Five Theses on Place (and Some Associated Remarks): A Reply to Peter Gratton
How does topos stand in relation to chora?[1] Does the one provide a counter to the other, even an implicit critique of it? What is the relation between a topology of the sort that can be found in Heidegger, and what might be termed the ‘chorology’ present in the deconstructive project of Derrida? Peter Gratton’s discussion is generous in the compliments it offers to my own work, and I very much appreciate what he has to say, but those comments also come with a carefully framed critique. Gratton begins his discussion by focussing on my seeming championing of space over time, particularly in relation to what I have called ‘temporalism’ – the prioritising of time and temporality – within much modern thinking.[2] Gratton insists that such temporalism involves a forgetting of the reality of time, and, despite the fact that Gratton does not put the point in such blunt terms, it seems likely that his criticism is implicitly directed at my account as much as against the temporalism that I oppose. In arguing that I privilege topos over chora, Gratton seems to suggest that I privilege unity over difference and plurality, the ahistorical over the historical, and even, perhaps, a mode of the spatial over the reality of the temporal.
Although I can appreciate the way such a reading might be arrived at (and I also leave open the possibility that I have misread Gratton’s intentions here), it is a reading that I would nonetheless contest on the grounds that it remains within a set of oppositions that are themselves called into question by the topological approach that I have attempted to develop. Moreover, in talking about a topology here, or as I sometimes do, about a topography,[3] I do not mean to dismiss the possibility of a chorology, or even a chorography. The use of topos, and so topology and topography, in my work derives partly from the fact that topos is a term familiar in English as a near synonym for place, but also from three additional considerations: that the term is used in an especially significant way in Heidegger (evident in his characterisation of his own thinking by reference to the German Topologie[4]); that the term connects crucially with the notion of bounding surface (evident in Aristotle’s discussion in Physics IV[5]); and that the term does indeed allow of an important connection with topography and the topographic in a way that enables certain key features of a place-oriented mode of thinking to be drawn out.[6]
It is true that chora appears less frequently in my work than topos, and it is also true that my tendency to focus on topos over chora is itself tied to the hermeneutical character of my approach. In both cases this relates directly to the explicit way in which topos is centred on place as bound or limit.[7] Yet chora is not a term I have ignored, and in a number of writings I have emphasised the way in which, although they can be said to draw attention to different aspects of the notion, both topos and chora are to be understood in terms of place rather than mere space (and, unlike Gratton, I have no qualms about using the one term, ‘place’, to translate both topos and chora – such a translation in no way disregards the complexities and indeterminacies that all three terms carry with them). Moreover, even though chora can be connected with notions of difference and separation[8], and is indeed deployed by Derrida in close connection with the notion of différance, chora, no less than topos, carries within it a sense of the belonging together of difference and sameness, of plurality and unity. Chora is no mere differing and separating, but always refers to the differing and separating of appearing or presencing as it occurs in relation to what presences or appears. Such presencing does not occur in some undifferentiated everywhere or nowhere, but is always a presencing in and through place – and as such it is a differing and separating that possesses a certain unity just as it also occurs within certain bounds. To talk of topos is to look to the character of place as that which allows presencing through a bounding that opens into unboundedness. To talk of chora is to look to the character of place as allowing presencing through the withdrawal of place itself, and so as place functions to enable emergence through a grounding that is also an emptying (and here there is a connection with the notion of the kenotic as well as the adventual). It is precisely because it involves a withdrawal of place that the boundedness that nevertheless belongs to chora is itself withdrawn and so remains largely unthematized, but nevertheless not insignificant or irrelevant.
The direction of Gratton’s argument might be taken to suggest that topos is more inclined towards the spatial and chora towards the reality of the temporal (on that basis, one might say that the reality of time is chora, and perhaps Gratton intends something like this). Yet when I note, in the passage Gratton quotes, that chora is more amenable to construal in terms of the modern notion of space as extension, the point I am making is one that concerns both the manner in which the notion appears in the Platonic text (and so, in part, to the unthematized character of the boundedness that belongs to chora) and the way the Platonic chora has been taken up historically. It is not intended as a reflection on what lies at the heart of the notion nor as the final word on what chora itself may be – as I note in Place and Experience, “as they appear in the work of Plato and Aristotle… both topos and chora carry important connotations of dimensionality or extendedness (though they cannot be reduced to such notions [emphasis here added]), while at the same time neither topos nor chora is used other than in relation to particular things …”.[9] Within the history of ideas, it is chora along with kenon (void) that have played the more significant roles in the emergence of space as extension rather than topos. In fact, much of the history of the development of the modern concept of space as extension occurred as a counter-movement to the Aristotelian emphasis on topos as bounding surface.
