You are on page 1of 6

08.09.

2015

No. 6 /
Representations/Misrepresentations
and Revaluations of Classic
Books
REVIEW

HarvardDesignMagazine:ThePoeticsofSpacebyGastonBachelard

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard


Joan 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 fail
to stir the architectural imagination. First published in French in 1957 and
translated into English in 1964, Gaston Bachelards philosophical meditation
on oneiric space appeared at a moment when phenomenology and the pursuit
of symbolic and archetypal meanings in architecture seemed to open fertile
ground within the desiccated culture of late modernism. We are far removed
from any reference to simple geometrical forms, Bachelard wrote in a chapter
entitled House and Universe. A house that has been experienced is not an
inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.2 In lyrical chapters
on the topography of our intimate beingof nests, drawers, shells, corners,
miniatures, forests, and above all the house, with its vertical polarity of cellar
and attiche undertook a systematic study, or topoanalysis, of the space we
love. Although Bachelard was specifically concerned with the psychodynamics
of the literary image, architects saw in his excavation of the spatial imaginary a
counter to both technoscientific positivism and abstract formalism, as well as an
alternative to the schematicism of the other emerging intellectual tendency of
the day, structuralism. In his book Existence, Space and Architecture (1971),
Christian Norberg-Schulz, the most prolific and long-term proponent of a
phenomenological architecture, asserted that further research on architectural
space is dependent upon a better understanding of existential space, citing
Bachelards Poetics of Space together with Otto Friedrich Bollnows Mensch
und Raum (1963), the chapter on space in Maurice Merleau-Pontys The
Phenomenology of Perception (1962; original French, 1945), and two key works
by Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1962; German, 1927) and the essay
Building Dwelling Thinking (1971; German, 1954), as fundamental texts.3
Yet if Bachelards phenomenological orientation was already evident before
the Second World War, the philosophy of sciencethe subject of his initial
formationremained a central preoccupation throughout his career. To read
only The Poetics of Space is therefore to miss his originality with respect to the
philosophical tradition from which he emerged, as well as the historical
specificity of his development. One must consider his work on the creative
imagination together with his writings on science and rationality to appreciate
the dialectic that informs his thought. Indeed, in a rereading of Bachelard
today, it is the interrelationship between science and poetry, experiment and
experience, that seems to have the most radical potential, while his well-known
vision of the oneiric house, with its rather nostalgic and essentialist world view,
comes across as historically dated.
In his own time, Bachelard (18841962) was a remarkable intellectual figure,
reputedly a reader of six books a day, and author of twenty-three at the time of
his death, not counting his scores of essays, prefaces, and posthumous
fragments. At the Sorbonne, where he occupied the chair of history and
philosophy of science from 1940 to 1955, he was a beloved pedagogue whose
flowing beard, earthy accents, and elevated flights of thought made him
something of a guru. Born into a family of modest shopkeepers and
shoemakers in a provincial town in the idyllic countryside of Champagne about
200 miles southeast of Paris, he initially intended to pursue a career in
engineering. After three years in the trenches of the First World War, however,
he changed his sights to philosophy, eventually moving to Paris, where he
obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1927 with two dissertations, one on

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/6/thepoeticsofspacebygastonbachelard

