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

摘要

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.