Already the possibility of this shift from chora to the idea of space as extension is evident in Aristotle’s seeming misrepresentation of the Platonic account as identifying place with matter (hyle).[10] Precisely since the Platonic account appears not to focus on place as bound, but rather on what lies within those bounds, so it seems possible to say that Plato does indeed allow for (or as we might well say, ‘prepares the way for’) the understanding of place as matter, where matter is itself identified with dimensionality or extension.[11] It is but a small step from here to the modern notion of space as itself extension – with Cartesian thinking providing the exemplary instance of this latter identification (which is also why the Cartesian ‘ontology of space’ is such a target for Heidegger in Being and Time). Heidegger’s criticism of Plato on this point – a criticism to which Gratton calls attention at the same time as he also suggests that I may have been misled by following Heidegger too closely in this regard – stands within a long tradition of thinking concerning the relation between place, space, and matter, and even though it may also seem to misconstrue what is really at work in the Platonic chora, it does address something that is genuinely at work within the history of the thinking of space. Moreover, even though Heidegger does single out the Platonic chora for its role in the development of the modern concept of space, Heidegger is also critical, even if only implicitly, of the Aristotelian notion of topos. The discussion in Being and Time, for instance, of the idea of ‘being-in’ construed as ‘containment’ concerns itself with the way in which topos can itself be construed spatially – as a matter of mere ‘location within’.[12] Indeed, although, historically, spatialized conceptions have been more closely aligned with certain ways of conceiving place than others, there is a persistent tendency for place, no matter how it is initially conceptualised, to be reduced to space – which is largely the story that Casey recounts in The Fate of Place.[13]
None of this is to forget the complexities and even obscurities that nevertheless remain in the Platonic thinking of chora, and that may also be said to belong to the thinking of place – nor is it to place undue emphasis on selected passages from the Platonic or Aristotelian discussions (certainly no more so than Gratton’s does in focussing on certain passages from my own work). Moreover, in presuming to take up the issue of place, and with it of topos and chora, I am not unmindful of the difficulties involved in the translation and the elucidation of the terms at issue here. Although it is true that place cannot be given any complete or final elucidation or representation, this does not mean that it cannot be given any elucidation or representation. The thinking of place is always attended by an essential indeterminacy, but this does not entail the impossibility of such thinking. Instead the indeterminacy at issue here consists in the fact that there are many ways in which place can properly be represented, many ways in which it can properly be thought – and here I do not draw back from the language of ‘propriety’, or indeed, of truth, both of which are already at work in any form of thinking as questioning or critique. Gratton’s critique, as with the very deconstructive practice exemplified by Derrida, operates with its own notion of the ‘proper’ and the ‘true’, even as it also seeks to cast doubt on the usual understanding of these notions and to draw out the indeterminacies that they entail. Part of what is at issue in the thinking of place is itself a rethinking of ‘the proper’ (‘that which belongs to’) as well as ‘the true’ in the light of the essential belonging together (the essential ‘appropriation’) of being with place, and the complexity of place itself.
Rather than merely standing over against deconstructive practice, my own approach, which is indeed well-characterised as ‘hermeneutical’, undertakes its own ‘deconstruction’ (in the sense of Heidegger’s Destruktion), but, as it is hermeneutical, so it is also accompanied by a movement of retrieval or as one might say of ‘reconstruction’, and this is directed not at simply reinstating the original binary nor of postulating some additional element, but rather of rethinking that opposition through the original belonging together of the terms that figure within it. Although much of my response as set out above has been concerned with what might be thought of as a set of interpretive issues in Gratton’s reading of my work, there are also a set of more substantive or ‘reconstructive’ points that are directly relevant here and that therefore deserve attention. To this end, there are five theses that pick out key elements in my account of place, all of which I have set out in various ways elsewhere, but which are worth reiterating in summary form here – five key elements of a philosophical topology or topography (or even, perhaps, of a chorology or chorography) :
Place is that original and originary domain that allows the emergence of both difference and sameness, unity and plurality.
As topos, place is the bounding surface that opens into boundlessness; as chora, place is the sustaining ground that withdraws to allow emergence.
The ‘reality’ of both time and space is place (chora/topos), and there is neither time nor space apart from their belonging together in place.
