// Space for seminar summaries and comments //

// The Poetics of Space // Department of Geography, University of North Carolina // 14 October 2009

The focus of last night’s spatial thinking/practice seminar, led by Prof. John Pickles, was Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. It marked a change of style and pace from the previous texts we had been reading by Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, though that is not to say there are not significant resonances between their ideas and concepts. Taking aim at logical positivism, Bachelard calls for a phenomenology of the imagination, or as I understand it, a demand that we pay attention to imaginations, dreams and virtual resonances. In doing so, Bachelard contends that we can move beyond a limited rendering of container space (a classical formulation of geometric space) and instead recognise the lively qualities of inhabited space. Furthermore, oneiric (dream-like) characteristics and their poetic images should not be regarded as mere metaphor, but should be lived directly as experiential events. What struck me in particular were the traces of process philosophy in Bachelard’s thinking. Here we can see Bachelard unsettling a functional dialectic between the house and the universe, between the inside and outside; he illustrates the relational constitution of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and the unfolding of spaces, both real and unreal (virtual). It’s not quite an ontology of becoming, as Deleuze and Guattari would go on to formulate, but the relational traces of space(s) are being expounded here.

As we discussed in class last night, it would be too easy to dismiss Bachelard as an antiquarian, parochial or sexist; yes he is, as Lefebvre states, anti-urban and anti-modernity; yes, he does suggest that only women are capable of house-work; but Bachelard is not trying to cast universal or general norms – quite the opposite, he is trying to differentiate the topos, attempting to unsettle geometric spaces, paving the way for the likes of Foucault to speak of heterotopias (multiple, relational spaces).

To see my summary of chapter 2, House and Universe, click here. The appended poem by Ted Hughes is a bit of a gimmick, but it’s also meant to act as an antidote to an unremittingly ‘felicitous space’, as Bachelard calls it. Instead, ‘Wind’ animates the more turbulent and violent affects of inhabited space.