Common-Places and Common-Non-Places:

The Notion of “Place” and the Changing Topographies of Knowledge

Dvořák, Tomáš (Charles University in Prague)

The doctrine of “places” is as ancient as the history of rhetoric and logic. The term “place” (topos, locus) generally

served in the tradition of rhetoric as a synonym for topic, thesis, passage, or oration. When it was formally defined

(for example by Aristotle in his Rhetoric), it designated a storehouse for ideas, a seat of argument – a heading, under

which one finds an argument – that can be used in a speech one is composing. Another, more implicit, meaning of

the term defines a commonplace as a “speech-within-a-speech.” It is a ready-made textual fragment, which can be

drawn from a repository of similar fragments and reused in a new oration (usually towards the end of it when the

subject of the speech was recapitulated and amplified to persuade the audience). As the usage of such

commonplaces diffused and expanded (rhetorical training was directed towards techniques of imitation, which

included the habit of making notes while reading: collecting words, phrases, metaphors, and passages from

speeches), they ceased to be seats of arguments and rather became a series of themes to be followed in the

expansion of any subject. Each part of the speech could be developed separately without regard to logical order

because its place was determined beforehand in a traditional series of topics.

For Aristotle, the places constituted a psychological area in which arguments were grouped according to their kind.

However, there was no uniform way of classifying and arranging them: they rather constituted a loose agglomerate

where different kinds of places overlapped and could be used for different cases under different circumstances. (The

only attempts at their systematization were made in the encyclopedic works of the Middle Ages and the

Renaissance, which were topically arranged and the order of their exposition was usually governed by some

overarching pattern, such as was the cosmological chain of being.) The structuring of commonplaces was rather

pragmatic and situational, governed by the “Art of Memory,” where things were recollected by being mentally

connected with successive real or imagined places.

In the Renaissance, first written and latter even printed commonplace books or copybooks became popular as

reservoirs of knowledge that constituted the basis of humanist learning. By the seventeenth century, however,

commonplace books became to merge with encyclopedias and other forms of compilations and the Enlightenment

encyclopedism took over as the dominant form of knowledge structuring. Commonplacing was still pursued but

became much more hidden, being considered a private, provisional, and preliminary practice. With the modern

notions of authorship and originality, use of similar techniques was considered inappropriate and disguised as a

practice of quotation and the notion of place itself was redefined: from Bacon on, the “places of proof” were

substituted by the “places of enquiry,” headings for receptacles never yet filled that would function as prompters to

research into the further questions which are raised by each new advance in knowledge.

In the 1920s, then, Walter Benjamin could provocatively state that “the book is already, as the present mode of

scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems” – the card index of

the writer and the card index of the reader. As if the books or articles, the finalized products of scholarly enterprise,

were in fact provisional vehicles for setting in motion a vast, underlying

reservoir of textual fragments, which, of course, can no longer be

mastered by a single mind. The “work” in this sense constitutes a non-

space, which is defined by Marc Augé as something “to be passed

through,” as something that can be quantified and measured (citation

index), as a space of transition and commerce. Although Augé’s analysis

comes from a very different field, it can be (including its anthropological

dimension) put well in use when dealing with the problem of the

structuring of knowledge. Not in the sense that an old doctrine of places is being replaced by one of non-places but

rather in the emphasis upon the interrelationship of both principles (“the first is never completely erased, the

second never totally completed”) and the changing tensions between them throughout history. The contemporary

virtual knowledge spaces can then be reconsidered in regard to the undercurrent of “places” and the practices of

their collecting and recollecting.