Iconoclasm and Imagination: Gaston Bachelard’s Philosophy of Technoscience

Abstract

Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962 occupies a unique position in the history of European thinking. As a philosopher of science, he developed a profound interest in genres of the imagination, notably poetry and novels. While emphatically acknowledging the strength, precision and reliability of scientific knowledge compared to every-day experience, he saw literary phantasies as important supplementary sources of insight. Although he significantly influenced authors such as Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and others, while some of his key concepts ("epistemological rupture," "epistemological obstacle," "technoscience") are still widely used, his oeuvre tends to be overlooked. And yet, as I will argue, Bachelard's extended series of books opens up an intriguing perspective on contemporary science. First, I will point to a remarkable duality that runs through Bachelard's oeuvre. His philosophy of science consists of two suboeuvres: a psychoanalysis of technoscience, complemented by a poetics of elementary imagination. I will point out how these two branches deal with complementary themes: technoscientific artefacts and literary fictions, two realms of human experience separated by an epistemological rupture. Whereas Bachelard's work initially entails a panegyric in praise of scientific practice, he becomes increasingly intrigued by the imaginary and its basic images ("archetypes"), such as the Mother Earth archetype.

Introduction: Coming to Terms with Technoscience

“…The latter's understanding of the history of science in terms of discontinuity and rupture in response to accumulating anomalies (Kuhn, 1962(Kuhn, /2000 seems clearly indebted to Bachelard, although Kuhn hardly mentions him (Fragio, 2020;Gutting, 2001;Simons, 2017;Stachel, 2016). And although strictly speaking Bachelard did not coin the term "technoscience" as we have seen (Hottois 2018), he emphatically emphasises the decisive role of technicity in contemporary research (Bachelard, 1934(Bachelard, /1973Bachelard, 1953;Zwart, 2019Zwart, , 2020d. His oeuvre still tends to be overlooked in mainstream philosophy of science.…”

Coming to Terms with Technoscience: The Heideggerian Way

“…On the one hand, we notice convergence. Heidegger's emphasis on the technicity of technoscience already offers a bridge (Hottois 1984;Lemmens 2008;Kastenhofer and Schwarz 2011;Zwart 2020). Moreover, from a Heideggerian perspective, technoscientific contrivances (such as microscopes) give rise to objectification, bringing microbes closer to us, literally into view, while at the same time segregating scientists as subjects (the scientific gaze) from their objects (microbes), as we have seen.…”

Psychoanalysing Technoscience

“…Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science is a psychoanalysis of technoscience, focussing on the epistemological rupture between pre-scientific and technoscientific ways of being-in-the-world, and on the crucial role of surveillance in technoscientific research (Zwart, 2019a(Zwart, , 2020a. Bachelard thematises the rupture between "pre-scientific" and "scientific" as a rupture between imaginative and symbolic styles of thinking, arguing that science is iconoclastic, negating the archetypal images and worldviews that dominate pre-scientific contemplation, and replacing them with the (mathematical, physical and chemical) symbols, equations and neologisms of exact or calculative thinking.…”

“…These worldviews are relentlessly challenged and negated, however, by the disruptive insights produced by technoscience (the second moment, M 2 ). Indeed, according to Bachelard, technoscience is decidedly iconoclastic, and in a significant part of his oeuvre, Bachelard emphatically takes sides with the iconoclastic, negating tendencies of technoscience (Zwart, 2019a(Zwart, , 2020a. Eventually, however, Bachelard opts for a more comprehensive approach, seeing technoscientific negation and poetic imagination as complementary dimensions of human experience.…”