空间诗学6books_ockman[1]

Book Reviews Reviewed by Joan Ockman The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard Translated from the French by Maria Jolas Foreword by Etienne Gilson New York: Orion Press, 1964 New foreword by John R. Stilgoe Boston: Beacon Press, 1994 But any doctrine of the imaginary is nec- essarily a philosophy of excess.1 T H R E E O R F O U R D E C A D E S ago a book entitled The Poetics of Space could hardly fail to stir the architectural imagi- nation. First published in French in 1957 and translated into English in 1964, Gaston Bachelard’s philosophical medi- tation 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 cul- ture of late modernism. “We are far re- moved 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 tran- scends geometrical space.”2 In lyrical chapters on the “topography of our inti- mate being”—of nests, drawers, shells, corners, miniatures, forests, and above all the house, with its vertical polarity of cellar and attic—he undertook a system- atic study, or “topoanalysis,” of the “space we love.” Although Bachelard was specifically concerned with the psycho- dynamics of the literary image, architects saw in his excavation of the spatial imag- inary a counter to both technoscientific positivism and abstract formalism, as well as an alternative to the schemati- cism 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, as- serted that “further research on architec- tural space is dependent upon a better understanding of existential space,” cit- ing Bachelard’s Poetics of Space together with Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s Mensch und Raum (1963), the chapter on space in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenome- nology 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 Bachelard’s phenomenological orientation was already evident before the Second World War, the philosophy of science—the subject of his initial for- mation—remained a central preoccupa- tion throughout his career. To read only The Poetics of Space is therefore to miss his originality with respect to the philo- sophical tradition from which he emerged, as well as the historical speci- ficity of his development. One must con- sider 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 to- day, it is the interrelationship between science and poetry, experiment and ex- perience, 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 (1884–1962) was a remarkable intellec- H A R VA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 1 This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 1998, Number 6. To order this issue or a subscription, visit the HDM homepage at . © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher tual 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 posthu- mous 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 coun- tryside 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 dis- sertations, one on the acquisition of sci- entific knowledge by approximation and the other on the thermodynamics of solids. Over the next decade he pro- duced eight more volumes dealing with the epistemology of knowledge in vari- ous sciences, becoming increasingly pre- occupied with the dangers of a priori thinking and questions of objectivity and experimental evidence. In L’Expérience de l’espace dans la physique contemporaine (1937), confronting the philosophical implications of Einstein’s monumental breakthrough in physics and Heisen- berg’s uncertainty principle, Bachelard took up the contradictions between Descartes’s and Newton’s concepts of physical space as empirical, locational, and stable, and the abstract, counterex- periential constructs of space-time being theorized by 20th-century microphysics. But Bachelard’s inquiry into the revo- lutionary 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 Lautréamont (1939), signaled a shift in his focus from physical science to the phenomena of consciousness, from “the axis of objectivization” to “that of sub- jectivity.” With The Psychoanalysis of Fire—a book in which Bachelard set out to “question everything,” “to escape from the rigidity of mental habits formed by contact with familiar experi- ences”4—he initiated a series of investi- gations into the psychic meanings of the four cosmic elements, conceived as con- stituting the repertory of poetic reverie, the “material imagination.” The project of discerning a loi des quatre éléments would preoccupy him until his death, re- sulting in a suite of remarkable volumes on fire, earth, air, and water.5 In Lautréa- mont, another excursion into the domain of depth psychology—more Jungian than Freudian, as noted by Deleuze and Guattari, admirers of the book6— Bachelard set out to study the phenome- nology of aggression in the wild, “animalizing” imagery of the 19th-cen- tury 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 anoth- er from the outset. All that philosophy can hope to accomplish is to make poet- ry and science complementary, to unite them as two well-defined opposites.”7 Yet what profoundly links Bachelard’s philosophy of knowledge to his poetics of the imagination, his scientific episte- mology to his study of psychic phenom- ena, is his concern with how creative thought comes into being. Like Michel Foucault after him (and anticipating Thomas Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm shift), Bachelard directed epistemologi- cal 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. Bachelard’s concept of the epis- temological obstacle—a concept Fou- cault would assimilate in The Archaeology of Knowledge—was an attempt to demon- strate how knowledge incorporates its own history of errors and divagations. The “epistemological profile” of any sci- entific idea included the multiple obsta- cles that had to be negated or transcended dialectically—and thus ab- sorbed—in 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 discon- tinuous rhythms and transforming or displacing concepts along novel avenues of inquiry.8 For Bachelard as for Fou- cault, 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 re- orderings and reversals. In this way, modern rationalism would be a tran- scendent rationalism, “surrationalism.” “If one doesn’t put one’s reason at stake in an experiment,” writes Bachelard in “Le Surrationalisme” (1936), “the exper- iment is not worth attempting.”9 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 Bachelard’s view, the authentically poetic image emerges from a form of forgetting or not-knowing that “is not ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowl- edge.” 