Analysis Of Gaston Bachelard's 'The Poetics Of Space'
Stories of place
Discovering new places is an important part of many enjoyable experiences. We use maps to guide us in our exploration but also to locate our findings. It is not rare that we use these personalized maps to share our knowledge of a place. Throughout the time, the importance of the relationship between personal stories, walking the land, experiencing places and knowledge became a continual topic of discussion.
There is reasonably substantial literatures that explains how stories facilitate processes of individual, organizational and corporate change. For example, stories have been said to help people to envision future realities, provide scripts that permit people to understand and enact change, foster learning, imagination, …show more content…
In ‘The poetics of Space’, Bachelard explores the psychology of human experience of intimate spaces and his perception of space as a blend of experience, physical structure, and senses.
He further reflects on the poetic imagination and on understanding how poetic images are situated in the human psyche and generated by real life settings. In order to convey the powerful nature of such emotions he describes such concepts using a language that evokes ‘daydreaming and poetic images in the reader’s mind’ (Bachelard, 1958).
Finally, in the same book, he describe the concept of ‘Localised Experience’ (Bachelard, 1958) in order to represent components such as personal emotions and memory associated with a physical environment and these elements being essential features of a space. He further assumes that human experience is fundamentally set within and affected by one's physical …show more content…
For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics, are part of them, from the alphabet of spatial indication ("It's to the right," "take a left”) to the beginning of a story the rest of which can be written by footsteps.
This thesis argues that the narrated adventures, simultaneously producing geographies of actions and drifting into the common places of an order, do not merely constitute a ‘supplement’ to pedestrian enunciations and rhetoric. They are not satisfied with displacing the latter and transporting them into the field of language. In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey before or during the time the feet perform it. This notion of spatial stories and movement in the space then becomes the corner stone of this thesis.
Walking in the city turns out to have its own logic - or, as de Certeau puts it, its own ‘rhetoric’. “The walked individuates and makes ambiguous the ‘legible’ order given to cities by planners, a little in the way that waking life is displaced and ambiguated by dreaming - to take only one of de Certeau's several analogies” (1988, p. 230).
“The pedestrian speech act has three characteristics which distinguish it at the outset from the spatial system: the present, the discrete, the 'phatic'” De Certeau (1988, p.
Discovering new places is an important part of many enjoyable experiences. We use maps to guide us in our exploration but also to locate our findings. It is not rare that we use these personalized maps to share our knowledge of a place. Throughout the time, the importance of the relationship between personal stories, walking the land, experiencing places and knowledge became a continual topic of discussion.
There is reasonably substantial literatures that explains how stories facilitate processes of individual, organizational and corporate change. For example, stories have been said to help people to envision future realities, provide scripts that permit people to understand and enact change, foster learning, imagination, …show more content…
In ‘The poetics of Space’, Bachelard explores the psychology of human experience of intimate spaces and his perception of space as a blend of experience, physical structure, and senses.
He further reflects on the poetic imagination and on understanding how poetic images are situated in the human psyche and generated by real life settings. In order to convey the powerful nature of such emotions he describes such concepts using a language that evokes ‘daydreaming and poetic images in the reader’s mind’ (Bachelard, 1958).
Finally, in the same book, he describe the concept of ‘Localised Experience’ (Bachelard, 1958) in order to represent components such as personal emotions and memory associated with a physical environment and these elements being essential features of a space. He further assumes that human experience is fundamentally set within and affected by one's physical …show more content…
For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics, are part of them, from the alphabet of spatial indication ("It's to the right," "take a left”) to the beginning of a story the rest of which can be written by footsteps.
This thesis argues that the narrated adventures, simultaneously producing geographies of actions and drifting into the common places of an order, do not merely constitute a ‘supplement’ to pedestrian enunciations and rhetoric. They are not satisfied with displacing the latter and transporting them into the field of language. In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey before or during the time the feet perform it. This notion of spatial stories and movement in the space then becomes the corner stone of this thesis.
Walking in the city turns out to have its own logic - or, as de Certeau puts it, its own ‘rhetoric’. “The walked individuates and makes ambiguous the ‘legible’ order given to cities by planners, a little in the way that waking life is displaced and ambiguated by dreaming - to take only one of de Certeau's several analogies” (1988, p. 230).
“The pedestrian speech act has three characteristics which distinguish it at the outset from the spatial system: the present, the discrete, the 'phatic'” De Certeau (1988, p.