08.09.2015 Harvard Design Magazine: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

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No. 6 /Representations/Misrepresentationsand Revaluations of ClassicBooksREVIEW

The Poetics of Space by Gaston BachelardJoan Ockman

But any doctrine of the imaginary is necessarily a philosophy of excess.1

Three or four decades ago a book entitled The Poetics of Space could hardly failto stir the architectural imagination. First published in French in 1957 andtranslated into English in 1964, Gaston Bachelard’s philosophical meditationon oneiric space appeared at a moment when phenomenology and the pursuitof symbolic and archetypal meanings in architecture seemed to open fertileground within the desiccated culture of late modernism. “We are far removedfrom any reference to simple geometrical forms,” Bachelard wrote in a chapterentitled “House and Universe.” “A house that has been experienced is not aninert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”2 In lyrical chapterson the “topography of our intimate being”—of nests, drawers, shells, corners,miniatures, forests, and above all the house, with its vertical polarity of cellarand attic—he undertook a systematic study, or “topoanalysis,” of the “space welove.” Although Bachelard was specifically concerned with the psychodynamicsof the literary image, architects saw in his excavation of the spatial imaginary acounter to both technoscientific positivism and abstract formalism, as well as analternative to the schematicism of the other emerging intellectual tendency ofthe day, structuralism. In his book Existence, Space and Architecture (1971),Christian Norberg-Schulz, the most prolific and long-term proponent of aphenomenological architecture, asserted that “further research on architecturalspace is dependent upon a better understanding of existential space,” citingBachelard’s Poetics of Space together with Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s Menschund Raum (1963), the chapter on space in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ThePhenomenology of Perception (1962; original French, 1945), and two key worksby Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1962; German, 1927) and the essay“Building Dwelling Thinking” (1971; German, 1954), as fundamental texts.3

Yet if Bachelard’s phenomenological orientation was already evident beforethe Second World War, the philosophy of science—the subject of his initialformation—remained a central preoccupation throughout his career. To readonly The Poetics of Space is therefore to miss his originality with respect to thephilosophical tradition from which he emerged, as well as the historicalspecificity of his development. One must consider his work on the creativeimagination together with his writings on science and rationality to appreciatethe dialectic that informs his thought. Indeed, in a rereading of Bachelardtoday, it is the interrelationship between science and poetry, experiment andexperience, that seems to have the most radical potential, while his well-knownvision of the oneiric house, with its rather nostalgic and essentialist world view,comes across as historically dated.

In his own time, Bachelard (1884–1962) was a remarkable intellectual figure,reputedly a reader of six books a day, and author of twenty-three at the time ofhis death, not counting his scores of essays, prefaces, and posthumousfragments. At the Sorbonne, where he occupied the chair of history andphilosophy of science from 1940 to 1955, he was a beloved pedagogue whoseflowing beard, earthy accents, and elevated flights of thought made himsomething of a guru. Born into a family of modest shopkeepers andshoemakers in a provincial town in the idyllic countryside of Champagne about200 miles southeast of Paris, he initially intended to pursue a career inengineering. After three years in the trenches of the First World War, however,he changed his sights to philosophy, eventually moving to Paris, where heobtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1927 with two dissertations, one on

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obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1927 with two dissertations, one onthe acquisition of scientific knowledge by approximation and the other on thethermodynamics of solids. Over the next decade he produced eight morevolumes dealing with the epistemology of knowledge in various sciences,becoming increasingly preoccupied with the dangers of a priori thinking andquestions of objectivity and experimental evidence. In L’Expérience de l’espacedans la physique contemporaine (1937), confronting the philosophicalimplications of Einstein’s monumental breakthrough in physics andHeisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Bachelard took up the contradictionsbetween Descartes’s and Newton’s concepts of physical space as empirical,locational, and stable, and the abstract, counterexperiential constructs of space-time being theorized by 20th-century microphysics.

But Bachelard’s inquiry into the revolutionary character of the new scientificmind little prepared his colleagues for the unconventional turn his work was totake at the end of the 1930s. Influenced by psychoanalysis and surrealism, twobooks, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) and Lautréamont (1939), signaled ashift in his focus from physical science to the phenomena of consciousness,from “the axis of objectivization” to “that of subjectivity.” With ThePsychoanalysis of Fire—a book in which Bachelard set out to “questioneverything,” “to escape from the rigidity of mental habits formed by contactwith familiar experiences”4—he initiated a series of investigations into thepsychic meanings of the four cosmic elements, conceived as constituting therepertory of poetic reverie, the “material imagination.” The project ofdiscerning a loi des quatre éléments would preoccupy him until his death,resulting in a suite of remarkable volumes on fire, earth, air, and water.5 InLautréamont,another excursion into the domain of depth psychology—moreJungian than Freudian, as noted by Deleuze and Guattari, admirers of thebook6—Bachelard set out to study the phenomenology of aggression in thewild, “animalizing” imagery of the 19th-century Uruguayan poet IsidoreDucasse, author of Les Chants de Maldoror, one of the sacred texts of thesurrealists (and later of the Cobra group, on whom Bachelard was to be deeplyinfluential).

