Towards a Poetics of Consumerism - French Cultural Studies

FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 1
French Cultural Studies
Towards a Poetics of Consumerism
Gaston Bachelard’s ‘Material Imagination’ and
Narratives of Post-War Modernisation
JEREMY F. LANE
University of Nottingham
The influence of Gaston Bachelard’s studies of the ‘poetic’ or ‘material
imagination’ on the ‘nouvelle critique’ has long been acknowledged.
Similarly, the importance of Bachelard’s work in the history of science to
social theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Pierre
Bourdieu has received considerable critical attention. What has been
largely unexplored, however, is the impact of Bachelard’s studies of the
‘material imagination’ on social theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Jean
Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes, in their analyses of the advent of mass
consumerism in post-war France. This article examines the use made by
these theorists of Bachelard’s concept of the ‘material imagination’ as an
index of everything authentic that risked being lost in France’s embrace
of mass consumerism. It also shows how Bachelard’s ‘material imagination’
could serve as a powerful tool for explaining the affective appeal that
the new spaces and mass-produced commodities of post-war France
possessed for French consumers.
Keywords: affect, Bachelard, Barthes, Baudrillard, Lefebvre, mass
consumerism, ‘material imagination’, poetry
Iont has
become customary in evaluations of the influence of Gaston Bachelard
the French post-war intellectual field to draw a clear distinction between
the two poles of his œuvre, between his studies of poetic imagery, on the one
hand, and his works in epistemology and the history of science, on the other.
Thus, Giuseppe Sertoli notes the importance of Bachelard’s studies of poetic
imagination to ‘la nouvelle critique’ of the 1950s and 60s, to the work of
French Cultural Studies, 17(1): 019–034 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
http://frc.sagepub.com [200602] 10.1177/0957155806060791
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
20
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 2
FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 17(1)
literary critics such as Jean-Pierre Richard, Georges Poulet, and Jean-Paul
Weber (Sertoli, 1971: 3–15). Dominique Lecourt, meanwhile, highlights the
impact of Bachelard’s work in the history of science on philosophers and
social theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Georges Canguilhem,
and Pierre Bourdieu (Lecourt, 1974: 11–14). Such assessments, however, fail
to recognise the equally important, and as yet largely unexplored, impact of
Bachelard’s studies of the poetic imagination on a range of social theorists,
amongst them Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, who
were seeking to make sense of the rapid pace of modernisation and
reconstruction in post-war France.
At the core of Bachelard’s notion of ‘material imagination’ lay his
conviction that poetic images had the power to evoke and revivify the deep
affective bonds between human subjects and the objects and spaces of their
everyday world, mobilising what he termed ‘la beauté intime des matières;
leur masse d’attraits cachés, tout cet espace affectif concentré à l’intérieur
des choses’ (Bachelard, 1948b: 9). At the simplest level, evocations, whether
explicit or implicit, of Bachelard’s notion of the ‘material imagination’ could
thus serve these social theorists as shorthand for a set of enduring human
values seen to be threatened by the reifying, alienating and disenchanting
effects of France’s transition to a mass consumerist society. In a second move,
however, Bachelard’s emphasis on the dynamic potential of imagination and
affect also provided these social theorists with a conceptual vocabulary with
which they could explain the seductive lure of mass consumerism, by
pointing to its ability to invest the new commodities and spaces of modern
France with an affective charge analogous to that contained in poetic
imagery. When, for example, in his 1963 essay ‘Le Message publicitaire’,
Barthes argued that ‘les critères du langage publicitaire sont ceux-là même
de la poésie’, he revealed the extent of the largely unacknowledged debt his
analyses of advertising discourse owed to Bachelard’s studies of poetic
imagery and the material imagination (Barthes, 1963: 1145).
To claim such a central role for Bachelard’s work in narratives of post-war
modernisation may seem strange, given that his work was not centrally
concerned with the question of modernisation, at least in its sociological
aspects. Certainly, his studies of the history of science all examined the
effects of modern, post-Einsteinian science on the human mind. Yet, far from
seeing those effects as part of a reifying or alienating process of technological
advance resulting in the disenchantment of the social world, Bachelard was
at pains to emphasise the creative and dynamic nature of scientific thinking.
Whilst insisting that the nature of the truths accessible through reading
poetry and scientific thinking were radically different, he nonetheless saw
each activity as equally ‘poetic’ in the etymological sense of the term,
equally transformative and creative. Modern scientific thought and poetry
produced an analogous effect on the thinking subject; each staged a ‘break’
or ‘rupture’ with unthinking experience, ‘renewing’ or ‘deforming’ everyday
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 3
LANE: TOWARDS A POETICS OF CONSUMERISM
21
language and unsettling conventional modes of thought. As Mary McAllesterJones points out, ‘Bachelard was fond of comparing science and poetry . . . in
order to draw attention to the creativity of modern scientific thinking . . . as a
kind of shock tactics to jolt his readers out of a positivistic and utilitarian view
of science’. For Bachelard, the work of scientists was ‘as imaginative, as creative
as that of poets’ (McAllester-Jones, 1991: 169–70). Thus, for instance, in the
1953 study Le Matérialisme rationnel he sought to distance himself from
contemporary accounts of the dehumanising effects of mass-production
methods, satirising ‘les polémiques faciles où les philosophes affirment la
dévalorisation humaine des objets fabriqués en série’ (Bachelard, 1953: 81).
However, whilst emphasising that poetry and science were equally
creative activities, Bachelard did posit ‘une opposition radicale’ between the
‘matérialisme imaginaire’ that he analysed in his studies of poetic imagery,
and the ‘matérialisme instruit’ he considered essential to all scientific thought.
