1. 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

2. 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.