All presencing occurs in and through place, even the presencing of that which exceeds any particular place – in other words, finitude is that which makes possible even the transcendence of finitude and consequently the placed character of thinking does not mean that thinking is bound to just one place, but instead, through its being placed, thinking is opened to the world.
Place and language are intimately bound together such that there is no speaking, no understanding, no engagement that is not placed, that is not tied to place, and it is language that both enables the opening and openness of place as well as being enabled by it. Like thinking, all speaking originates in place, and yet itself emerges into the opening and openness of place, and so of world, that it enables.
These theses aim to set out the way in which both topos and chora are at issue in my own thinking of place regardless which of these terms is given priority. These theses also draw attention to the way in which the thinking of place does indeed retain an emphasis on a certain ‘hermeneutical’ concern with unity. However, the unity at issue is precisely the unity that is itself tied to difference, and is so tied by means of the key notion of bound or limit. Derrida’s own différance is itself a way of thinking bound – that is, of thinking bound in terms of differentiation and deferral, but the real difficulty it presents in this regard is that it can also be read (and I emphasise this ‘can be read as’ making no claim as to whether this is a reading that is proper to Derrida’s own text) in a way that seems to refuse bound, and so différance appears to function as if it disseminated itself across, or even as, an endless and unbounded field (and in this way, it can itself be construed as spatializing even given its supposed incorporation of the temporal). Yet what the analysis of the chora itself shows is that the character of appearing or presencing, even (or perhaps especially) when understood as taking the form of both a differing and deferring of what comes to presence, is always such as to entail a withdrawal, and so, as I noted earlier, is also a withdrawal in and of place. As place withdraws, so place itself is not reducible merely to what is present, but neither can it be treated as identical with what is absent. Place is what gives way to allow both presence and absence. Perhaps this is the real point of understanding différance in conjunction with chora – that différance itself ‘belongs to’ place – though it is a conjunction that cannot be seen as standing opposed to or as excluding topos.
Regardless of its place in Derrida’s thought, the image of the endlessly disseminating and disseminated field, and the refusal of bound that it entails, is at the very heart of modernity in all its contemporary forms, and in the spatialization by which it operates. The system of technologized capital (and in modernity technology and capital are inseparable as they are themselves inseparable from particular forms of corporate and bureaucratised organisation and governance, and as they are all entangled within the structure of globalization) is a system that forms itself in terms of just such a refusal, that represents itself by means of such a refusal, and yet, since the very possibility of emergence, even of technologized capital, remains inevitably tied to place, so the world of modernity becomes a world predicated on a refusal of its own place, its own bounds, its own being (this is at the core of Heidegger’s own ‘question’ concerning technology as it is also central to much of his later thinking). Precisely because it belongs so much to modernity, the refusal of bound, along with the ideas and images to which it is tied, is everywhere within modernity, whether in the corporate boardroom or the academic lecture hall – it is common to Microsoft and Google, to HSBC and BHP, as well as, somewhat ironically perhaps, to Deleuze and to Harvey. The self-representations of modernity are thus replicated and repeated no less by many of the theorists of modernity (even when they offer themselves as its critics) than by its patrons and ‘practitioners’.
These latter comments demonstrate the way in which the thinking of place is directed both at thinking the way place itself emerges contemporaneously and at the character of place – of topos and chora – such that it allows even this contemporary emergence of itself. The thinking of the latter, the thinking of place, is indeed the necessary presupposition for the thinking of the former, for the thinking of this place (even though, in its concrete realization, the one develops always in interaction with the other). This means that in my own thinking and speaking about place, whether as topos or chora, I am not speaking in a way that is about only a certain historical presencing of place nor is it determined only by that place in its particular historical presencing – as if my speaking and thinking were ‘bounded’, in the sense of being completely restricted to, just the ‘place’ that emerges – and this reflects, of course, a more general point about speaking and thinking as such.
In one sense, the point at issue here is an obvious and simple one, and if it is denied, it is usually only when presented in a form that obscures the simple truth at issue. The point is perhaps clearest when put linguistically: in speaking I speak in a way tied to my language, but the fact that I may speak only English, and then only a certain dialect, perhaps even idiolect, of English, and from within a certain limited set of competencies, does not mean that I can only speak in terms of just that set of utterances with which I am already familiar, that I can understand only those utterances of which I already have knowledge, that I cannot speak of new things or make novel utterances, that I cannot make myself understood to someone who speaks differently (which may mean in another language, another dialect, or another idiolect), or that I cannot come myself come to speak differently (whether by incorporating other languages or ways of speaking into my own or by taking on another language, dialect, idiolect or an expanded set of competencies). The having of a language, any language, is what opens me both to language as such as well as to other languages than my own. One other point should be added here: it is only through the mediation of others that the very first entry into language, the entry into one’s own language, is possible – alone, one has neither language nor the means of entry into language (which means, of course, that the very first entry into language is an entry into the encounter with the other as well as with what is one’s own). Almost all of this applies as much to place as it does to language.