The study of ‘le matérialisme imaginaire’ was the study ‘des convictions quasi
immédiates qui naissent associées à des rêveries invincibles fortement
enracinées dans notre inconscient’. Attaining the level of ‘le matérialisme
instruit’ required that the scientific mind be purged or ‘cured’ of the hold that
the ‘matérialisme imaginaire’ and such ‘convictions quasi immédiates’ held
over it. This could only be achieved by means of a psychoanalysis that was at
once ‘brutale’ and ‘chirurgicale’, that would separate ‘d’un coup les convictions
inconscientes et les convictions rationnelles’, helping us ‘à nous guérir de nos
images, ou du moins nous aider à limiter l’emprise de nos images’ (Bachelard,
1953: 17–18).1
In his studies of poetic images of the four elements of fire, air, earth and
water, Bachelard sought to demonstrate the power of the imagination to invest
each such element or ‘substance’ with a ‘value’ or ‘quality’. As he put it in La
Terre et les rêveries du repos (1948): ‘D’une substance elle [l’imagination] fait
immédiatement une valeur’ (Bachelard, 1948a: 4). It was these values or
qualities that elicited human subjects’ intense affective investment, ‘cette
liaison passionnée’ between them and the objects they employed or the
spaces they inhabited (Bachelard, 1957: 33). The different values attaching to
each such substance formed the basis of a particular kind of symbolism, a
symbolism that operated, as it were, below the level of conscious perception,
rational thought, or even signification, at the level of affect (Bachelard,
1948a: 79–82). Hence the key role Bachelard attributed to the state of
‘rêverie’, understood to be an intermediate zone between rational thought
and the unconscious, peculiarly conducive to the workings of the material
imagination and thus to helping human subjects gain access to that realm of
affect and rich symbolic meaning.
The symbolic meanings or values that Bachelard took to be associated
with each element or substance were not fixed or static but rather dynamic
and varied. Thus, in L’Eau et les rêves (1942), he attributed very different
values to contrasting images of water by night. Certain images of water at
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
22
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 4
FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 17(1)
moonlight endowed that element with all the affective qualities of milk, ‘de
l’eau nourricière comme un lait, de l’eau conçue comme l’élément nutritif …
l’eau ainsi maternisée’ (Bachelard, 1942: 170). Other images of water at
night, however, such as those of Ophelia’s watery grave in Hamlet or those
found in Edgar Allen Poe’s poems, evoked a diametrically opposed set of
values or symbolic meanings, according to which water was ‘la vraie matière
de la mort bien féminine’ or the matter of darkness, fear, death and despair
(Bachelard, 1942: 111, 137–42). Despite their varied nature, however,
Bachelard maintained that such values corresponded to a set of ‘unconscious
archetypes’, in the Jungian sense of the term. The aim of his studies of poetic
imagery was, as he put it in La Poétique de l’espace (1957), to examine ‘le
rapport d’une image poétique nouvelle et d’un archétype dormant au fond
de l’inconscient’ (Bachelard, 1957: 1).
The relationship between poetic images and these archetypes was not to
be understood as one of simple causality; an image of domestic space as
nurturing refuge, for example, should not be read reductively as the straightforward expression of its author’s personal past experience, nor should its
potency be limited to its ability to resonate with its readers’ analogous
experiences. The images of domestic space that Bachelard examined in La
Poétique de l’espace, images of hearth, bedroom, staircase, cellar and attic,
did have such a power of ‘résonance’. However, they also had a more
extensive potential for ‘retentissement’; their ability to evoke ‘les valeurs
d’intimité de la maison’ set in motion a series of repercussions which
extended ‘par delà les souvenirs positifs qui sont les matériaux pour une
pyschologie positive’. In so doing, they re-opened ‘le champ des images
primitives’, a field of primitive images whose ‘fond onirique’ formed the
basis of a kind of collective unconscious (Bachelard, 1957: 44). Thus, images
which evoked the nurturing, protective space of the poet’s childhood home
did not simply elicit in their readers a nostalgia for their own childhood,
they elicited a more general ‘nostalgie des expressions de la jeunesse’, a
nostalgia for a shared or collective investment in the certainties of childhood,
which transcended the limited concerns of personal biography. As such,
these images had a ‘transsubjective’ or ‘intersubjective’ force, a dynamic
force which obliged readers to move beyond their own personal memories
and engage their imaginations anew in a manner that might prefigure some
ideal community to come: ‘Il semble qu’en habitant de telles images, des
images aussi stabilisantes, on recommencerait une autre vie, une vie qui
serait nôtre, à nous dans les profondeurs de l’être’ (Bachelard, 1957: 47).2
As we have seen, in Le Matérialisme rationnel Bachelard argued that the
cultivation of ‘le matérialisme instruit’ inherent to scientific thought required
that the mind be purged, ‘cured’, or ‘psychoanalysed’ of all the ‘primitive
images’, affective investments, symbolic meanings and values he had studied
in his works on the material imagination. In this sense, then, scientific
discovery and, a fortiori, the technological exploitation of such discoveries
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 5
LANE: TOWARDS A POETICS OF CONSUMERISM
23
might indeed be seen to pose a threat to the richness of poetic imagery,
purging or curing the unconscious of its almost immediate affective
investment in different forms of matter, replacing the passionate intensity of
‘le matérialisme imaginaire’ with the cold rationality of ‘le matérialisme
instruit’. Certainly, this would explain the melancholic tone of Bachelard’s
La Flamme d’une chandelle (1961), the last of his works to be published
during his lifetime. Writing in the first years of the era of Gaullist
planification, Bachelard sketched here a highly condensed narrative of
technological progress in which the flickering candle was replaced first by
the oil lamp and subsequently by electric light. The oil lamp, ‘cette lumière
humanisée’, was, he argued, as effective as the flickering candle flame it
replaced in provoking the state of ‘rêverie’, that ‘intermediate zone’ between
rational thought and the unconscious where the ‘poetic’ or ‘material
imagination’ was given free reign (Bachelard, 1961: 16). Electric light, on the
other hand, was unflatteringly dubbed ‘la lumière administrée’ and its
inability to offer access to the state of ‘rêverie’, that state singularly conducive
to the creation and reading of poetic images, bemoaned. Electric light, which
was either on or off, lacked any of the ‘phenomenological depth’ or poetic
potential of the flickering flame of the candle or oil lamp:
L’ampoule électrique ne nous donnera jamais les rêveries de cette lampe
vivante qui, avec de l’huile, faisait de la lumière. Nous sommes entrés
dans l’ère de la lumière administrée. Notre seul rôle est de tourner un
commutateur. Nous ne sommes plus que le sujet mécanique d’un geste
mécanique. Nous ne pouvons pas profiter de cet acte pour nous
constituer, en un orgueil légitime, comme le sujet du verbe allumer … Un
doigt sur le commutateur a suffi pour faire succéder à l’espace noir
l’espace tout de suite clair. Le même geste mécanique donne la
transformation inverse. Un petit déclic dit, de la même voix, son oui et
son non. Le phénoménologue a ainsi le moyen de nous placer
alternativement dans deux mondes, autant dire dans deux consciences.
