the chora morphs into the place made open for people to meet and talk; and when they meet and talk, at least in the formalized arrangements associated with political debate, they couch their arguments in familiar forms and tropes. Hence, orators used to depend on a fund of common places, or topics, immediately recognizable mental places in relationship to which the public could orient itself. In the classical period, typical loci communes might include “the power of love, the happiness of animals, the divinity of nature, the variety of human pursuits and national characteristics .”3 In Cicero’s day, these mental places were imagined physically: asked what was meant by “topics,” the famous orator replied, “Pigeonholes in which arguments are stored.”4 Topics were nesting places and roosting places. Above all, they were hollows, and the topography of a common place conceived in this way would not have been planar and smooth but eroded, honeycombed, ribbed, nodular, and alive with the low crooning of secrets. But what of hedra? What would be the mental place or discursive occasion corresponding to the saddle, rump, impression, or proper place of anything? How is this experience of communication differentiated from the enjoyment of oratory—where, also, every part of the argument is in its [18.191.132.194] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 08:49 GMT...