Harvard Design Magazine: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Harvard Design Magazine: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard: 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