Avec un commutateur électrique, on peut jouer sans fin aux jeux du oui
et du non. Mais, en acceptant la mécanique, le phénoménologue a perdu
l’épaisseur phénoménologique de son acte. (Bachelard, 1961: 90–1)
As the reference to ‘l’ère de la lumière administrée’ suggested, the light-bulb
functioned here as a synecdoche for the whole process of technocratically
planned modernisation and reconstruction of the built environment that
characterised the early years of the Gaullist era. Bachelard’s lament at the
replacement of the creative relationship between subject and oil lamp with the
purely mechanical gesture of flicking an electric switch, reducing the human
subject to ‘le sujet mécanique d’un geste mécanique’, played an analogous
role. For this reads as a synecdoche for rapid post-war industrialisation, for
the disappearance of peasant and artisanal forms of labour and their
replacement by the repetitive, mechanical, parcellised tasks characteristic of
mass production organised along Taylorist lines. In his earlier study, La Terre
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
24
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 6
FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 17(1)
et les rêveries de la volonté (1948b), Bachelard had analysed a series of poetic
and literary images of human subjects transforming the matter on which they
worked: potters working their clay, bakers their dough, blacksmiths their
iron, and so on. Such images, according to Bachelard, possessed a dynamic
potential; evoking the deep affective bonds between workers and the matter
on which they worked, they awakened in the imagination of readers an
awareness of their inherent creative capacities, hence encouraging a
productive synthesis of imagination and will. As he put it:
En étudiant les images matérielles, nous y découvrirons – pour parler
tout de suite en psychanalyste – l’imago de notre énergie. Autrement dit,
la matière est notre miroir énergétique; c’est un miroir qui focalise nos
puissances en les illuminant de joies imaginaries . . . Ce qui est bien
certain, c’est que les rêveries matérielles changent la dimension de nos
puissances; elles nous donnent des impressions démiurgiques; elles nous
donnent des illusions de la toute puissance . . . Du forgeron au potier, sur
le fer et dans la pâte, nous montrerons par la suite la fécondité des rêves
du travail. En éprouvant dans le travail d’une matière cette curieuse
condensation des images et des forces, nous vivrons la synthèse de
l’imagination et de la volonté. (Bachelard, 1948b: 23–4)
In the modern world of electric lighting, where flicking a light switch
reduced the human subject to ‘le sujet mécanique d’un geste mécanique’, all
the creativity of earlier forms of artisanal labour, all their poetic and affective
resonance, had thus been definitively lost. Modernisation as a whole was
thus characterised for Bachelard by a loss of affect, by a ‘disenchantment’, to
use Max Weber’s term, of the relationship between the minds and bodies of
human subjects and the objects of their everyday environment. As relations
between human subjects and the objects which surrounded them became
reified, the human body itself became transformed from a creative into a
purely mechanical force, and the realm of ‘rêverie’ or poetic imagination
retreated ever further to become but a distant memory, inhabiting ‘un jadis
par les rêves eux-mêmes oubliés’ (Bachelard, 1961: 19).
It was this notion of modernisation as involving a loss of affect, a
disenchantment of the traditional domestic space, that Henri Lefebvre picked
up on in the Introduction he contributed to the collective study of 1967,
L’Habitat pavillonnaire. Here Lefebvre turned to Bachelard’s Poétique de
l’espace as an exemplification of everything that contemporary urbanisme had
rejected; ‘ce qui, dans notre culture occidentale, se nomme encore “profondeur”,
dans l’étude de l’homme, de la cité, de la société en général’ (Lefebvre, 1967:
159). The ‘valeurs d’initimité’ that Bachelard had attributed to domestic space
were, for Lefebvre, strikingly absent from the modernist architecture of the new
grands ensembles springing up on the edges of France’s major cities:
La maison étrange, onirique, unique, dont nous entretient G. Bachelard,
cette maison qui rassemble dans son unité de rêve les dispersions du
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 7
LANE: TOWARDS A POETICS OF CONSUMERISM
25
Moi, c’est une maison traditionnelle, une demeure partriarcale, bondée
de symboles, riches de coins mystérieux, de greniers. De cette Maison, le
philosophe a pu écrire: ‘Elle est une des plus grandes puissances
d’intégration pour la pensée, les souvenirs, les rêves de l’homme … Elle
maintient l’homme à travers les orages du ciel et de la terre … Elle est
corps et âme’. Cette maison disparaît. On ne sait plus, on ne peut plus en
construire. (Lefebvre, 1967: 161)
The grands ensembles epitomised, for Lefebvre, the reified, impersonal
space produced by ‘l’urbanisme dit rationnnel’, which proceeded ‘par
percées brutales, lignes droites ou quadrillages, géométrisation, combinaisons
d’éléments homogènes, quantification abstraite’ (Lefebvre, 1967: 173–4).