1/6

08.09.2015

HarvardDesignMagazine:ThePoeticsofSpacebyGastonBachelard

obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1927 with two dissertations, one on
the acquisition of scientific knowledge by approximation and the other on the
thermodynamics of solids. Over the next decade he produced eight more
volumes dealing with the epistemology of knowledge in various sciences,
becoming increasingly preoccupied with the dangers of a priori thinking and
questions of objectivity and experimental evidence. In LExprience de lespace
dans la physique contemporaine (1937), confronting the philosophical
implications of Einsteins monumental breakthrough in physics and
Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, Bachelard took up the contradictions
between Descartess and Newtons concepts of physical space as empirical,
locational, and stable, and the abstract, counterexperiential constructs of spacetime being theorized by 20th-century microphysics.
But Bachelards inquiry into the revolutionary character of the new scientific
mind little prepared his colleagues for the unconventional turn his work was to
take at the end of the 1930s. Influenced by psychoanalysis and surrealism, two
books, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) and Lautramont (1939), signaled a
shift in his focus from physical science to the phenomena of consciousness,
from the axis of objectivization to that of subjectivity. With The
Psychoanalysis of Firea book in which Bachelard set out to question
everything, to escape from the rigidity of mental habits formed by contact
with familiar experiences4he initiated a series of investigations into the
psychic meanings of the four cosmic elements, conceived as constituting the
repertory of poetic reverie, the material imagination. The project of
discerning a loi des quatre lments would preoccupy him until his death,
resulting in a suite of remarkable volumes on fire, earth, air, and water.5 In
Lautramont,another excursion into the domain of depth psychologymore
Jungian than Freudian, as noted by Deleuze and Guattari, admirers of the
book6Bachelard set out to study the phenomenology of aggression in the
wild, animalizing imagery of the 19th-century Uruguayan poet Isidore
Ducasse, author of Les Chants de Maldoror, one of the sacred texts of the
surrealists (and later of the Cobra group, on whom Bachelard was to be deeply
influential).
As Bachelard acknowledged in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, The axes of poetry
and of science are opposed to one another from the outset. All that philosophy
can hope to accomplish is to make poetry and science complementary, to unite
them as two well-defined opposites.7 Yet what profoundly links Bachelards
philosophy of knowledge to his poetics of the imagination, his scientific
epistemology to his study of psychic phenomena, is his concern with how
creative thought comes into being. Like Michel Foucault after him (and
anticipating Thomas Kuhns notion of the paradigm shift), Bachelard directed
epistemological inquiry away from the continuities within systems of knowledge
toward the obstacles and events that interrupt the continuum, thereby forcing
new ideas to appear and altering the course of thought. Bachelards concept of
the epistemological obstaclea concept Foucault would assimilate in The
Archaeology of Knowledgewas an attempt to demonstrate how knowledge
incorporates its own history of errors and divagations. The epistemological
profile of any scientific idea included the multiple obstacles that had to be
negated or transcended dialecticallyand thus absorbedin the process of
arriving at more rational levels of knowledge. Countering the codification of
universal systems of thought and the formation of collective mentalities, as
Foucault would put it, were events and thresholds that suspended the linear
advancement of knowledge, forcing thought into discontinuous rhythms and
transforming or displacing concepts along novel avenues of inquiry.8 For
Bachelard as for Foucault, such epistemological obstacles played a crucial and
creative function in the history of thought. Scientific inquiry therefore had to
remain nonteleological and open to the possibility of such reorderings and
reversals. In this way, modern rationalism would be a transcendent rationalism,
surrationalism. If one doesnt put ones reason at stake in an experiment,
writes Bachelard in Le Surrationalisme (1936), the experiment is not worth
attempting.9
For Bachelard, the role played by the epistemological obstacle in experimental

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/6/thepoeticsofspacebygastonbachelard

2/6

08.09.2015

HarvardDesignMagazine:ThePoeticsofSpacebyGastonBachelard

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


science is exactly paralleled by that of the poetic image in literary language. In
Bachelards view, the authentically poetic image emerges from a form of
forgetting or not-knowing that is not ignorance but a difficult transcendence
of knowledge. As such, it constantly surpasses its origins. Hence, neither
history nor psychology can ever fully determine or explain it. As he puts it in
The Poetics of Spaceunderscoring the irony in the title of his earlier book on
firethe problem with psychoanalysis (just as with Marxist interpretations of
history) 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, nor
is 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 in
language like the sudden springing forth of language itself.11 Bachelards
notion of the role played by chance and mutability in the emergence of the
poetic image is virtually identical to the creative principle of the surrealists. For
Bachelard, surrealism is related to realism as surrationalism is to rationalism.
Explicit in his ontology of the poetic image, as in surrealist literature and art, is
a critique of the ocular privilege accorded by Enlightenment philosophy to
geometry and visual evidence. Despite its perceptual sophistication, the eye
cannot necessarily go beyond a description of surface: Sight says too many
things 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 analysis
of architecture or design as such: it is not a question of describing houses, or
enumerating their picturesque features and analyzing for which reasons they
are comfortable.13 Rather, space is the abode of human consciousness, and
the problem for the phenomenologist is to study how it accommodates
consciousnessor the half-dreaming consciousness Bachelard calls reverie. In
this sense, any application of Bachelards ideas to architecture requires a
cautious approach at best. Indeed, Bachelard would undoubtedly argue that
almost everything we know about architecture as a historical discipline stands
in the way of everything we can know about the poetics of dwelling.
But precisely from the standpoint of clinging to traditional modes of thought,
Bachelards vision of the oneiric houseinfluential as it has been on a certain
sector of architectural discourse since the 60sitself seems to constitute a
blind spot or epistemological obstacle. His radical will to question all received
ideas and experience, his concept of the dynamism of the creative imagination,
and his post-Newtonian philosophy of science contradict a conception of
dwelling rooted in the soil of the preindustrial French countryside. It is no
coincidence that Bachelard first evokes this atavistic dream worlda house
that comes forth from the earth, that lives rooted in its black earthin his
book La Terre et les rveries du repos, published in 1948, just after the Second
World War.14 Bachelards recourse to the poetics of felicitous space would
seem to be a way of countering an encroaching modernity. His antipathy to
20th-century urbanism and technology receives its strongest expression inThe
Poetics of Space:

Current Issue

Browse

Back Issues

In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in
superimposed boxes . They have no roots and, what is quite unthinkable for a
dweller of houses, skyscrapers have no cellars. From the street to the roof, the
rooms pile up one on top of the other, while the tent of a horizonless sky
encloses 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 longer
any virtue in living up near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality. The
different rooms that compose living quarters jammed into one floor all lack one
of the fundamental principles for distinguishing and classifying the values of
Aboutintimacy.
Buy
But in addition to the intimate nature of verticality, a house in a big city lacks
cosmicity. For here, where houses are no longer set in natural surroundings, the
relationship between house and space becomes an artificial one. Everything
about it is mechanical and, on every side, intimate living flees.15

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/6/thepoeticsofspacebygastonbachelard

3/6

08.09.2015

HarvardDesignMagazine:ThePoeticsofSpacebyGastonBachelard

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


Bachelards evocation of the rustic abode in Champagne is almost exactly
contemporary with Heideggers paean to the peasant hut in the Black Forest.16
Henri Lefebvre, who admired both philosophers, was among the first to point
out the shared aura of nostalgia that suffuses their poetics of dwelling. The
special, still sacred, quasi-religious and in fact almost absolute space that
both Bachelard and Heidegger associate with the idea of house reflects the
terrible urban reality that the twentieth century has instituted.17 The reverie
of a maternal, womblike, and stable home, sheltering and remote, is, as
Anthony Vidler has suggested more recently,18 a symptomatic response to the
experience of an unheimlich modernity.
From this perspective, the work of Foucault beginsconsciouslywhere
Bachelard leaves off. Instead of Bachelards timeless reverie of felicitous space,
Foucault prefers to confront the coefficient of adversity in the
phenomenology of human habitation, addressing questions of historicity and
power in relation to spatial discourse and institutions. The Poetics of Space thus
leads, at least by one route, to Foucaults seminal essay of 1967 on heterotopia,
in which Foucault suggestively proposes to shift the problematic of
Bachelardian topoanalysis from intimate space to other spacesspaces of
crisis, deviance, exclusion, and illusion; in other words, to heterotopoanalysis.19

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/6/thepoeticsofspacebygastonbachelard

4/6

08.09.2015

HarvardDesignMagazine:ThePoeticsofSpacebyGastonBachelard
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, Bachelards books on the cosmic imagination are LEau et
les rves.Essai sur limagination de la matire (1942; English trans., Water and Dreams: An Essay
on the Imagination of Matter, 1983); LAir et les songes: Essai sur limagination du mouvement
(1943; trans., Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, 1988); La Terre et les
rveries de la volont(1948); La Terre et les rveries du repos (1948); La Flamme dune chandelle
(1961; trans., The Flame of a Candle, 1988); and Fragments dune potique du feu (posthumous,
1988). The Poetics of Space is properly part of this series, the house belonging to the earthly
element of the cosmos. Two more related worksLa Potique de la rverie (1960; trans., The
Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, 1969) and Le Droit de rver
(posthumous, 1970; trans., The Right to Dream, 1971)complete the list of Bachelards books
on the phenomenology of the imagination.
6. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 235236.
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, 193739, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 397, n.2.
10. The Poetics of Space, xxvi, xxviiixxix.
11. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 320321.
12. The Poetics of Space, 215. Cit. in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-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 Edward
Eigen, ed.,Architecture Culture 19431968: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Rizzoli, 1993),
111.
15. The Poetics of Space, 2627. Bachelards 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: Basil
Blackwell, 1991), 120121.
18. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays on the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1992), 6366. For a feminist reading along similar lines, suggesting that the dream of
dwelling in the bosom of the house is a male fantasy not shared by most women (for whom
the 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: The
Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson,
1996), 257258.
19. The coefficient of adversity is Bachelards term; see Water and Dreams, p. 157. Foucaults
essay, 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. Caseys
illuminating philosophical history, The Fate of Place(University of California Press, 1997), which
situates Bachelards Poetics of Space in the broad context of Western philosophical discourse
on the concept of place.

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

Michel Foucault

Phenomenology

Other Articles From


No. 6 / Representations/Misrepresentations and Revaluations of Classic Books

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/6/thepoeticsofspacebygastonbachelard

5/6

08.09.2015

HarvardDesignMagazine:ThePoeticsofSpacebyGastonBachelard

Object, Image, Aura

Daniel Naegele

Harvard Design
Magazine

48 Quincy Street
Gund Hall
Cambridge, MA
02138

YourEmail

Reflections on a Polished
Floor

Selected books by J. B.
Jackson

Landscape for Living by


Garrett Eckbo

Iain Boyd Whyte

Mitchell Schwarzer

Robert Riley

info@harvarddesignmagazine.org

2015 President
and Fellows of
Harvard College

Get Updates

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/6/thepoeticsofspacebygastonbachelard

6/6

You might also like