It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in finality
Prefatory Notes:
The following discussion on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, will contextualize his phenomenological approach within the discourse of modern architecture theory to illustrate the politics of his spatio-poetics. Considering Bachelard’s proposed phenomenology of a polysemic space, and the politics of human intimacy, the extent to which such a space (or rather such a sense of space) can be realize through new technologies will be discussed in class.
Bachelard and Company: In context
The discourse of Modern architecture and its Bauhausian principles are epitomized by the mantra, “form must follow function”. This pithy axiom and its ubiquitous celebration of the International Style (i.e the twin towers pre-911), which dominated architecture practice from the 1920’s to the 1970’s, is conspicuous absent in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. Rather than privilege the instrumentality of the built form as the extent of human interaction with space, Bacherlard reflects upon an epistemology of space through human intimacy. His imaginary ethnography of domestic spaces through the lyricism of Baudelaire, Rilke, Breton, and other poets, demonstrates the significance of the lived experience and the intimacy of inhabitance. Particularly through banal yet sensitive spaces of nests, corners, houses, and other sites of everydayness, his journey brings to light the processes of psychic signification (like memory, daydreams, and lustrous reverie) in which spaces of inhabitance are given subjective and universal meaning that transcends rational functionalism. This exploration of space through poetic texts is guided by a phenomenological lens, in which Bachelard uses to examine the dialectical relationships between the real and imaginary, sensual and physical, and geometrical (logical) and metaphysical dynamics of space, and thus of being.
Published in 1957 and translated into English in 1964, Gaston’s “poetics of space” particularly resonated with the contemporaneous criticism against the sprawling uniform urbanism since Le Corbusier’s post-war practices of modern architecture. In opposition to the “Garden City” movement characterized by the concentration of skyscrapers and Brutalist design (in which many buildings in York University are exemplary of) during the 50’s, detractors worked towards an anti-formalist discourse to situated the human subject as the producer, rather than passive consumer of, space. From this developed an experimental language laden with neologisms that imagined new spatio/human relations. The avant gardian musings of the Situationist Internationale (lead by Guy Debord in 1957), the CoBrA group, (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, in 1949) and Jane Jacob’s ‘New Urbanism’ (1961), are paradigmatic of the anti-formalist movement in urban theory in which Bachelard’s poetics, even if unwittingly, participated in.
In Bachelard’s House:
Bachelard’s topoanalysis of intimate space is similar to Debord’s physcogeography described as, “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (Criticism). However, while Debord maintains the exterior environment as the ontology of space, Bachelard emphasizes the co-constitutive forces in which space is understood as both shaped by human imagination, as well as actively shaping human imagination. This dialectic is at the core of Bachelard’s poetic investigation; the ‘logos’ of space, in which the collective unconscious repertoire of spatial experiences (like the lone light in the house, the nooks, nests…etc) is universal, and at the same time singular instances of subjective intimacy. In this sense, people are less the Jungian archetypes reincarnated in history, than spaces of inhabitance, such as the nest, nooks, and corners, that act as “the [tools] for analysis of the human soul” (Bachelard, xxxvii). Bachelard illustrates this dynamic in his chapters dedicated to a poetic analysis of the house.
Contrary to Le Corbusier’s axiom, “a house is a machine for living in”, Bachelard contends, “a house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabitant space transcends geometrical space” (Bachelard, 47). A phenomenological orientation of a house provides a journey into one’s home. This transformation from space to place is initiated through projections of one’s own dream, memories, and fantasy of home. This process of conjuring one’s own sense of being at home, whether his or her own or a fantasy of an other, is inherent in the iconic image of a house. The poet who describes a house, (distinctively from describing the form of a house), provides an experience in which, “the values of intimacy are so absorbing that the reader has ceased to read your room; he sees his own again (Bachelard,14). This language of desire, intimacy, and attraction, is to Bachelard, the language of space.
Questions to Consider:
To what extent can new technologies of (new) cinema (i.e VR, AR), negotiate the meaning of space between both the inhabitant/user and the architect/director? As Linda Hutcheon contends, “all architects [and film makers] know that…the act of designing and building [and creating a film] is an unavoidably social act” (Hutcheon, 3) (content in square parentheses is not paraphrased or part of Hutcheon’s argument). As cinema becomes more spatialized, to what extent can the user be given authority, or opportunity to participate, in the construction of the narrative, and subsequent meaning of space?
Space is always the potential of place. Considering the past DART cities, and the upcoming GPS projects, how does one’s narrative of that space control/appropriate the sense of place?
Sites of Interest:
Zizek’s physcoanalysis of Norman Bates House:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhkLjfWtCF0
Works Cited:
Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space. Boston; Beacon, 1994.
Debord, Guy. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” Les Lèvres Nues. No. 6, 1955.
Hutcheon, Linda. “The Politics of Postmodernism: parody and history.” Cultural Critique 5 (Winter, 1986-1987), pp. 179-207.