Where the alienating new landscapes of ‘tours’ and ‘barres’ could best be
understood by contrast with Bachelard’s study of the symbolic density of the
traditional home, the attraction of the ‘pavillon’ reflected its ability to retain
some residual trace of the poetic force of that same traditional home.
According to Lefebvre, for all its modernity, the ‘pavillon’ nonetheless
retained a certain potential for creativity, for generating affective investments,
as manifest in the 80 per cent of French citizens who, in opinion polls,
expressed a desire to live in one. As he put it:
Le contraste … entre ‘l’habitat pavillonnaire’ et les grands ensembles est
saisissant. Précisons quelques aspects de cette confrontation. Dans le
pavillon, d’une façon sans doute mesquine, l’homme moderne ‘habite en
poète’. Entendons par là que son habiter est un peu son oeuvre. L’espace
dont il dispose pour l’organiser selon ses tendances et ses rythmes garde
une certaine plasticité. Il se prête aux aménagements. Ce n’est pas le cas
de l’espace fourni aux locataires ou aux co-propriétaires dans un
ensemble; cet espace est rigide, dépourvu de souplesse. Les aménagements
y sont difficiles, souvent impossibles, presque toujours interdits. L’espace
pavillonaire permet une certaine appropriation par le groupe familial et
par les individus de leurs conditions d’existence. (Lefebvre, 1967: 172–3)
However, the limited possibilities for creative appropriation of domestic
space offered by the ‘pavillon’ did not amount to the authentic poesis of the
‘maison traditionnelle’, as described by Bachelard. In La Flamme d’une
chandelle, he had pointed to the use of the same word, ‘lamp’, to refer to two
objects, an oil lamp and an electric lamp, which possessed a diametrically
opposed capacity to provoke ‘rêverie’ and spark the poetic imagination. For
Bachelard, then, the word ‘lamp’ in the collocation ‘electric lamp’ represented a
false promise, a promise to offer access to the realm of poetic reverie on
which it could not possibly deliver. The signifier ‘lamp’ thus seemed to have
cut dangerously adrift from everything it had once signified and symbolised:
‘quel désastre de rêverie quand les noms, les vieux noms s’en viennent à
changer d’objet, à s’attacher à toute autre chose que la bonne vieille chose du
vieux chosier!’ (Bachelard, 1961: 89–90). Lefebvre similarly argued that the
‘pavillon’ made promises to its inhabitants on which it could not deliver.
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
26
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 8
FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 17(1)
The ‘pavillon’ promised its inhabitants a domain of personal happiness, of
possessions invested with deep symbolic meaning and poetic resonance. Yet
what it in fact delivered was not those values themselves but a series of
standardised, mass-produced objects, which merely signified those values.
In the ‘pavillon’, the authentic values that Bachelard had described in his
studies of domestic space could be experienced, but only at one remove, as it
were. Domesticity, even authenticity itself, had become commodified,
marketed and sold as signifiers of themselves, rather than lived or
experienced as the things in themselves:
dans le ‘monde pavillonnaire’, plus qu’ailleurs, tout est élément d’un
système. L’objet n’est pas seulement chargé de symboles; il est signe. Il
est moins adapté fonctionnellement à un usage que pris dans le système
des signes . . . Chaque habitant d’un pavillon, chaque ‘sujet’ (individu et
famille) croit trouver dans les objets un microcosme à lui, bien
‘personnalisé’, et son bonheur à lui. Or ces microcosmes, ces ‘systèmes’
se ressemblent étrangement. Les mêmes fournisseurs vendent ces biens,
ces objets, ces modèles de pavillon dans le style ‘normand’ ou ‘basque’ ou
‘moderne’. Chaque sujet pourrait s’installer ailleurs et s’y trouverait aussi
bien. Il y vivrait le même bonheur, mi-fictif, mi-réel. La finalité – le
bonheur – est partout présentée de la même façon, c’est-à-dire indiquée,
signifiée, mais indiquée en son absence: réduite à la signification.
(Lefebvre, 1967: 176–7)
As we have already seen, Bachelard placed great emphasis on the affective
bond between human subjects and the objects that surrounded them, the
‘absorption’ of subjects in the objects they employed and the matter they
creatively transformed. In the ‘pavillon’, according to Lefebvre, this absorption
of subject in object, this deep affective bond had been reduced to an absorption
in mere signs: ‘Au niveau de l’utopie, le consommateur pavillonnaire est
absorbé non par des choses mais par des signes’ (Lefebvre, 1967: 177).
Nonetheless, the promise of domestic utopia offered by the ‘pavillon’ was
not a pure chimera; the happiness of the ‘consommateur pavillonnaire’ was
‘mi-fictif, mi-réel’. The Bachelardian notion of ‘material imagination’ thus
allowed Lefebvre to understand the appeal of the ‘pavillon’ to those who
aspired to own one, an appeal which reflected its ability to tap into the
enduring archetypes of domesticity, protection, nurture, and poesis whose
structure and form Bachelard had anatomised in La Poétique de l’espace.
