The Poetics of Space

Author

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), French philosopher of science and of the imagination. A postmaster and then a provincial schoolteacher before taking up philosophy late, Bachelard held the chair in history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne. His work divides into two streams — a rigorous epistemology of scientific concepts, and a phenomenology of reverie and the elemental imagination — that he deliberately kept separate.

Publication Details

La poétique de l'espace. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958. English translation by Maria Jolas, The Poetics of Space, New York: Orion Press, 1964; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, 1994. 288 pp. Later editions carry a foreword by Etienne Gilson and, in the 2014 Penguin Classics edition, an introduction by Mark Z. Danielewski and a foreword by Richard Kearney.

Description

Bachelard proposes to study not space as measured but space as inhabited — "felicitous space," the space that has been seized by the imagination and can no longer be a neutral container. His method he calls topoanalysis: "the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives."

The book proceeds through a sequence of privileged forms. The house is treated first and at greatest length, understood vertically: the cellar as the irrational, buried, feared depth; the attic as the place where fears are rationalised by daylight and rafters; the staircase between them as a passage of the mind. Then come the smaller enclosures — drawers, chests, wardrobes, locks — which Bachelard reads as the architecture of secrecy. Then nests and shells, forms in which a creature and its dwelling are continuous. Then miniature, in which attention makes a small thing vast, and immensity, in which the imagination expands without leaving the room. The final chapters treat the dialectic of inside and outside and the phenomenology of roundness.

Key Ideas

• Topoanalysis. Memory is not chronological but topographical. We do not remember durations; we remember rooms, and the rooms hold the durations.
• The house as a tool for analysis of the soul. The first house is a body of images that gives a person "reasons or illusions of stability" and structures every dwelling afterwards.
• The poetic image as origin, not effect. Bachelard insists an image is not to be explained by the poet's biography or by cause. It arrives, and the reader's task is to let it reverberate ("retentissement").
• Intimate immensity. Vastness is a category of interiority before it is a category of measurement.
• Inhabited space transcends geometric space. A corner is not a ninety-degree angle. It is a refuge with a psychology.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Bachelard supplies vocabulary for something interface design has never had good words for: the felt interiority of non-physical spaces. Inboxes, feeds, folders, saved drafts and archived conversations behave like drawers and cellars — they accumulate, they are dreaded, they are dug into. Work on persistent paleontology and on the phenomenology of the inbox is, in effect, topoanalysis applied to storage that has no geometry at all.

Related Reading

• The Social Logic of Space
• One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
• Persistent Paleontology
• Space Syntax

External Links

• Beacon Press paperback edition