Towards a Poetics of Consumerism - French Cultural Studies
Transcription
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]]