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 Space—underscoring the irony in the ti- tle of his earlier book on fire—the prob- lem with psychoanalysis (just as with Marxist interpretations of history) is that it seeks to explain the flower by the fer- tilizer.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 it- self.”11 Bachelard’s notion of the role played by chance and mutability in the emergence of the poetic image is virtual- ly identical to the creative principle of the surrealists. For Bachelard, surrealism is related to realism as surrationalism is to rationalism. Book Reviews The Poetics of Space 2 H A R VA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E FA L L 1 9 9 8 © 2 0 0 1 b y th e Pr es id en t an d Fe llo w s of H ar va rd C ol le ge a nd T he M IT P re ss . N ot t o be r ep ro du ce d w ith ou t th e pe rm is si on o f th e pu bl is he r Explicit in his ontology of the poetic image, as in surrealist literature and art, is a critique of the ocular privilege ac- corded by Enlightenment philosophy to geometry and visual evidence. Despite its perceptual sophistication, the eye cannot necessarily go beyond a descrip- tion 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 conscious- ness—or the half-dreaming conscious- ness Bachelard calls reverie. In this sense, any “application” of Bachelard’s 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, Bachelard’s vision of the oneiric house— influential as it has been on a certain sec- tor of architectural discourse since the ’60s—itself seems to constitute a blind spot or epistemological obstacle. His radical will to question all received ideas and experience, his concept of the dy- namism of the creative imagination, and his post-Newtonian philosophy of sci- ence 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 world—“a house that comes forth from the earth, that lives rooted in its black earth”—in his book La Terre et les rêveries du repos, published in 1948, just after the Second World War.14 Bachelard’s recourse to the poetics of “felicitous space” would seem to be a way of countering an encroaching modernity. His antipathy to 20th-centu- ry urbanism and technology receives its strongest expression in The Poetics of Space: In Paris there are no houses, and the in- habitants of the big city live in superim- posed 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 pure- ly 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 hor- izontality. The different rooms that com- pose living quarters jammed into one floor all lack one of the fundamental principles for distinguishing and classify- ing the values of intimacy. 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 be- comes an artificial one. Everything about it is mechanical and, on every side, inti- mate living flees.15 Bachelard’s evocation of the rustic abode in Champagne is almost exactly contemporary with Heidegger’s 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 terri- ble urban reality that the twentieth cen- tury 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 begins—consciously—where Bachelard leaves off. Instead of Bachelard’s timeless reverie of felicitous space, Foucault prefers to confront the “coefficient of adversity” in the phenom- enology of human habitation, addressing questions of historicity and power in re- lation to spatial discourse and institu- tions. The Poetics of Space thus leads, at least by one route, to Foucault’s seminal essay of 1967 on heterotopia, in which Foucault suggestively proposes to shift the problematic of Bachelardian topo- analysis from intimate space to “other spaces”—spaces of crisis, deviance, ex- clusion, and illusion; in other words, to heterotopoanalysis.19 Notes 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 et les rêves. Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (1942; English trans., Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, 1983); L’Air et les songes: Es- sai sur l’imagination du mouvement (1943; trans., Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, 1988); La Terre et les rêveries de la volon- té (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 earthly element of the cosmos. Two more related works—La Poétique de la rêverie (1960; trans., The Poetics 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 books on 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. Sheri- dan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 4. 9. Cit. in Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociolo- gy, 1937–39, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 397, n.2. Book Reviews The Poetics of Space 3 H A R VA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E FA L L 1 9 9 8 © 2 0 0 1 b y th e Pr es id en t an d Fe llo w s of H ar va rd C ol le ge a nd T he M IT P re ss . N ot t o be r ep ro du ce d w ith ou t th e pe rm is si on o f th e pu bl is he r 10. The Poetics of Space, xxvi, xxviii–xxix. 11. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 320–321. 12. The Poetics of Space, 215. Cit. in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twenti- eth-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 Ed- ward Eigen, 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: Basil Black- well, 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 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 Suppres- sion 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’s es- say, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Hetero- topias,” is republished in Architecture Culture, 1943-1968, 419-426. As this article was going to press, I came across Edward S. Casey’s illuminat- ing philosophical history, The Fate of Place (Uni- versity of California Press, 1997), which situates Bachelard’s 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. Book Reviews The Poetics of Space 4 H A R VA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E FA L L 1 9 9 8 © 2 0 0 1 b y th e Pr es id en t an d Fe llo w s of H ar va rd C ol le ge a nd T he M IT P re ss . N ot t o be r ep ro du ce d w ith ou t th e pe rm is si on o f th e pu bl is he r