There was, thus, a certain poetics of mass consumerism, a poetics even in
the commodified space of the ‘pavillon’, albeit a ‘derisory’ one: ‘le pavillon
nous offre – dérisoirement mais peu importe – un exemple de cette
“poïetique” de l’espace et du temps’ (Lefebvre, 1967: 174).
Lefebvre’s account of this loss of affect in the modern domestic space, as
of the ability of consumerism to invest that same space with a commodified
simulacrum of the home’s traditional symbolic value, was picked up and
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 9
LANE: TOWARDS A POETICS OF CONSUMERISM
27
expanded upon by his former student, Jean Baudrillard, in his first book, Le
Système des objets (1968). Here Baudrillard analysed the stark functionality
of the modern home, with its décor of glass, steel and Formica, its gadgets,
and its adaptable pieces of furniture, ‘banquettes-lit’, ‘placards escamotables’.
The significance of this new décor was defined, by Baudrillard, in
opposition to the traditional ‘maisons d’enfance’, whose ‘profondeur’, whose
‘prégnance dans le souvenir’ reflected ‘cette structure complexe d’intériorité
où les objets dépeignent à nos yeux les bornes d’une configuration symbolique
appelée demeure’ (Baudrillard, 1968: 22). The unacknowledged referent for
these archetypal ‘maisons d’enfance’ was, of course, the home as Bachelard
had described it in La Poétique de l’espace.
Indeed, the opening sections of Le Système des objets might be read as a
re-writing or updating of La Poétique de l’espace, in which Baudrillard
described the waning of ‘l’ancien ordre symbolique’ that Bachelard had
described, and its replacement by a new kind of symbolism in which the
objects and spaces of the home were stripped of their traditional semantic
and affective richness, reduced to the status of differential elements in a
combinatory system of signification. As Baudrillard put it:
C’est tout l’univers de la ‘Stimmung’ qui a disparu, celui de l’unisson
‘naturel’ des mouvements de l’âme et de la présence des choses:
l’ambiance intériorisée (par opposition à l’ambiance extériorisée des
‘intérieurs’ modernes). Aujourd’hui la valeur n’est plus d’appropriation
ni d’intimité, mais d’information, d’invention, de contrôle, de
disponibilité continue aux messages objectifs – elle est dans le calcul
syntagmatique, qui fonde proprement le discours de l’habitant moderne
. . . Le goût traditionnel, comme détermination du beau selon les affinités
secrètes, n’intervient plus ici. C’était un discours poétique, une évocation
d’objets clos qui se répondent: aujourd’hui les objets ne se répondent
plus, ils communiquent – ils n’ont plus de présence singulière mais, dans
le meilleur des cas, une cohérence d’ensemble, faite de leur simplification
comme éléments de code et du calcul de leurs rapports.
(Baudrillard, 1968: 34–5)
In the modern home full of electrical and electronic gadgets, Baudrillard
argued that the affective, creative relationship that Bachelard had identified
between human subjects, the objects they used, and the matter they worked,
the ‘investissement libidinal profond’ of body and effort in traditional
objects and tools, had disappeared, to be replaced by a mere ‘gestuel de
contrôle’ (Baudrillard, 1968: 77). The process whereby such commodities
had been produced, in a series of parcellised tasks on a production line, was
mirrored in their impact on the praxis of those who purchased and used
them. If the consumers and users of such gadgets were ‘alienated’ from them,
this reflected ‘l’abstraction du découpage fonctionnel’ of human actions, the
severely reduced and ‘abstracted’ range of gestures required of those who
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
28
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 10
FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 17(1)
operated them (Baudrillard, 1968: 70). As an example of this process,
Baudrillard traced the shift from the open fire, to the cooker, to modern
specialised apparatuses of central heating and cooking in a narrative which
recalled Bachelard’s account of the shift from candle to oil lamp and then
electric light. As he put it, ‘le “foyer” répond primitivement aux fonctions
conjointes de chauffage, de cuisine et d’éclairage’ and this explained its
‘complexité symbolique’. The ‘cuisinière’ retained ‘une certaine présence
symbolique’ through combining ‘les fonctions de chauffage et de cuisine’. In
the modern home, however, ‘toutes ces fonctions se séparent analytiquement, se dispersant dans des appareils spécialisés’ with the result that
the ‘dimension symbolique de cette nouvelle ambiance, fondée sur un
découpage fonctionnel d’un ordre différent, est nulle’ (Baudrillard, 1968: 70,
n.1).
In common with Lefebvre, however, Baudrillard did not understand the
commodification of domestic space as resulting in a loss of all affect and
symbolic value. Rather, these new commodities and gadgets evoked a new
symbolism of efficiency, fluidity and functionality, mobilising a set of
mythological connotations which were, however, but the ‘simulacre d’une
relation symbolique perdue’, seeking to ‘réinventer une finalité à force de
signes’ (Baudrillard, 1968: 82). Thus, like the tail fins on a car, these symbols
of functionality, progress and speed only signified those values; tail fins had
no inherent or natural functional value, deriving their symbolic meaning
from their status as elements within a system of cultural signification.
Nonetheless, this system of signification did lay claim to some ultimate
‘natural’ referent for its signifiers. It ‘stole signs’ from nature, tail fins
ultimately evoking sharks’ fins or birds’ wings, in order to establish ‘une
systématique de la fluidité, qui ne cherche plus ses connotations dans la
terre et la flore, éléments statiques, mais dans l’air et l’eau, éléments fluides,
et dans la dynamique animale’ (Baudrillard, 1968: 84). The Bachelardian
resonance of Baudrillard’s analysis was unmistakeable. Yet this was Bachelard’s
poetics of the four elements reified and disenchanted; commodified and
exploited for commercial gain, the deep poetic resonance of air and water
had been stripped of its former phenomenological depth to become a mere
floating signifier, a simulacrum of that lost realm of symbolic value.