As Bachelard acknowledged in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, “The axes of poetryand of science are opposed to one another from the outset. All that philosophycan hope to accomplish is to make poetry and science complementary, to unitethem as two well-defined opposites.”7 Yet what profoundly links Bachelard’sphilosophy of knowledge to his poetics of the imagination, his scientificepistemology to his study of psychic phenomena, is his concern with howcreative thought comes into being. Like Michel Foucault after him (andanticipating Thomas Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm shift), Bachelard directedepistemological inquiry away from the continuities within systems of knowledgetoward the obstacles and events that interrupt the continuum, thereby forcingnew ideas to appear and altering the course of thought. Bachelard’s concept ofthe epistemological obstacle—a concept Foucault would assimilate in TheArchaeology of Knowledge—was an attempt to demonstrate how knowledgeincorporates its own history of errors and divagations. The “epistemologicalprofile” of any scientific idea included the multiple obstacles that had to benegated or transcended dialectically—and thus absorbed—in the process ofarriving at more rational levels of knowledge. Countering the codification ofuniversal systems of thought and the formation of collective mentalities, asFoucault would put it, were events and thresholds that suspended the linearadvancement of knowledge, forcing thought into discontinuous rhythms andtransforming or displacing concepts along novel avenues of inquiry.8 ForBachelard as for Foucault, such epistemological obstacles played a crucial andcreative function in the history of thought. Scientific inquiry therefore had toremain nonteleological and open to the possibility of such reorderings andreversals. In this way, modern rationalism would be a transcendent rationalism,“surrationalism.” “If one doesn’t put one’s reason at stake in an experiment,”writes Bachelard in “Le Surrationalisme” (1936), “the experiment is not worthattempting.”9

For Bachelard, the role played by the epistemological obstacle in experimental

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For Bachelard, the role played by the epistemological obstacle in experimentalscience is exactly paralleled by that of the poetic image in literary language. InBachelard’s view, the authentically poetic image emerges from a form offorgetting or not-knowing that “is not ignorance but a difficult transcendenceof knowledge.” As such, it “constantly surpasses its origins.” Hence, neitherhistory nor psychology can ever fully determine or explain it. As he puts it inThe Poetics of Space—underscoring the irony in the title of his earlier book onfire—the problem with psychoanalysis (just as with Marxist interpretations ofhistory) is that it seeks to explain the flower by the fertilizer.10 For Bachelard,the poetic image “has no past; it is not under the sway of some inner drive, noris it a measure of the pressures the poet sustains in the course of his early life…. The trait proper to the image is suddenness and brevity: it springs up inlanguage like the sudden springing forth of language itself.”11 Bachelard’snotion of the role played by chance and mutability in the emergence of thepoetic image is virtually identical to the creative principle of the surrealists. ForBachelard, surrealism is related to realism as surrationalism is to rationalism.

Explicit in his ontology of the poetic image, as in surrealist literature and art, isa critique of the ocular privilege accorded by Enlightenment philosophy togeometry and visual evidence. Despite its perceptual sophistication, the eyecannot necessarily go beyond a description of surface: “Sight says too manythings at the same time. Being does not see itself. Perhaps it listens to itself.”12

Space, for Bachelard, is not primarily a container of three-dimensional objects.For this reason the phenomenology of dwelling has little to do with an analysisof “architecture” or design as such: “it is not a question of describing houses, orenumerating their picturesque features and analyzing for which reasons theyare comfortable.”13 Rather, space is the abode of human consciousness, andthe problem for the phenomenologist is to study how it accommodatesconsciousness—or the half-dreaming consciousness Bachelard calls reverie. Inthis sense, any “application” of Bachelard’s ideas to architecture requires acautious approach at best. Indeed, Bachelard would undoubtedly argue thatalmost everything we know about architecture as a historical discipline standsin the way of everything we can know about the poetics of dwelling.

