makes a most puzzling claim: “The theory that the void exists involves the existence of place; one could [even] define void as place bereft of body.”47 If Aristotle is right, the void itself is not without place, and may be itself a kind of place. Difficult as it may be to conceive, anxiety provoking as it certainly is to experience, even the strictest void is not unrelated to place. At the very least, the void may possess certain residual place-properties: for example, “bereft of body.” To be devoid of body is nevertheless to be capable of containing a body—even if the body in question does not yet exist, or no longer exists. Aristotle here qualifies Archytas: to be (a body) is to be in place, but there can also be a (void) place without (any) body. Although void and place usually are construed as antonymic, they may not be antinomic: they may share in some common nomos, or law, some shared structure.
What void and place share is the common property of being the arena for the appearance of bodies (and thus for the events of which bodies form part). But while a place is the immediate arena for such appearance—a body appears precisely in a particular place—the void is the scene for this kind of place. As a precreationist entity, the void is empty of place primarily and of bodies secondarily. It is empty of the place that is empty of bodies. Thus we need to emend Aristotle’s dictum: not merely is void “place bereft of body” but “void is bereft of place that is bereft of body.” The void is doubly bereft. As a scene, it is an empty stage that is not yet specified as to places or bodies. (“Scene” in its origins meant an empty tent or booth before it came to signify a theatrical stage.)
Regarded as a scene of places and things to come, the void may thus play a positive and not a merely nugatory role in cosmogony. It figures precisely as the scene named “Tokpela” (endless space) by the Hopi, or as “Taaora,” literally “immensity” or “void,” by the ancient inhabitants of Hawaii, the Tuamotuans.48 Neither of these void-scenes is an inert pregiven entity. According to Hopi tradition, Taiowa the Creator immediately occupies Tokpela; indeed, far from inertly preexisting, the endless immensity of Tokpela is said to exist already in Taiowa’s mind and thus to be part of an active agency from the start. Tokpela is “an immeasurable void that had its beginning and end, time, shape, and life in the mind of Taiowa the Creator.”49 Conversely, for the Tuamotuan people the creator-god exists in the void, thereby assuring its dynamism from within: “It is said that Kiho dwelt in the Void. It [is] said that Kiho dwelt beneath the foundations of Havaiki [i.e., in a particular place] which was called the Black-gleamless-realm-of-Havaiki.”50 To dwell in the void in this immanent manner is to dwell in the active scene of creation, the scene of what-is-to-come. It is to dwell in the void as place-giving; to be placed in the void. The lines that follow in the Tuamotuan epic spell out this curious topology.
That place wherein Kiho dwelt was said to be the Non-existence-of-the-land; the name of that place was the Black-gleamless-realm-of-Havaiki.
It was there that Kiho dwelt; indeed, in that place he created all things whatsoever.
Hereafter [I give] the names of his dwelling places.
Kiho dwelt in his heaven at the nadir of the Night-realm.
Kiho dwelt in his heaven in the Black-gleamless-realm.
Kiho dwelt in his heaven in the Many-proportioned-realm-of-night.
These places were situated within the Night-sphere.51
This night-sphere of creation is a scene of becoming-place; it is a “many-proportioned” arena of possible places-to-come. The cosmogonic void, far from being place-indifferent or simply place-bereft, proves to be place-productive, proliferating into place after place.
The Tuamotuan text illustrates a principle that can be designated “topo-reversal.” Void is posited as no-place, only to be succeeded by the immediate positing of place. Or more exactly: no-place is succeeded by something that, precisely as something, brings places with it. Nowhere is this reversal so dramatically evident as in a Jicarilla Apache creation tale.
In the beginning nothing was here where the world now stands; there was no ground, no earth—nothing but Darkness, Water, and Cyclone. There were no people living. Only the Hactcin [personifications of the powers of objects and natural forces] existed. It was a lonely place.52
Here the reversal is marked by the sudden transition from “nothing” to “nothing but.” While the first stage represents a radically empty state, the second populates it with at least three natural things and several personified forces. The volte-face occurs even within one and the same sentence, and is expanded in subsequent sentences. Saturation is by no means reached—the place in question is still quite “lonely”—but the changeover from nothing at all to just barely something is cosmogonically progressive. Nonplacement gives way to implacement: cyclones, darkness, and water come clinging to their cosmic locations.
The topo-reversal can move in the opposite direction as well: from something to nothing. In the Han dynasty text Huai-nan Tzu, the Great Beginning gives way to emptiness. Or else something and nothing may be considered as coexisting. Thus Chuang Tzu writes, “There is being. There is nonbeing.”53 An ancient Mayan text proclaims that in the beginning “there was nothing standing; only the calm water, the placid sea, alone and tranquil. Nothing existed.”54 Nothing stands—and yet water and sea are already standing there. The chiasmatic turn whereby even a minimal nothing-but or an “only” (i.e., a bare something) is denied existence, yet is nevertheless given existence, also receives expression in one of the Upanishads: “In the beginning this world was merely non-being. It was existent.”55 To exist as nonbeing: a self-complicating assertion of convoluted cosmologic.
Despite such reversals and twists, indeed through them, we witness the persistence of place in the face of the nothing—a nothing that one might have assumed to be the very death of place. Whether as the sheer something of a “Black-gleamless-realm” or as the still sheerer nonbeing that nevertheless exists (and thus literally “stands-out”), place abides. In the context of cosmogony—that is to say, in an account of the becoming of the world—there is no place for no-place. Dearth of place, even literal nonplace, we may acknowledge: such is the “lonely place” of the Apache creation myth. But this is not tantamount to the death of place, no-place-at-all: rather than dealing with its demise, cosmogony has to do with the birth of place itself.
Even the utter void, then, retains the dynamic property of being a scene of emergence, a proscenium on which things can arise as taking place and as having their own place. Much as we have found that chaos is not entirely empty of form, so we now discover the empty no-place of the void to have more shape and force than we might have imagined. Indeed, if chaos can be regarded as predeterminate place, the void is best construed as the scene of emergent place. Cosmogonically considered, the void is on its way to becoming ever more place-definite. It is the scene of world-creation and thus the basis of an increasingly coherent and densely textured place-world.
VII
The foregoing construal of the void does not retrieve it for place. Indeed, it deprives void of place—particular place—and place of void. But it makes room for the possibility of place in the void by maintaining that the void may itself become devoid of its own initially unimplaced and unimplacing character. By speaking of “possibility” and of “become,” I am keeping the void within a cosmogonic context. It is important to retain this context in the face of the temptation to offer a transcendental deduction of place as that which has to be presupposed if experience or knowledge of certain kinds is to be possible. This temptation must be resisted. The only thing that can be deduced from a transcendental argument—of a Kantian sort—is the presupposition of empty space. Such space, especially when located