Bachelard’s poetics could thus serve simultaneously as an index of all those
values mass consumerism was eroding and a means of explaining the
seductive power consumerism appeared to hold over those who submitted to
its blandishments.
It was perhaps Roland Barthes who made most systematic use of
Bachelard’s notion of the material imagination. Several of the essays in the
first half of Mythologies (1957) revealed a significant debt to Bachelard, a
debt equally evident in Barthes’s later theorisation of the general characteristics
of advertising discourse in ‘Le Message publicitaire’. This debt was
explicitly acknowledged by Barthes in ‘Le Vin et le lait’, where Bachelard’s
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 11
LANE: TOWARDS A POETICS OF CONSUMERISM
29
‘psychanalyse substantielle’ of the poetic qualities of wine served as the spur
to a meditation on wine as an icon of national identity and its relationship to
the politics of French imperialism and decolonisation. These two subjects
were linked, for Barthes, by the role of viniculture in French colonial Algeria
and by the French public’s distrust of Pierre Mendès France, a politician
who not only publicly championed the health benefits of drinking milk, ‘le
véritable anti-vin’, but who had also negotiated the French withdrawal from
Morocco and Tunisia (Barthes, 1957: 74–7).3 Elsewhere in Mythologies,
however, Barthes’s debt to Bachelard was less openly acknowledged.
For example, in ‘Jouets’ Barthes focused on the proliferation of plastic
toys in post-war France. The forms taken by such toys, which mimicked the
forms and institutions of French society, naturalised and legitimised the
existing social order, robbing the child of all creative and imaginative
potential, of any possibility of imagining a future outside of a range of preallotted social roles. Plastic toys aimed to produce ‘des enfants usagers, non
des enfants créateurs’ (Barthes, 1957: 60). As we have already seen, in La
Terre et les rêveries de la volonté, Bachelard had placed great emphasis on
the creative relationship between workers and the substances on which they
worked. Images of potters working and creatively transforming clay, for
example, awakened human subjects’ awareness of their potential, provoking a
series of ‘impressions démiurgiques’ in a productive synthesis of imagination
and will. Indeed, Bachelard had argued that an awareness of this poetic,
affective relationship between subjects and the substances they transformed
through labour played a fundamental role in a child’s education: ‘en marge
de la réalité sociale, avant même que les matières soient désignées par les
métiers instaurés dans la société, il nous faut considérer les réalités
matérielles vraiment premières, telles qu’elles sont offertes par la nature,
comme autant d’invites à exercer nos forces . . . Il suffit de donner à un
enfant des substances assez variées pour voir se présenter les puissances
dialectiques du travail manuel’ (Bachelard, 1948b: 30). For Barthes, the
problem with modern toys was precisely that in mimicking ‘les métiers
instaurés par la société’, in taking the form ‘des soldats, des postiers’, they
curtailed the child’s creative and imaginative potential.
Moreover, this loss of creative and imaginative potential was reinforced
by the very nature of plastic as a substance. Wood, according to Barthes, was
‘une substance familière et poétique’, a ‘matière … idéale par sa fermeté et sa
tendreur, la chaleur naturelle de son contact’. Wooden toys, manufactured
under artisanal, hence unalienated conditions of production, thus had all of
the affective and poetic resonance, all of the imaginative and creative potential
that Bachelard had attributed to the potter’s clay or the blacksmith’s iron.
Plastic, however, was the antithesis of this and plastic toys, made ‘d’une
matière ingrate, produits d’une chimie, non d’une nature’, could introduce
the child only ‘à une cénesthésie de l’usage, non du plaisir’. Only in toys
involving building or construction did Barthes find a remnant of those
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
30
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 12
FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 17(1)
‘impressions démiurgiques’ that Bachelard argued images of labour could
evoke in the subject: ‘l’enfant n’y crée nullement des objets significatifs . . .
ce qu’il exerce, ce n’est pas un usage, c’est une démiurgie’ (Barthes, 1957:
60).
Barthes continued his meditation on the deadening qualities of plastic in
‘Le Plastique’. Here he emphasised the ambivalent nature of plastic, this
‘substance alchimique’. On the one hand, plastic was an extraordinarily,
even ‘magically’ versatile substance, which could be miraculously moulded
to produce any number of different forms and objects. On the other hand, the
price to be paid for plastic’s proteiform qualities was its ‘qualité substantielle
neutre’. Its dull sound, its harsh, unnatural colours, its ‘prosaïsme’ signalled
the substance’s total lack of poetic resonance, the absence of any link
between it and ‘la terre … son origine minérale ou animale’. Plastic was ‘un
matériau disgracié’ in ‘l’ordre poétique des grandes substances’, a substance
entirely lacking in creative or imaginative potential since it was ‘tout
englouti dans son usage’. As the range of plastic products proliferated ever
further, the traditional ‘hiérarchie des substances’ was ‘abolished’ and with
the development of plastic aortas, the very basis of human life itself, the
symbolic seat of genuine human emotion, the heart, had been commodified,
stripped of its poetic and affective resonance (Barthes, 1957: 171–3).