The necessarily placed character of speaking and thinking does not constitute a form of exclusion from other places, from other placed modes of speaking and thinking, or from place itself. One of the reasons for this is already implicit in the brief discussion of language above: one can always ask ‘what language do I speak?’ – is my language identical with some generic form of the language, with some dialect, with my own idiolect? – and there is no one right answer to this question. Similarly, the very idea of place, especially of ‘this’ place, always retains an essential indeterminacy or questionability that is itself tied to the open and emergent character of place (indeed, the question of our place, ‘where are we?’, which contains the question of place as such within it, remains perhaps the first and most fundamental question[14]). A second, closely related reason, concerns the very idea of bound itself, and the way it is itself tied, not only to constraint, but to openness and to emergence.[15] Again, this is a point that should already be evident from the linguistic example above, as well as much of the preceding discussion, but the general point at stake is nevertheless worth reiterating in more explicit form. We enter into world through place, and our being placed is therefore to be construed, not as disabling or as a cutting off, but rather as enabling and so as opening up. It is thus that in my speaking and thinking of place here, in this place, I can also engage with the speaking and thinking of place that is at work in Gratton’s work, in Derrida’s, and even in Plato’s. Moreover, to suppose otherwise is not only to misunderstand the nature of place and bound, but it is also implicitly to assume a determinacy to speaking and thinking such that to speak and think of what is other is always undermined by the determinacy of the other in its (or in their) otherness.
One of the key lessons of contemporary hermeneutics, most obviously in Gadamer, is that the engagement with the other is always an engagement that operates between sameness and difference, within an essential indeterminacy that belongs to engagement as such, and in a way that brings into question both self and other within that engagement. This is true of the engagement with other persons, of the engagement with the things of the world, and of the engagement with ideas. In this engagement ‘between’ is implicated, not only place, but also language, and this is itself indicative of the centrality of the relation in which place and language and drawn together. The opening and openness of place is not apart from language, even though language in no way ‘makes’ place, and this reflects the character of language as itself belonging to the ‘between’, to the open, to the adventual. Human being finds itself in the opening and openness of place and language together. As individual human beings, we are always brought into this opening and openness by others – we do not and cannot, as I emphasised earlier, come into it alone – but equally, human being does not itself make this opening nor does it call it forth. Place is thus not a ‘projection’ of the human – and neither is language. Instead, the human is itself a ‘projection’ of place, a ‘projection’, even, of language (since language is that by which the human enters into place, and so into world, that by which the human comes into the ‘neighbourhood’ of being).
How does topos stand in relation to chora? Both stand within the bounds of place, as place itself appears within the bounds that these terms also mark out. As both topos and chora refer us back to the same place (that which encompasses boundedness and openness, withdrawal and emergence) as well as to the place of sameness as such, so too do they direct our attention to different places (to the place that emerges in the Aristotelian or Platonic texts, to the place of Classical Athens or perhaps twentieth-century Paris, even contemporary Hobart or St Johns), and to the place of difference. Does one of the terms at issue, whether topos or chora, provide a counter to the other, even an implicit critique of it? Only inasmuch as these terms are already thought apart – not only from one another, but also from place. My own aim has been to think them together, even while remaining mindful of their differences. What is the relation between a topology of the sort that can be found in Heidegger, or my own work, and what might be termed the ‘chorology’ present in the deconstructive project of Derrida? Some may well insist on setting these apart from and even in opposition to one another; some may take the view that any opposition is superficial, and that there is a deeper continuity. Certainly, there is an important sense in which, on the account I have advanced, both topology and chorology, even as instantiated in the work of such as Heidegger and Derrida, must move within and with respect to the same place that is also at issue in the relation between topos and chora. If that seems contradicted by either thinker or their work, then that very contradiction must become a place for engagement and critique. Of course, any genuine engagement between thinkers, between ideas, is never closed, and itself reflects the dynamic and ‘iridescent’ character of the place of that engagement as well as of the thinking itself – here is evident the character of thinking and the character of place. I look forward to future continuations of this engagement with Gratton himself, and thank him once again both for his generosity and for the critical comments by which the place for this particular engagement has been opened up.
