The Poetics of Cartography and Habitation: Home as a Repository of Memories

Abstract

This article brings Proust and Bachelard into conversation about inhabiting the home and the role that remembrance, memory and the imagination might play in producing knowledge about the world. Proust and Bachelard both suggest that once a material object, such as a house, has been seized upon by the imagination by those who inhabit the dwelling, it no longer makes sense to assess the space-of-home using “objective” or “mathematical” modalities. Proust’s novel has particular relevance in suggesting how we might think about how the material objects of the home serve as the repository for memories. The aim is to investigate the tension between the experience of urban space and its representations to make cognizant and explicit the use of mathematically informed signs. I suggest that the material features of the urban landscape and home itself hold memories that should be viewed as significant artifacts that constitute how we understand the world. I argue that the formation of the self is constituted through our relations with both imaginary and material objects. This position challenges a concept of the home whereby habitation and imagination are constructed as subordinate to the mathematical measurements of the material world.

Key Words:

• Proust
• Bachelard
• Home
• Cartography
• Memory

Notes

1. Not the street’s real name.

2. Materialism’s most important contribution, in my opinion, was to philosophically do away with “gods” by forwarding a materialist conception of the soul. However, Steven Hawking recently argued that “philosophy is dead” and he forwards “science” – to be read as the physical sciences and in this case physics – as the only ‘valid’ knowledge system for understanding the social and material world(s). So, there are ontological implications for both promoting and challenging materialist doctrines. These might include: on the one side, the possibility of ‘creating new gods’ through the promotion of phenomenological or similar processes of remembrance; while, on the other side, the promotion of a hard-edge Hawkarian materialism – which denies the validity of ‘philosophical’ understandings of the social and material world – rules out other forms of knowledge about the world.

3. <-!!->

4. Housing NSW is the state housing authority in the state of New South Wales in Australia.