In both ‘Jouets’ and ‘Le Plastique’, Barthes thus made a series of implicit
allusions to Bachelard’s studies of the material imagination, which provided
him with an index of all the authentic values that were being swept away by
the pace of modernisation and the advent of mass consumerism in post-war
France. By contrast, in ‘Saponides et détérgents’ and ‘Publicité de la
profondeur’, Barthes drew on Bachelard’s work to analyse the use advertisers
made of the poetic resonance of certain substances, earth, fire, air, water, to
seduce consumers into purchasing cleaning and skin-care products. Barthes
claimed, in ‘Saponides et détérgents’, that in studying ‘la publicité psychanalytique’, he was not attaching ‘une signification d’école particulière’ to the
term ‘psychanalytique’. This was, however, somewhat disingenuous given
that the terminology he employed to explain the efficacy of that ‘publicité
psychanalytique’ was so clearly indebted to Bachelard. Such psychoanalytic
advertising worked, according to Barthes, by engaging ‘le consommateur
dans une sorte de mode vécu de la substance … la matière est ici pourvue
d’états-valeurs’. In ‘Saponides et détérgents’, those ‘états-valeurs’ were the
opposing values attached to cleaning powders and fluids, on the one hand,
as against creams and foams, on the other. The former functioned
symbolically by evoking an aggressive process of cleansing; fluids based on
ammonia or chlorine represented ‘les délégués d’une sorte de feu total’,
whilst powders ‘poussent, conduisent la saleté à travers la trame de l’objet,
elles sont une fonction de police, non de guerre’. Creams and foams, on the
other hand, sought to hide their abrasive, detergent function ‘sous l’image
délicieuse d’une substance à la fois profonde et aérienne’; they appealed
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 13
LANE: TOWARDS A POETICS OF CONSUMERISM
31
because they flattered ‘chez le consommateur une imagination aérienne de la
matière, un mode de contact à la fois léger et vertical’. Just as in L’Eau et les
rêves Bachelard had analysed the contrasting ‘values’ and ‘qualities’ different
poetic images could attach to nocturnal water, from nurturing milky whiteness
to deathly terrifying darkness, so here Barthes analysed the different values,
the contrasting poetic qualities with which advertisers sought to invest their
products. However, where the values Bachelard identified were taken to be
authentic, fundamental and elemental, the values Barthes identified were
ultimately false, commodified and mystificatory. As the ‘punchline’ of
‘Saponides et détérgents’ revealed, the products which had such apparently
contrasting qualities were in fact all manufactured by the same multinational
corporation, Unilever (Barthes, 1957: 38–40).
In ‘Publicité de la profondeur’, Barthes found an analogous opposition
between water and ‘la graisse (appelée plus poétiquement, huiles)’ at work in
advertising campaigns for different skin-care products. Such campaigns
worked firstly by investing the skin with certain fundamental qualities and
values and then by attributing correspondingly curative qualities to the
different substances, the different skin products, considered essential for the
maintenance and protection of the skin. All advertising for skin products,
according to Barthes, attributed to skin the basic quality of depth; the skin
was an organ with depth, with hidden roots or layers requiring constant
care, nutrition, revivification. Each skin-care product then claimed, in
opposition to its competitors, to possess a unique capacity to perform such a
curative function, drawing on a particular mythology or poetics of substances
as it did so. As Barthes put it: ‘le vrai drame de toute cette petite psychanalyse
publicitaire, c’est le conflit de deux substances ennemies qui se disputent
subtilement l’acheminement des “sucs” et des “principes” vers le champ de
la profondeur. Ces deux substances sont l’eau et la graisse’. Thus advertising
for skin products respected ‘toutes les valeurs positives de la mythologie des
substances’. As such, ‘l’eau est donnée comme volatile, aérienne, fuyante,
éphémère, précieuse; l’huile au contraire tient, pèse, force lentement les
surfaces, imprègne, glisse sans retour le long des “pores”’ (Barthes, 1957:
82–5).
In his later essay, ‘Le Message publicitaire’, Barthes was to set out more
clearly the theoretical basis for this tendency to compare the discourses
of advertising to poetry, although his debt to Bachelard would remain
unacknowledged. The opening paragraphs of ‘Le Message publicitaire’
read as a classic exercise in the structuralist or semiotic analysis of an
advertisement, itself defined as ‘un message’ with ‘une source d’émission’,
‘un point de réception’ and ‘un canal de transmission’. Towards the end of
the essay, however, Barthes’s terminology shifted away from the language of
message, code, reception and transmission, as he sought to account for the
efficacy of certain advertisements. At this point the rather cold, abstract
terminology of semiotic analysis was supplemented by a rather different
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
32
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 14
FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 17(1)
language of affect, poetry and the oneiric, a conceptual vocabulary with an
unmistakeably Bachelardian resonance. The efficacy of an advertising
slogan, Barthes argued, related more to its ability to engage the realm of
affect than to its powers of rational persuasion: ‘un slogan peut “séduire”
sans convaincre, et cependant engager à l’achat par cette seule séduction’.
That power of ‘seduction’ could be explained, moreover, by reference to
poetry: ‘le “bon” message publicitaire est celui qui condense en lui la
rhétorique la plus riche et atteint avec précision (souvent d’un seul mot) les
grands thèmes oniriques de l’humanité, opérant ainsi cette grande libération
des images (ou par les images) qui définit la poésie même. Autrement dit, les
critères du langage publicitaire sont ceux-là mêmes de la poésie’ (Barthes,
1963: 1145). This notion that poetry was defined by its potential to effect
‘une grande libération des images (ou par des images)’ was, of course,
profoundly Bachelardian. The power of advertising thus reflected, according
to Barthes, its ability to tap into and revivify that stock of unconscious
archetypal images that Bachelard had located at the heart of the material
imagination: ‘L’excellence du signifiant publicitaire tient ainsi au pouvoir,
qu’il faut savoir lui donner, de relier son lecteur à la plus grande quantité de
“monde” possible: le monde, c’est-à-dire: expérience de très anciennes
images, obscures et profondes sensations du corps, nommées poétiquement
par des générations, sagesse des rapports de l’homme et de la nature,
accession patiente de l’humanité à une intelligence des choses à travers le
seul pouvoir incontestablement humain: le langage’ (Barthes, 1963: 1146).
