The theory of elementary figures is destined to explain how order is introduced into the moving chaos of qualities. By their definite and invariable properties, these figures infuse a certain fixity into Becoming. But they do not form its substance, which remains constituted by changing qualities.84
It is not so much that the initially wild motions are “subordinated”85 by the Demiurge—such a term would be more suitable in describing the martial confrontation between Marduk and Tiamat—as that errancy and regularity cooperate in the constitution of a world that is a conjoint product, a literal bi-product, of their disparate tendencies. For this reason, it is difficult to say whether the Demiurge imposes order on the Receptacle or draws out what is already immanent in its pregiven necessities. Perhaps, as Alfred North Whitehead suggests, both claims are true.
Plato in the Timaeus affords an early instance of wavering between the two doctrines of Law, [i.e. between] Immanence and Imposition. In the first place, Plato’s cosmology includes an ultimate creator, shadowy and undefined, imposing his design upon the Universe. [But] secondly, the action and reaction of the internal constituents is—for Plato—the self-sufficient explanation of the flux of the world.86
VI
when everything wassunless desertdowncast soundless night
things-not-thingsunfilled
by the still empty MotherTimberStuff
for this was a slack time her lovely bodyforms had yet to employ
then WorldMother Start worked everything into her fashion
drawing them for safety and health into her body
to give them birth
she bore the universe her beauty’s/cosmos which is also order
unhooked earth from sky unfurled endless land and sea
untangling them from each other
after she’d considered everything
before shuffling each into place
the god . . . since she had no clear choice
separated into shape her once aimless body 87
This Hellenistic poem of creation sets forth an important variant. “MotherTimberStuff” (hulē), the matrix of creation, fills herself with things that are not yet fully things—with what “had not yet had its character struck”88—and proceeds to create. She creates first by separating regions from each other, dislodging earth from sky and dissevering land from sea. Thanks to this primal diairesis (division), she is able to find determinate places for created things, “shuffling each into place.” As in Genesis and the Theogony, the Enuma Elish and the Timaeus, creation of the world occurs as the creation of regions and of places; and in every instance as well the creation of regions (chōrai) precedes the creation of places (topoi). But there is a decisive difference in the above text of Heraclitos the Grammarian. Instead of calling for the intervention of another figure—a male creator-god, a master of creation: Yahweh, Zeus, Marduk, the Demiurge—the “WorldMother” does the creating on her own and from her own. She creates the world out of her own “lovely body-forms.” It is a matter of autochthonous birth, birth from a self-ingesting and self-generating matrix. This mater-mother, far from needing the external assistance of an independent master, creates sui generis. She separates herself “into shape,” mastering her own matrix.
The disparity between this account and previous phallogocentric versions of creation is momentous (it bristles with gender issues), but the choice between them may be as undecidable as whether the Timaeus presents us with a paradigm of Imposition or Immanence. Just as we may wonder indefinitely which of these latter is the truer term, so we may inquire without respite as to whether a matrocentric or phallogocentric model is the truer one. In keeping with the logic of undecidability, we may very well be led to say: neither one nor the other, and both.89
The same undecidability pertains to a still more pressing question: Does place precede the creation of the world—being presupposed by it—or is place a result of creation itself? Place is definitely not precedent if by “place” is meant something like a particular locale or spot: anything of this order of specificity, that is, of the order of topos or of thesis (position), misses the mark. For it would be manifestly absurd for world-creation to be inaugurated in a scene in which places already existed in complete determinacy: creation then would be superfluous, since the world would be already constituted in large measure as a world, being place-ordered in advance. Just as there is no place without a world for, and of, places, so there is no world without places, without definite loci in which things and events can appear: every world is a place-world. (This latter claim is merely an extension of the Archytian axiom.) Given the intrinsic, internal relationship between place and world, it is senseless to say that place precedes world or is presupposed by the creation of the world (whether this creation is autogenous or interventionist in character).
Yet, by the same token, it is not the case that place is a mere product of such creation. We have found, massively, that place in one sense or another is continually at stake throughout the process of creation: if not in the form of discrete topoi, then as predeterminate (and often quite indeterminate) parts of the scene of creation. Such pregivenness can be thematized as such—as occurs precisely in the Timaeus, which posits a precosmic Space (the Receptacle) and various regions (chōrai) within this Space. But it also can be left quite implicit, as happens in Hesiod’s allusions to a primal Chaos, a state we have found to possess its own peculiar place-predicates. Even when the role of place seems to be expressly denied—as at the beginning of the Enuma Elish (“no heaven, no earth, no height, no depth”) or in a Sumero-Akkadian purification ritual that begins with the words “No place for the bright house . . . no land [or] sea”90—we may still detect the presence of place in a prospective or residual sense. Close inspection reveals a primordial process of implacement at work, whether by claiming that “in the waters gods were created” or by referring to “motion in sea cunt.”91 Indeed, wherever an “in” is employed, place is already at stake—if not literally, then as an active force all the same. This is what we learn from Plato’s careful description of the Receptacle as a Space in which things happen and appear, including the event of creation itself. If places are thus always part of creation and coextensive with it, they cannot be regarded as its mere outcome—as on a par with, say, the creation of the human species in Genesis or the city of Babylon by Marduk. In these latter cases, something is brought forth that was not present beforehand, not even in an amorphous format.
But we can also say, and for a not dissimilar set of reasons, that place is both presupposed and produced in the course of creation. On the one hand, there can be no altogether ex nihilo act of creation if by this is meant an act of creation taking place nowhere at all. As we have seen, the very same lines of Genesis that are so often cited to confirm ex nihilo cosmogonies contain the unambiguous conditional clause that even the most exalted monotheistic God can create only if He moves over “the face of the Deep.” Just as depth implies place—depth brings with it depth-of-place, qualifying distance, motion, surface, size, and shape—so place implies depth, something of sufficient extent into which to step. No wonder that Tiamat, that creature of cosmogonic depth par excellence, continues to haunt the Old Testament.92 In this instance, place is presupposed conceptually and linguistically and mythically (not to mention religiously). If other instances are less dramatic or overdetermined, they are no less crucially dependent on place as a condition of creation.
On the other hand, it is also true that place is an ens creatum; it is something set forth by creation, where by “set forth” I do not mean