Plato also uses the term “Receptacle” to designate the pregiven space with which the Demiurge must begin. As “the ‘nurse’ of all Becoming,”45 the Receptacle is no less deep, and no less fertile, than Tiamat. And it is no less maternal, since both the mythic and the philosophic entities require that creation involve a return to the womb, the womb of Nature (phusis) itself. It is altogether by and in the Receptacle construed as “mother”46 that the phallogonic paternal action of the Demiurge occurs—occurs within a matrix.
It never departs at all from its own character; since it is always receiving all things, and never in any way whatsoever takes on any character that is like any of the things that enter it: by nature it is there as a matrix for everything, changed and diversified by the things that enter it.47
The Platonic matrix is not, however, strictly material in character. Although it takes on material qualities, it is not itself composed of matter. As exhibiting or reflecting these qualities, it is more like a mirror of the physical than a physical thing itself.48 It has no qualities of its own, for, if it did, it could not be altogether receptive of the qualities of the things that occupy it, nor would it reflect them faithfully: “that which is to receive in itself all kinds must be free from all characters” (50e). Thus we cannot even characterize the receptive matrix as aqueous—as we are certainly encouraged to do at the beginning of the Enuma Elish and in Genesis. In fact, none of the four elemental qualities can be said to characterize the Platonic matrix: “the mother and Receptacle of what has come to be visible and otherwise sensible must not be called earth or air or fire or water” (51a). If the Sumerian and Old Testament matrices are expressly elemental, this is no longer possible in the Greek instance. As preelemental, Space or the Receptacle is “a nature invisible and characterless” (51b). Yet the Receptacle is neither a void nor placeless.
The Receptacle not a Void. Plato’s primary opponents in the Timaeus are the ancient Atomists, who held that cosmogenesis occurs by the interaction of discrete bits of matter within a circumambient empty space (kenon). Empty space itself possesses no predetermined routes, much less any qualities of its own. Nor does it possess places or regions; in its radical placelessness, it is a prime candidate for what I have called the “strict void” and “no-place.”49 In contrast with this model, the Receptacle is richly plenary. The only emptiness it knows occurs in the form of the tiny interstices at the edges of the regular figures that come to fill it out.50 Neither outside itself (for there is nothing outside the Receptacle) nor within itself is there any sheer emptiness.51
The Receptacle not Placeless. The Receptacle “appears to have different qualities at different times” (50c; my emphasis). To appear at all requires a place-of-appearance. In other words, the Receptacle, even if it has no place of its own (i.e., being Space itself, it is not located in some more extensive space), offers place to sensible qualities. Just as the initial state of things in the Enuma Elish is place-providing, so the Receptacle proffers place, thereby “providing a situation [hedran] for all things that come into being.”52 Such place-provision occurs for both formal and substantive reasons.
(1) Formally, even sensible qualities (and a fortiori the material bodies they will inhabit) must be exhibited somewhere. F. M. Cornford remarks that “the Receptacle is not that ‘out of which’ [ex hou] things are made; it is that ‘in which’ [en hō] qualities appear, as fleeting images are seen in a mirror.”53 Plato echoes Archytas here, and even seems to be paraphrasing him when he says that not just appearances but “anything that is must needs be in some place and occupy some room. . . . [W]hat is not somewhere in earth or heaven is nothing” (52b). Some kind of place must therefore always be on hand—and already on hand within the Receptacle itself. But what sort of place is this?
We have just seen that, in contrast with the body of Tiamat, the Receptacle cannot be a strictly material locus of creation, a physical realm of the sort that is at stake when Marduk “piled huge mountains on her paps and through them drove water-holes.” Intrinsically characterless, the Receptacle can contain no features comparable to mountains or water holes. Not only must it not be designated as “earth” or “water,” but, Plato adds shrewdly, it does not even consist of “any of their compounds or components” (51a). Of what then does it consist? The answer is regions, that is, primal zones in which elementary sensibilia cling to each other in momentary assemblages. Thanks to the cosmological rule that like seeks like, groups of these qualities gather into primeval regions.
Now the nurse of Becoming, being made watery and fiery and receiving the characters of earth and air, and qualified by all the other affections that go with these, had every sort of diverse appearance to the sight; but because it was filled with powers that were neither alike nor evenly balanced, there was no equipoise in any region of it; but it was everywhere swayed unevenly and shaken by these things, and by its motion shook them in turn. And they, being thus moved, were perpetually being separated and carried in different directions. . . . [The Receptacle] separated the most unlike kinds farthest apart from one another, and thrust the most alike closest together; whereby the different kinds came to have different regions, even before the ordered whole consisting of them came to be.54
I cite this long passage to underscore the fact that in the Platonic cosmology regions, or perhaps better, protoregions, arise in the very beginning. The shaking or “winnowing”55 action of the Receptacle, carrying like into the company of like, is itself an action of regionalization: it renders the Space of the Receptacle regional in status.
(2) A region is not just a formal condition of possibility. It is a substantive place-of-occupation. Chōra, translated both as “region” and as “space” by Cornford, connotes occupied place, for example, a field full of crops or a room replete with things. A region includes both the container and the contained—terms Aristotle insists on keeping separate—and we can make ostensive reference to it as “this region” (whereas, as Plato insists, we cannot refer to a merely evanescent sensible quality as “this”). A choric region is substantive without being a substance: rather than a thing, it is a locatory matrix for things.56 Such a region is finally a matter of place rather than of space—if “place” implies finite locatedness and “space” infinite or indefinite extension. Despite its curious adumbration of the modern idea of space as something invisible, the Receptacle remains above all a scene of implacement.57
The Receptacle is place-providing twice over. First, as we have just seen, it is inherently regionalized and regionalizing. In this capacity, it “clears space for” groups of similar qualities, furnishing them with their “leeway.”58 Regions in this sense are primal zones—not altogether unlike the major “zones” of psychosexuality identified by Freud. Just as the psychosexual zones are located on (or, better, in) the lived body while not being sharply demarcated there, so the cosmological zones structure the body of the Receptacle and are not strictly bounded (in a region, like draws to like; but likeness is a matter of degree and so cannot be rigorously delimited). Second, the openness and vagueness of a region call for a much more particular sense of place: place as topos. Although Plato does not always bother to distinguish between chōra and topos, he needs this very distinction when he comes to discuss the “primary bodies” constructed by the Demiurge. For each such body, formed as it is from sensible qualities and regular geometrical shapes, “is something coming to be in a certain place” (52a)—that is, in its own topos as determined by its outer form along with its volume. But this topos is in turn located in a region, an encompassing but delimited portion of choric space.59