Barthes’s analysis in ‘Le Message publicitaire’, as in the earlier essays in
Mythologies, seemed to rely on a set of assumptions about a shared human
nature, indeed about the authenticity of nature itself, the same assumptions
that had underpinned Bachelard’s analyses. This reliance sat uneasily both
with Barthes’s critique of such anthropological assumptions in ‘La Grande
famille des hommes’ and with his broader rejection of arguments from
nature throughout Mythologies. Indeed, it was surely those anthropological
assumptions that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had in mind when they
wrote so dismissively of a psychoanalysis which ended up in ‘une étude des
gadgets et des marchés, sous la forme la plus misérable d’une psychanalyse
de l’objet (paquet de nouilles, de l’automobile ou du “machin”)’ in L’Antioedipe (1972), their attempt to track the varying ways in which desire and
the affects had been channelled into different ‘agencements machiniques’ in
different social formations at different historical moments (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1972: 33).
Nonetheless, for all the anthropological assumptions that Barthes, along
with Lefebvre and Baudrillard, inherited from Bachelard, their adoption of
his notion of a material imagination did provide them with a powerful tool
for making sense of mass consumerism in France, of its attractions just as
much as of its disappointments. Moreover, these theorists’ appropriation of
Bachelard’s work performs a useful function in alerting us to the centrality of
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 15
LANE: TOWARDS A POETICS OF CONSUMERISM
33
desire, affect and imagination, as against rational thought or deliberative
judgement, to the workings of mass consumerism. That said, desire, affect
and imagination need not always be conceptualised in a nostalgic mode, as
expressing a fundamental human need to compensate for the lack or loss of
an earlier age of symbolic richness or of some primitive, authentic
relationship between man and nature. Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that
desire should always be understood as inherently productive, never as pure
‘pulsion interne’, but always already shaped and configured by the
particular ‘agencement’ which produces it, may prove helpful here (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1980: 280). Such ‘agencements’ configure the relationships
between bodies, organs, affects, objects and tools in historically variable
ways. Each such ‘agencement’ thus represents ‘un état précis de mélange de
corps dans une société, comprenant toutes les attractions et répulsions, les
sympathies et les antipathies, les alliages, les pénétrations et expansions qui
affectent les corps de toutes sortes, les uns par rapport aux autres’ (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1980: 114). According to this conception, the poetics of
consumerism, sketched by Barthes, Baudrillard and Lefebvre, might be
interpreted as the expression of the ‘agencement’ of mass consumerism, a
configuration or ‘assemblage’ of desire which need not necessarily be
assumed to be either richer or poorer than what preceded it, in affective,
poetic or symbolic terms, but which nonetheless involved the wholesale
reconfiguration of the human body, its desires and affective relationships
with the objects it employed and the spaces it inhabited.
Notes
1. The Introduction to Le Matérialisme rationnel contains perhaps Bachelard’s most complete
and succinct explanation of the relationship between the poetic and scientific halves of his
output. See Bachelard (1953: 1–36).
2. For the distinction between ‘la maison natale’, as the source of purely personal memories,
and ‘la maison onirique’, as the locus of ‘transsubjective’ experience, see also ‘La Maison
natale et la maison onirique’, in Bachelard (1948a: 95–128).
3. See also ‘Le Vin et la vigne des alchimistes’, in Bachelard (1948a: 323–32).
References
Bachelard, Gaston (1942) L’Eau et les rêves: essai sur l’imagination de la matière. Paris: José
Corti.
Bachelard, Gaston (1948a) La Terre et les rêveries du repos. Paris: José Corti.
Bachelard, Gaston (1948b) La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté. Paris: José Corti.
Bachelard, Gaston (1953) Le Matérialisme rationnel. Paris: PUF/Collection ‘Quadrige’, 2e
édition, 2000.
Bachelard, Gaston (1957) La Poétique de l’espace. Paris: PUF/Collection ‘Quadrige’, 7e
édition, 1998.
Bachelard, Gaston (1961) La Flamme d’une chandelle. Paris: PUF/Collection ‘Quadrige’, 7e
édition, 1984.
FCS 17(1) Jeremy Lane
34
12/15/05
1:24 PM
Page 16
FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 17(1)
Barthes, Roland (1957) Mythologies. Paris: Éditions du Seuil/Collections ‘Points’.
Barthes, Roland (1963) ‘Le Message publicitaire’, in Œuvres complètes, tôme 1: 1942–1965,
edited and presented by Eric Marty, pp. 1143–6. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993.
Baudrillard, Jean (1968) Le Système des objets. Paris: Gallimard/Collection ‘Tel’.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1972) Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-oedipe,
nouvelle edition augmentée. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1973.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1980) Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux.
Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Lecourt, Dominique (1974) Bachelard, ou, le jour et la nuit. Paris: Grasset.
Lefebvre, Henri (1967) ‘Introduction à l’étude de l’habitat pavillonnaire’, in N. Haumont,
M.-G. Raymond and H. Raymond, L’Habitat pavillonaire. Paris: Éditions du CRU, 1967;
reprinted in H. Lefebvre, Du rural à l’urbain: textes rassemblés par Mario Gavira, pp.
159–81. Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1970.
McAllester-Jones, Mary (1991) Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist: Texts and Readings.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Sertoli, Giuseppe (1971) Le immagini e la realtà: saggio su Gaston Bachelard. Florence: La
Nuova Italia Editrice.
Jeremy F. Lane is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of French at the
University of Nottingham. Address for correspondence: Department of
French, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD,
UK [email: [email protected]]