Science and Place 385But that was not enough to establish it as a piece of genuine knowledge.
To secure that level of epistemic standing it had to receive the approval
of the relevant experimental public. A chasm thus opens up between the
private “trying” of an experiment, and its public “showing.” Only when
it had successfully traveled from private to public space could a scientifi c
claim enjoy the status of warranted knowledge. Through public demon-
stration, private experimentation achieved open confi rmation. The shift from
“trying” to “showing,” from delving to demonstrating, we might say, is a
spatialisation of the move from the context of scientifi c discovery to the
context of justifi cation. It is important to note here that it was only what
Shapin calls “geographically privileged persons” who could deliver war-
ranted credibility. But this did not involve just anybody who crossed the
material threshold. A variety of visitors could, under certain conditions,
enter the lab. It was only men of a certain standing that could provide
trustworthy testimony. Occupying the laboratory’s physical space was one
thing; occupying its discursive space quite another. Casual callers inhab-
ited a different epistemic space from those socially and cognitively sanc-
tioned to adjudicate on experimental reliability. Here were boundaries
that, though unmarked in physical space, were prominently displayed in
the laboratory’s mental cartography.
As a place of obtaining scientifi c knowledge of nature, the laboratory
is, in Lefebvre’s terms, a produced space, a distinct material and mental
space, where knowledge is made in very particular sorts of ways. And the
kind of place the laboratory is, turns out to be signifi cant in the cognitive
claims that emerge from it. To be sure, experimental knowledge can be
secured in other spaces too. The body, for example, has itself often been
a site of experiment. Take Alexander von Humboldt. He frequently used
his own body as an instrument for acquiring experimental knowledge of
the environments through which he traveled. It was, as he put it, “a kind
of gauge” for registering different atmospheres and conditions. He even
applied electrodes to himself to determine the effects of an electric cur-
rent on a secretion of blood and serum derived from deliberately raised
blisters on his back. And, indeed, he and Aimé Bonpland used their own
bodies as virtual Leyden jars to test the discharge from electric eels—with
fairly nasty results.^28 Such procedures point to the body as an experi-
mental space. But such performances raised intriguing questions about
which bodies—and which minds—could be trusted to deliver empirical
truths. Typically, during the eighteenth century it was only the genteel
whose word could be taken seriously. Only they had suffi cient composure
to distinguish what was fact from what was fabulous. Thus the French
student of electricity, Jean- Antoine Nollet, debarred from the republic