A generation ago scientific ideas floated free in the air, as historians gazed up at them in wonder and admiration. From time to time, historians agreed, the ideas that made up the body of scientific truth became incarnate: they were embedded into the fleshly forms of human culture and attached to particular times and places. How this incarnation occurred was a great mystery. How could spirit be made flesh? How did the transcendent and the timeless enter the forms of the mundane and the contingent? Platonist and providentialist perspectives offered ways of speaking about the mystery, but, in general, it remained unresolved at the core of orthodox idealist historiography.1

Visible colleges, in contrast to the “invisible colleges” familiar to historians of science, are the collective places of science, the places where the “creation of phenomena” and theoretical speculation proceed side by side. To understand their spatial form, we must understand first how buildings can structure space to both conserve and generate social forms, depending on how they relate structure in space to randomness. Randomness is shown to play a crucial role in morphogenetic models of many kinds, especially in spatial forms and in social networks. We argue here that it can also play a crucial role in the advance of science.

There can be no doubt about the moral and epistemological significance of what Shapin (1988) calls the “physical place” of the scientific laboratory. The physical place is defined by the locales, barriers, ports of entry, and lines of sight that bound the laboratory and separate it from other urban and architectural environments. Shapin's discussion of the emergence of the scientific laboratory in seventeenth-century England provides a convincing demonstration that credible knowledge is situated at an intersection between physical locales and social distinctions. In this paper I take up Shapin's theme of the “siting of knowledge production,” but I give it a different treatment – one based on ethnomethodological studies of work (Garfinkel 1986; Garfinkel et al. 1981; Garfinkel et al. 1989; Livingston 1986; Liberman 1985; Lynch 1985a; Lynch et al. 1983; Bjelic and Lynch forthcoming; Morrison 1990; MacBeth 1989). Without denying all that can be witnessed in the spectacle of the scientist at the bench and of the architectural habitat of the bench, I argue that the “place” of scientific work is defined by locally organized topical contextures. The paper describes two examples of such spatial orders – “opticism” and “digitality” – associated with distinct complexes of equipment and practice. These topical spaces might initially be viewed as “ideal” or “symbolic” spaces, but I argue that they are no less material (and no less social) than the “physical setting” of the laboratory; indeed, they are the physical setting.

Emergency medicine, a new medical specialty in the United States, is an ethical practice that has developed through its interaction with the spaces in which it is situated. We discuss this claim in two steps followed by a demonstration. First we examine the historical evolution of the hospital, to provide the background for a lengthier account of the historical transformation of the emergency room. We then introduce Foucault's approach to ethics, to explain the sense in which emergency medicine is an ethical practice constituted, in part, by its space(s) of operation. The preliminaries of the application of our historico-ethical framework to emergency medicine, are presented, focusing on cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Our intention is to provide a framework for the newest clinical specialty as an ethical practice in order to understand how to individuate its emerging ethical problems. The emphasis on space throughout enables us to integrate the historical development of emergency medicine with its present concrete setting, and to establish a basis for analyzing emergency medicine that does not rely uncritically on either a preferred ethical perspective or the perspective of its practitioners.

It is often observed by historians of postwar American art that painters and sculptors of the 1960s sought a more mechanized “look” for their art. I argue that the changes reflected in the art have their source in a deeper shift – a shift at the level of production, expressed in new studio practices as well as in the space of the artworks themselves.

In the period immediately before, during, and after World War II, the dominant topos of the American artist was that of a solitary (male) genius, alone in his studio, sole witness to the miraculous creation of his art. I demonstrate that artists of the 1960s, against this backdrop of heroic modernism, engaged in a different rhetoric and practice, one based on the models of industry and business. The studio of Andy Warhol, named the “Factory,” is viewed as apodictic of this great change, with its rudimentary assembly line and highly social mode of production.

The change in practice instantiated in Warhol's Factory is significant in and of itself, but I argue further that it expressed itself in the “place of knowledge” – the space within (or in front of) Warhol's paintings and objects, and the newly social space in which they signify. The context for that signification thus becomes crucial to our understanding of the “Warhol phenomenon” celebrated in popular and arthistorical texts. The ambivalencies embedded in Warhol's Factory, where the artist's role oscillated between manager and proletarian worker, are seen as a function of their context. Conflicting signals are also broadcast by the works of art, which speak in the dialect of mass production with the accent of the irreplaceably unique.

Few spaces have been given such great importance as national space. It is often seen as the fulfillment of a predestination–simultaneously geographical, political, ethnic, and functional – granted affirmation by history. This being especially true for the French territory with its ancient history.

This paper takes a different approach as regards the establishment of knowledge concerning the national territory. Looking at two of the many ways of knowing the territory–proto-statistics and the map–it aims at showing that the acquisition of this knowledge is a discontinuous, partly cumulative process, with social, political, and cognitive rationales, which were heterogeneous and even contradictory for a long period of time.

Montaigne's Essays were an exercise in self-knowledge carried out for more than twenty years in Montaigne's private library located in his mansion near Bordeaux. The library was a place of solitude as well as a place of knowledge, a kind of heterotopia in which two sets of spatial relations coexisted and interacted: the social and the epistemic. The spatial demarcation and arrangement of the site – in both the physical and the symbolic sense – were necessary elements of the constitution of Montaigne's self as an object of knowledge and as a subject of discourse. The spatial setting of the library made possible and constrained certain discursive patterns through which words were systematically linked to things, authority was correlated with access and visibility, and the epistemological was coordinated with the social. In this sense, Montaigne's library resembled other places of empirical knowledge of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g., early laboratories or observatories) in which subjects of knowledge were constituted, objects were posited in their proper phenomenal fields and the entire structure of intellectual activity was reproduced through various cultural mechanisms. But the initial similarity is only apparent. The private library never became a culturally recognized place for knowledge of the self; its heterotopic structure could not have been reproduced without the concrete presence of an author and of a self, while Montaigne's skepticism systematically undermined the possibility of the author's position and of the identity of the self.

It is not easy to point to the place of knowledge in our culture. More precisely, it is difficult to locate the production of our most valued forms of knowledge, including those of religion, literature and science. A pervasive topos in Western culture, from the Greeks onward, stipulates that the most authentic intellectual agents are the most solitary. The place of knowledge is nowhere in particular and anywhere at all. I sketch some uses of the theme of the solitary philosopher across a broad sweep of history, giving particular attention to its deployment in and around the scientific culture of seventeenth-century England. I argue that the rhetoric of solitude is strongly implicated in individualistic views of society and empiricist portrayals of scientific knowledge. Solitude is a state that symbolically expresses direct engagement with the sources of knowledge – divine and transcendent or natural and empirical. At the same time, solitude publicly expresses disengagement from society, identified as a set of conventions and concerns which act to corrupt knowledge. Hence, the study of the social uses of solitude adds further support to the notion that problems of knowledge and problems of social order are solved together.