Gaston Bachelard Research Articles

Water's Ethical Time: The Art of Deindustrialising Human‐Water Relationships

AbstractI explore by way of a thought experiment the temporality of waterways in the context of restorative art interventions. As a substance that moves and gives form, and as a medium that retains and discharges, connects and divides, water that flows can make tangible the experiential flow of return and anticipation. Arguably, this bi‐directional structuring of time is pivotal to transformative and reparative action. If restoration means ‘going back’ to memories of ecologies and places, it does so with a generative thrust forward. This is the life‐enabling orientation of recuperation that I discern connects diverse phenomenological concepts: Deborah Bird Rose's ‘multispecies knots of ethical time’, the idea of ‘afterness’ as developed by Gerhard Richter, Gaston Bachelard's ‘rhythmic time’, and Gerald Vizenor's ‘survivance’. I bring these concepts to: (a) artistic water restoration projects that make imaginable, palpable, and real sustainable human‐water relationships, with a focus on the public works in Sydney by Turpin + Crawford Studio; (b) perspectives on water and time that Australian Indigenous thinkers have shared during my ethnographic research; and (c) the re‐naturalization of a river in Germany's postindustrial Ruhr region. I propose that thinking with water ethically and recognizing its temporal diversity opens up perspectives on the deindustrialisation of rivers and other bodies of water.

‘The Radio, This Unknown’ and <i>La Nouvelle Équipe Française</i>: National and Transnational Public Spheres in Post-1945 France

This article examines the representation of the radio in an important post-1945 periodical in France, La Nouvelle Équipe Française (La NEF). Analysing a double issue of La NEF, ‘La Radio, Cette Inconnue’ [‘The Radio, This Unknown’], I argue that we witness an implicit tension between a new state monopoly on radio and the transnational nature of radio broadcasting. On the one hand, this issue features the major figures in the new state radio institutions, the RDF and the Club d’Essai, with their contributions functioning as quasi-promotional material. On the other hand, three philosophers (Gaston Bachelard, Louis Lavelle, Brice Parain) all focus on the potential of radio for founding new transnational communities post-1945. We then turn to the status of the periodical within this dynamic. I propose that La NEF presents the periodical as a privileged site of the articulation of this tension between the nationaland the transnational, thus affirming the value of the periodical for the construction of a post-WWII public sphere.

Spatial and Narrative Escape in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone

Bone is the impressive first novel written by Fae Myenne Ng, a first-generation Chinese American woman writer. Under the guidance of Gaston Bachelard’s and M. M. Bakhtin’s theories of space and Gérard Genette’s theories of narrative discourse, this paper probes into the narrative space and time in Ng’s Bone, trying to detect the protagonist’s escape consciousness revealed in the form of spatial and narrative escape. Leila’s individual escape, which derives from the family tragedy under the exploitation and expulsion of racial minorities in America, is, in fact, the epitome of every anxious Chinese American’s impulse to run away.

EXPLORING NARRATIVE STRUCTURE THROUGH THE THEME OF DREAM IN AMAL AL-FARAN NOVEL “HUJRA” (CHAMBER)

This study analyzes the narrative structure of “Hujra”, a novel written by Saudi novelist Amal Al-Faran, by delving into the main character’s consciousness and world of dreams. By exploring the character’s dreams, which reflect and express their real world, the study aims to dissect and understand the novel’s narrative structure. Additionally, the study seeks to comprehend the technical formation of the novel’s narrative structure enabling it to convey the social reality and cultural values addressed in the text. To analyze the text, the study draws upon cultural criticism and cultural studies as well as Gaston Bachelard Theory of Material Imagination and Theory of time. The study also incorporates Sigmund Freud’s Dreams and Repression Theory, along with several other theories associated with the structure of narrative discourse as formulated and articulated by literary theorist, as: Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman

The "unseen land of thought"

Through the construction of their miniature books, the Brontës demonstrate the critical, dynamic relationship between inert matter and the"material imagination," as theorised by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. To make the books, the children drew on the resourceful things around their home: a range of literary matter that stimulated their imaginations and of paper scraps that they used to materialise it. This essay shows how all four Brontë children selected and creatively refashioned this material into their writing, crafting their own worlds with material and immaterial fragments. It demonstrates how scaling, and the process of miniaturisation were critical to their cognitive understanding, imaginative creativity, and writing practices; and it explains how their childhood imagination became a vital lifelong aspect of their identities that was always entangled with real life. Thus, the Brontës’ child-formed miniature books reflect Bachelard’s notion of imagination and matter awakening individuals to energy and agency.