But precisely from the standpoint of clinging to traditional modes of thought,Bachelard’s vision of the oneiric house—influential as it has been on a certainsector of architectural discourse since the ’60s—itself seems to constitute ablind spot or epistemological obstacle. His radical will to question all receivedideas and experience, his concept of the dynamism of the creative imagination,and his post-Newtonian philosophy of science contradict a conception ofdwelling rooted in the soil of the preindustrial French countryside. It is nocoincidence that Bachelard first evokes this atavistic dream world—“a housethat comes forth from the earth, that lives rooted in its black earth”—in hisbook La Terre et les rêveries du repos, published in 1948, just after the SecondWorld War.14 Bachelard’s recourse to the poetics of “felicitous space” wouldseem to be a way of countering an encroaching modernity. His antipathy to20th-century urbanism and technology receives its strongest expression inThePoetics of Space:

In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live insuperimposed boxes… . They have no roots and, what is quite unthinkable for adweller of houses, skyscrapers have no cellars. From the street to the roof, therooms pile up one on top of the other, while the tent of a horizonless skyencloses the entire city. But the height of city buildings is a purely exterior one.Elevators do away with the heroism of stair climbing so that there is no longerany virtue in living up near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality. Thedifferent rooms that compose living quarters jammed into one floor all lack oneof the fundamental principles for distinguishing and classifying the values ofintimacy.

But in addition to the intimate nature of verticality, a house in a big city lackscosmicity. For here, where houses are no longer set in natural surroundings, therelationship between house and space becomes an artificial one. Everythingabout it is mechanical and, on every side, intimate living flees.15

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about it is mechanical and, on every side, intimate living flees.15

Bachelard’s evocation of the rustic abode in Champagne is almost exactlycontemporary with Heidegger’s paean to the peasant hut in the Black Forest.16

Henri Lefebvre, who admired both philosophers, was among the first to pointout the shared aura of nostalgia that suffuses their poetics of dwelling. The“special, still sacred, quasi-religious and in fact almost absolute space” thatboth Bachelard and Heidegger associate with the idea of house reflects “theterrible urban reality that the twentieth century has instituted.”17 The reverieof a maternal, womblike, and stable home, sheltering and remote, is, asAnthony Vidler has suggested more recently,18 a symptomatic response to theexperience of an unheimlich modernity.

From this perspective, the work of Foucault begins—consciously—whereBachelard leaves off. Instead of Bachelard’s timeless reverie of felicitous space,Foucault prefers to confront the “coefficient of adversity” in thephenomenology of human habitation, addressing questions of historicity andpower in relation to spatial discourse and institutions. The Poetics of Space thusleads, at least by one route, to Foucault’s seminal essay of 1967 on heterotopia,in which Foucault suggestively proposes to shift the problematic ofBachelardian topoanalysis from intimate space to “other spaces”—spaces ofcrisis, deviance, exclusion, and illusion; in other words, to heterotopoanalysis.19

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1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969),210.

2. Ibid., 47.

3. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space and Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1972), 15–16.

4. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press,1964), 1, 6.

5. Following La Psychanalyse du feu, Bachelard’s books on the cosmic imagination are L’Eau etles rêves.Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (1942; English trans., Water and Dreams: An Essayon the Imagination of Matter, 1983); L’Air et les songes: Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement(1943; trans., Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, 1988); La Terre et lesrêveries de la volonté(1948); La Terre et les rêveries du repos (1948); La Flamme d’une chandelle(1961; trans., The Flame of a Candle, 1988); and Fragments d’une poétique du feu (posthumous,1988). The Poetics of Space is properly part of this series, the house belonging to the earthlyelement of the cosmos. Two more related works—La Poétique de la rêverie (1960; trans., ThePoetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, 1969) and Le Droit de rêver(posthumous, 1970; trans., The Right to Dream, 1971)—complete the list of Bachelard’s bookson the phenomenology of the imagination.

6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 235–236.

7. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 2.

8. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M.Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 4.

9. Cit. in Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 1937–39, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 397, n.2.

10. The Poetics of Space, xxvi, xxviii–xxix.

11. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993), 320–321.

12. The Poetics of Space, 215. Cit. in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision inTwentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 388, n.29.

13. The Poetics of Space, 4.

14. Gaston Bachelard, “The Oneiric House,” trans. Joan Ockman, in Joan Ockman with EdwardEigen, ed.,Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Rizzoli, 1993),111.

15. The Poetics of Space, 26–27. Bachelard’s italics.

16. See Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 160.

17. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1991), 120–121.

18. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1992), 63–66. For a feminist reading along similar lines, suggesting that the dream ofdwelling “in the bosom of the house” is a male fantasy not shared by most women (for whomthe house is more a place of labor than repose), see Sharon Haar and Christopher Reed,“Coming Home: A Postscript on Postmodernism,” in Christopher Reed, ed., Not at Home: TheSuppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson,1996), 257–258.

19. The “coefficient of adversity” is Bachelard’s term; see Water and Dreams, p. 157. Foucault’sessay, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” is republished in Architecture Culture,1943-1968, 419-426. As this article was going to press, I came across Edward S. Casey’silluminating philosophical history, The Fate of Place(University of California Press, 1997), whichsituates Bachelard’s Poetics of Space in the broad context of Western philosophical discourseon the concept of place.

Joan Ockman teaches history and theory at the Columbia University Graduate School ofArchitecture, Planning and Preservation.

Michel Foucault Phenomenology

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