Notas:
[1] As they appear here, which is to say, as terms that play a role spanning their original Greek context (where they appear as τόπoϛ and χώρα) and that of a contemporary philosophical topology or topography as developed in English, both topos and chora are given in an anglicized form and without accents.
[2] For more on my critique of temporalism see 'Timing Space – Spacing Time: On transcendence, performance, and place', in Jodie McNeilly, Stuart Grant, Maeva Veerapen (eds.), Performance and Temporalisation: time happens (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), pp. 25-36. I would note too that although I am critical of the prioritization of time over space, I am also critical of the prioritization of space that is characteristic of modernity – a prioritization that typically involves the prioritization of space over time and place through the reduction of each to a mode of space (thus time becomes mere succession and place mere location).
[3] Both these terms appear in my work. Topology is the term I take from Heidegger (as I note above), whereas topography is a notion I take from the practice of topographical surveying as it operated in the age before aerial or satellite views.
[4] The latter term first appearing in Heidegger’s work in a significant way in his Notebooks for 1946 – see Heidegger, Anmerkungen I-V (Schwarze Hefte 1942-1948), Gesamtausgabe 97, ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2015), pp. 201-202.
[5] See Aristotle, Physics IV, esp. 212 a 20.
[6] See the essay that is included in this issue of Il Cannocchiale, ‘Thinking topographically: place, space, and geography', originally published as 'Pensando topográficamente. Lugar, espacio y geografía’, Documents d'anàlisi geogràfica 61 (2015), pp. 199-229).
[7] See my 'Place and Situation', in the Routledge Companion to Philosophical Hermeneutics, edited by Jeff Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 354-366; see also my ‘Placing Understanding/Understanding Place’, Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions 56 (2016), forthcoming. One of the points that Gratton’s account may be said to make salient is indeed a tendency for deconstruction to align itself with chora in a way that seems to disregard topos, and so also perhaps, in some cases at least (and I am not claiming this is necessarily true of either Derrida or Gratton), to thereby disregard, or at least de-emphasise, bound or limit.
[8] Although it should be noted that whether there is a genuine etymological connection between chora and choris in Classical Greek is largely speculative. Chora does have a range of meanings, including ‘place’ and ‘territory’ (specifically the territory of the polis beyond its walls), and often does seem to have the sense of an extended domain or ‘space’ (though always bounded). The term is also linked to the terms choros (whose original meaning is probably ‘an area set aside for dance’) and chorea (which can itself mean ‘to withdraw’ as well as ‘to dance’). The latter term is especially interesting inasmuch as it underpins the term perichoresis, a form of ‘rotation’ or even ‘round-dance’, that appears in Orthodox theology to describe the relationship between the divine persons that make up the threefold unity of the Trinity.
[9] Place and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 24. The discussion of the terms here echoes many of the points discussed above.
[10] See Aristotle, Physics IV, 209b6-17.
[11] Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp.72-118, esp. p. 114.
[12] See Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), H53-H54. As I have noted elsewhere, one finds just such a spatial construal in Albert Einstein’s comments on the supposed development of space from place in his introduction to Jammer’s Concepts of Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2nd edn, 1970), p. xiii.
[13] Once again, it should be emphasised that this is not to say that the Platonic account itself makes this reduction, but rather to observe that it plays a role in the historical tendency towards such a reduction.
[14] Perhaps not coincidentally, the question ‘Where are you?’ is, according to Genesis (Chapter 3, verse 9), the very first question God puts to Adam.
[15] To repeat the line from Heidegger that I have probably quoted more than any other (and of which I am sure Gratton does not need to be reminded): “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greek recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing”, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 154.
Jeff Malpas is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University in Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows. He is the author or editor of some 30 books including Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning (Cambridge, 1992), Place and Experience (Cambridge, 1999, 2nd edn Routledge, 2018), Heidegger’s Topology (MIT, 2006), Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (MIT, 2012), and, among many edited collections, Death and Philosophy, with Bob Solomon (Routledge, 1998), Gadamer’s Century, with Ulrich Arnswald and Jens Kertscher (MIT, 2002), Consequences of Hermeneutics, with Santiago Zabala (Northwestern, 2010), The Intelligence of Place (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, with Ingo Farin (MIT: 2016). His most recent publications are The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World (Edinburgh, 2021), written in collaboration with the poet Kenneth White, and Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2021).