Imagining the Elements with Gaston Bachelard and Claire Denis: ‘Weighted’ Images, Drift and Diffusion in L’Intrus/The Intruder

Abstract Adapted from philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s semi-autobiographical text, The Intruder remains one of French director Claire Denis’ most transnational and yet dreamlike works. In this article, I pair philosopher Gaston Bachelard (in particular, his concept of the material and dynamic imagination and his reveries on water and air) with Denis to explore how The Intruder enacts an imagining of the elements and an elemental poetics of film form. Bringing Bachelard into a dialogue with Saad Chakali’s, Rosalind Galt’s and Nancy’s writing on the film’s imagery, I also approach The Intruder as an image-poem that is structured by poetically ‘weighted’ images and by recurrent symbolism. Shot through with an oneiric sense of drift, voyaging and diffusion, I explore some of the ways that Denis’s elemental imaginings of air and oceanic water reflect an affective politics.

SPEP Plenary Address: Thinking with Fire: Elemental Philosophy and Media Technology

ABSTRACT Humans have been thinking with fire since ancient times. In elemental philosophy, fire is considered as one of the most important elemental technologies. Fire has allowed the building of our world by reshaping matter, by making the earth less inhospitable, providing warm shelters and chasing and attracting animals. In the current elemental turn in media theory, the material dimensions of fire as medium have gained importance. Fire, however, also has important epistemological, psychological, and symbolic meaning, captured by Gaston Bachelard in a series of entangled “fire complexes.” This article focuses on these immaterial and subjective aspects of fire exemplified in a range of “matterphors” and combustive imagery of contemporary cinema to address its pyrotechnical dimensions and redefine media as affective fiery messages, interfaces, and environments.

Kitchen phenomenologies: Antiromantic poetics of space and food in the Anthropocene

AbstractThis paper considers the kitchen and the phenomenological values that emerge from it. In this text the kitchen is seen as a space of possibility within the context of the Capitalocene, from which new values and imaginations for a more sustainable future may emerge. Drawing upon ecofeminist critiques and feminist food studies, and building upon the phenomenologies of space of Gaston Bachelard and Yi‐Fu Tuan, this exploration surveys how intimacy, memory, care, and relation emerge from kitchen endeavours and what these notions mean for a Capitalocenic world. These theoretics are intertwined with ethnographic materials on foodscapes and foodways gathered in Xochimilco, Mexico City. From this, radical conceptualisations of the kitchen emerge and everyday phenomenologies spread into new spaces, while bringing together these subjects with environmental issues. I propose the notion of the antiromantic as an approach emerging from the kitchen's history as a gendered and contested space, and as a way to approach the kitchen and its labours in the midst of our current ecological crises; in this way the kitchen can be understood and inhabited as a political space of possibility for sustainable transformations.

Prison as a Mirror: The Reflection of the Prison Concept & The Re-Evaluation of the Built Environment

Throughout history, the prison as a physical entity took different shapes, forms and morphs. However, the prison system was hardly ever proven effective and questions about its efficiency and objectives have been a subject of debate. This research suggests that “Prisons” do not only exist physically but also exist as a conceptual phenomenon. The concept of imprisonment was determined through studying distinctive legendary prisons while referring to written literature by Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, and Edmund Bacon. A direct connection between imprisonment and the human detachment from “Nature and Life” was determined. Criteria of the concept of imprisonment were deduced in order to be able to distinguish the existence of the conceptual prison phenomenon from other heterotopic spaces. The research suggests that the concept of prison as a mirror is able to reflect the unspoken factors in the built environment which leads to the reevaluation of the current built environment in urban context. This research suggests the use of the prison criteria as a tool to read the built environment and develop the capability to avoid the phenomenon of imprisonment in urban context as well as individual spaces within the built environment.

장작불 영상을 선호하는 대중 심리에 대한 해석적 연구

This study focuses on the popular video content of fireplace videos that have gained popularity on platforms such as YouTube over the past few years. As most popular videos on video platforms have a plot and even very short videos contain narrative elements such as events or twists, it is noteworthy that monotonous fireplace videos without a story have gained such widespread popularity. This study attempts a critical analysis of the phenomenon by linking the online reproduction of fireplace videos with the trendy term “hitting mung” which has received significant attention from the public.
 Starting from the discourse on “daydreaming” being linked to psychological effects and being presented as the purpose of the production and distribution of videos, previous research on the psychological effects of campfire videos was explored. Then, to specialize in “hitting mung” among various “daydreaming” contents, the unique media history of “hitting mung” videos and the cultural context of Western households were examined. In addition, by examining Gaston Bachelard's discussion of the imagery of fire in relation to daydreaming, material imagination, relaxation, and healing, the study interpreted the psychology of modern people who prefer “hitting mung” videos. The study presents a content critique that gives meaning to the imagery of fire as a cultural archetype through an interpretive analysis of the epistemo- logical relationship between “fire” and “hitting mung”.

