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 necessarily
a philosophy of excess.
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 Bachelard’s 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
being”—of nests, drawers, shells,
corners, miniatures, forests, and above
all the house, with its vertical polarity of
cellar and attic—he 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
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 Phenomenologya
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 formation—
remained 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
(1884–1962) was a remarkable intellec-
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 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 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 L’Expérience de
l’espace dans la physique contemporaine
(1937), confronting the philosophical
implications of Einstein’s monumental
breakthrough in physics and Heisenberg’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, counterexperiential
constructs of space-time being
theorized by 20th-century microphysics.
But Bachelard’s 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 Lautréamont (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
Fire—a book in which Bachelard set out
to “question everything,” “to escape
from the rigidity of mental habits
formed by contact with familiar experiences”
4—he 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 éléments
would preoccupy him until his death, resulting
in a suite of remarkable volumes
on fire, earth, air, and water.5 In Lautréamont,
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 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 Bachelard’s
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 Kuhn’s 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. Bachelard’s concept of the epistemological
obstacle—a concept Foucault
would assimilate in The Archaeology
of Knowledge—was 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 dialectically—and thus absorbed—
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 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 doesn’t put one’s 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
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 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
Space—underscoring the irony in the title
of his earlier book on fire—the 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 Bachelard’s 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 consciousness—
or the half-dreaming consciousness
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 sector
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 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 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-century
urbanism and technology receives its
strongest expression in The Poetics of
Space:
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 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 becomes
an artificial one. Everything about
it is mechanical and, on every side, intimate
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 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 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 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 Foucault’s seminal
essay of 1967 on heterotopia, in which
Foucault suggestively proposes to shift
the problematic of Bachelardian topoanalysis
from intimate space to “other
spaces”—spaces of crisis, deviance, exclusion,
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: Essai
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 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 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. 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.
