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2015
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Representations/Misrepresentations
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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
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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
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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, 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
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