THE ESSENCE OF AN IMAGE IN ENGLISH-AMERICAN IMAGISM: SINGULAR VERSUS UNIVERSAL

The paper is aimed at filling the gap in learning the formative image peculiarities of the English and American Imagistic poetry by analyzing the correspondence of the internal and the external and their correlation. This is where the answer lies, why T.S. Eliot called Imagism “an opening salvo” of English/ American Modernist poetry. It also explains the reason for a long-term effect of this short-term “school” in the English poetry of the twentieth century. Imagism hasn’t left any extended or profound theory as far as the criteria for producing “hard, dry images” (T.E.Hulme) are concerned. Since then the problem has been under-studied and calls for more in-depth analysis. The modern theoretical background of the paper includes the ideas of S. Averintsev and M. Gasparov, Paul Ricoeur and Gaston Bachelard; the criticism of the Imagism founders (T.E. Hulme and E. Pound) as well as its present-day English and American researchers. The major theoretical points highlight the important features of image transformation in Imagism: the dual (semantic and psychological) nature of an image (P. Ricoeur); loss of its axiological constituent thus forfeiting its wholeness (M. Girshman); its non-permanent essence (G. Bachelard). All these “new” sides underlie too general and vague definition of an image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” given by Ezra Pound, his definitive denial of using images as “ornaments” and the emphasis on the image affiliation with speech, not language. The fight doesn’t have to be limited only to opposing Romanticism (as in Hulme’s “Romanticism and Classicism”). Equally significant and far more sophisticated is the distinction between Symbolic and Imagistic essence of an image (Pound’s “Retrospect” and “Gaudier Brzeska”). For Pound, the main criterion is the receptive potential of an image, its semantic openness which offsets its meaning as finally fixed in some symbol. The paper examines the possibility to apply Roland Barthes’s idea (“L`imagination du signe”, 1962) of the crucial influence of the interior (symbolic) relationship and two exterior (paradigmatic and syntagmatic) relationships on the formation of both single image and the total imagery of a certain type of art conscience – consequently, of Symbolism, Romanticism and Imagism. In the early period of Imagism development (the poetry of F. Flint, E. Storer, to a lesser extent, of T.E. Hulme) the images still preserve the inner affinity with the signified objects (concepts) as seen in Romantic and Symbolic image “patterns”. And throughout Imagism development, this inner affinity is being weakened until a distant outer resemblance is left. It is clearly seen in Hulme’s “Autumn”, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”, H.D.’s “Oread”, “Hermes of the Ways” et al. The close reading of the W.C. Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is carried out in front of the “Tall Nettles” by Edward Thomas (1878–1917), his contemporary, who is now considered to be one of the “non-Modernist modern” poets. It is stated that the central image of the red wheelbarrow in its every detail constitutes a modern pastoral while Thomas’s nettles stand for psychological matrix of personal melancholy and despair. Syntagmatic relations also involve the further interaction of signs in the form of “superposition”, forming montage as one of the important Мodernist techniques not only in poetry, but also in Мodernist prose. And it becomes evident that it is not a mechanically borrowed cinema technique, as it is commonly viewed, but a deeper, “syntagmatic” similarity. The result of the research, based on the analysis undertaken, seems to prove its initial point: the poems of T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, W. Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) taken as models, manifest that the image in Imagism is every time constructed as a new actual syntagma of the common imagination of a poet and a reader to become the unique image for every single poem without its further “universal” use in any virtual paradigm.

House and Home in Georgian Ireland, Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life

One of the pleasures of reading House and Home in Georgian Ireland, Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life, is the richness of detail which each author of this collected volume commits to its pages. In a series of nine chapters, the book ‘introduces a broader appreciation of the diverse meanings and materialities ascribed to and associated with house and home in eighteenth-century Ireland’ (p. 28), but this might be considered an understatement, as contained within the collection is a wealth of reflections and careful consideration of lives lived in Irish houses during the period. The volume originated with the online conference ‘Species of domestic spaces: house and home in eighteenth-century Ireland’, convened at the Humanities Institute, University College Dublin in June 2021. The book’s editor, Conor Lucey, has captured the breadth of discussion from that event, and incorporated this alongside a series of powerful impressions of intimate historical interiors. Strikingly, the chapters describe lived experiences amid private and public encounters with domestic spaces, incorporating the humblest of interior furnishings in single rooms and lodgings to the most opulent decorative features of Dublin’s finest town houses. Throughout the volume, the writings of Gaston Bachelard and George Perec form an expressive metanarrative to historical accounts of many of the homes that no longer exist, as ‘bit by bit, the house that was lost in the mists of time will appear from out of the shadow ….’ (p. 171).

The Memory of a Place

This paper focuses on the perceptual-phenomenological experience of place in the Faculty Housing built for professors of Jondishapour University (Shahid Chamran) in the city of Ahvaz in Iran. Based on an historical overview of Ahvaz, the paper employs a phenomenological approach to examine how the memory of childhood home as an inhabited space is associated with sensory engagement and how it is experienced differently over time. Faculty Housing was built in 1967–72 and was designed by the prominent Iranian architect Kamran Diba. Taking into consideration the significant sociocultural factors affecting Ahvaz in 1979–2018, this paper aims to examine and interpret the housing’s architectural and urban images, which have changed considerably over time and are now fallen into disrepair, with a loss of their vital and live atmosphere of the past. In order to achieve this goal, it examines and analyses a number of photographs from the creation of this residential complex and its present status. These include images of different architectural, urban, and landscape features as well as semidetached houses, apartments, the local shop, school, play areas, green spaces, separating brick walls, pools, and benches. In addition, the experiences of twenty-one former inhabitants of Faculty Housing are analysed and constructed through a survey questionnaire, the findings of which suggest that Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological approach supports the comparative analysis of our imagined past experiences of a special place and new experiences after a considerable passage of time.

The Vogue for a New Interior: A Study of the Presentation and Interpretation of Servants’ Quarters in Country House Visits

The article is a study of the presentation and interpretation of servants’ quarters in country houses in England and Wales (Erddig, Lanhydrock, Audley End, Petworth and Ickworth), directed at theorizing the latest popular fascination about the ‘downstairs’. Hinging on Gaston Bachelard’s twofold reading of the interior as a contained physical space and an elusive imaginal one, the notion of home as the site of domesticity is compared with that of the country house, whose ‘domestication’ is surveyed in a series of visual and spatial analyses of its rooms and, specifically, its servants’ quarters. Probing the tendency of ‘leaving the green baize door’ to the servants’ quarters ‘ajar’ allows for an understanding of the reasons behind the inception and development of such a vogue, arguing that it is the experience of the tangible everyday that defines the popular ‘doing’ of the country house visit.

Based on Whole Thinking through Imagination Strategies for Programming in Arts Genre Integrated Arts & Culture Education Program: Centered on Gaston Bachelard's Material Imagination

본 연구는 2021년 한국문화예술교육진흥원이 주최하는 <문화예술교육사 대상 프로그램 개발 공모전>에서 프로그램을 개발했던 경험을 바탕으로 한다. 연구자는 경험을 통해 통합 문화예술교육 프로그램을 계획할 때, ‘상상을 통한 총체적 사고 과정’이 필요하다고 생각했다. 이에 가스통 바슐라르의 ‘물질적 상상력’을 통해 주제를 다-감각적으로 상상하는 과정, 방법에 대한 연구를 하였다. 그래서 본 연구에서는 연구자의 예술 장르 통합 프로그램 경험을 언급하고, 문제점을 해결하기에 바슐라르의 상상력이 어떤 의미를 지닐 수 있는지 살펴볼 것이다. 그리고 이를 어떻게 통합 문화예술교육 프로그램 계획에 활용할 수 있는지 연구자의 사례를 통해 설명할 것이다. 이에 교육 현장의 실질적 경험을 바탕으로 한 연구는 통합 문화예술교육의 질적 성장을 위한 좋은 밑바탕이 되기를 기대한다.In 2021, I developed a program for the <Culture and Arts Education Program Development Contest>. When planning a program, I became to think ‘whole thinking through imagination' is necessary. Based on Gaston Bachelard's 'material imagination', a study was conducted on the process and method of imagining a subject multi-sensibly. Therefore, in this study, the researcher's experience of the integrated program was mentioned and looked at what Gaston Bachelard's imagination can mean for solving problems. And I would like to explain how this can be used in planning cultural arts education programs through the case of a researcher. Research based on practical experience in the educational field can be a good foundation for the qualitative growth of integrated culture and arts education.

The philosophical and historical context of Bion's concept of reverie and its use as a rhetorical act in his theory of psychoanalysis

In this article, we seek to clarify the historical and philosophical roots of Bion's somewhat enigmatic concept of reverie. We also reflect on the rhetorical reasons for Bion's decision to introduce the concept into psychotherapeutic discourse. Although Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud (1894) had used the term in their Studies on Hysteria, prior to Bion it had lost its independent significance and role in psychotherapeutic theories. We would contend that even if the concept reverie has become increasingly popular in recent psychotherapeutic discourse, the relative neglect of its history and philosophy have led to problematic ways of implementing the concept in both the theory and practice of psychotherapy. We start from Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, moving on to Freud, William James, Henri Bergson and Gaston Bachelard. We present our view of why Bion considered reverie to be an indispensable tool in explicating certain psychoanalytic dimensions. We also reveal the kinds of historical and philosophical commitments that are embedded in the concept of reverie and append brief comments on the relevance of our analysis to the present state of psychotherapy and psychotherapy research.

“Changing” one's mind: Historical epistemology as normative psychology

This article argues that historical epistemology offers the history of philosophy and science more than a mere tool to write the history of concepts. It does this, first of all, by rereading historical epistemology through Michel Foucault's “techniques of the self.” Second, it turns to the work of Léon Brunschvicg and Gaston Bachelard. In their work we see a proposal for what the subjectivity of scientists and philosophers should be. The article thus argues that their work is driven by a normative psychology: a set of prescriptions for which mental constitution a scholarly self has to have. In the Conclusion, it returns to existing analyses of “open-mindedness” as a virtue and explores in what way these cases challenge these analyses, as well as to what extent Foucault's “techniques of the self” can be applied to other cases in the history of French philosophy.

The phenomenology of image and enthusiasm for the experience of foiling sailboats

ABSTRACT As human beings, we formulate meanings to our actions, making them more precious than if they were composed only of objective goals. The sporting experience transcends its pragmatic goals and its meaning is linked to what excites us in the practice itself. To discuss the elements that make sports and leisure practices an exciting experience, we propose a way of exploring these elements based on the image phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard. In this article, we bring reflections on the bases of this phenomenological view, and then we illustrate this through discussing foiling sailboats use. We argue that sports and leisure practices triggers poetic images, which in the case of foil navigation encompass immensity, freedom, purity and enlightenment. In such a way, foiling a sailboat does not only entail travelling a distance at a certain height and at high speeds. Thus, analysing poetic images considering the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard, we find a way to uncover the enthusiasm felt by athletes as well as regular practitioners.

Poetic Objects: Bachelardian Reverie, Reverberation and Repose in Claire Denis'35 Shots of Rum

This article draws on the interrelated concepts of reverie and repose in Gaston Bachelard's philosophy to approach Claire Denis' poetic foregrounding of objects in 35 Shots of Rum ( 35 Rhums, 2008). Connecting Bachelard's work on time to his later studies of the imagination, I demonstrate how the poetic time of reverie and repose are essential to Bachelard's thinking. Focusing on three especially charged objects (trains, rice cookers and lanterns), I argue for reverie and repose as being embedded into the rhythmic structure, affective organisation and form of Denis' film. Contextualising Bachelard's later thinking in relation to Eugène Minkowski, I maintain that Denis' objects reverberate (both formally and sensuously). In 35 Shots of Rum, Denis' poetic objects and her evocation of different in-between states parallels Bachelard's own materialist thinking on the imagination, reverie and repose.

Abracadabra: Until the Word is Gone

Language, speech and word are undergoing catastrophic changes in the context of modern history. The multilingual world has created a catastrophe for all elements of language, where they are gradually losing their original meaning. The historical territories of languages are dispersed and disintegrate into many fragments, putting them in danger of extinction. However, art becomes the new territory for their Renaissance. The art world provides its environment for the complete rebirth of the word and language. Furthermore, it allows the subsequent acquisition of an entirely new corporeality and constructs a new metalanguage for the “dialogue” between people. The works of contemporary artists such as Erik Bulatov, Sergei Katran, Lena Herzog, Eyal Sivan, Yegor Astapchenko, Jaak Sooaar, Aleksei Kruglov, Dmitriy Prigov, Sharon Bloom of absolutely different nationalities will help us to trace the main strategies for preserving all the components of our communication - language, speech and words. And the main ideas of such scholars as Juri Lotman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gaston Bachelard, and Michel Jouvet will help us understand the trends of their changes.