The Experience of The Interior Outlines of An Alternative Anthropology

Interiors
Design/Architecture/Culture
ISSN: 2041-9112 (Print) 2041-9120 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfin20
The experience of the interior: outlines of an

alternative anthropology
Kris Pint
To cite this article: Kris Pint (2016) The experience of the interior: outlines of an alternative
anthropology, Interiors, 7:1, 55-72, DOI: 10.1080/20419112.2016.1165438
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The experience of
the interior: outlines
of an alternative
anthropology
Kris Pint
Kris Pint is assistant professor at ABSTRACT Cultural artifacts only acquire meaning in
Hasselt University, Belgium. He
teaches and does research in the
a subjective context. This is particularly the case for the
domains of cultural philosophy, domestic interior, which since modernity has a strong link
semiotics and scenography at the with the subjects inhabiting them. Inspired by the later 55 Interiors DOI: 10.1080/20419112.2016.1165438
Faculty of Architecture and Arts
at Hasselt University. His research
work of Michel Foucault, we want to present an approach
focuses on literature, (interior) to interiors that takes into account this subjectivity, not only
architecture and visual arts, more of the inhabitant, but also of the researcher. Using the work
specifically on the alternative
possibilities of living, dwelling,
of anthropologist Tim Ingold, we will argue that our bodily
knowing that artistic research helps and existential engagement with an interior environment
to explore. He is the author of The can be considered as a valid form of scholarship. Finally,
Perverse Art of Reading (2010).
kris.pint@uhasselt.be
we will apply this alternative anthropology in a short
analysis of a painting by Pierre Bonnard.
KEYWORDS: anthropology, art, subjectivity, Michel Foucault,
Tim Ingold
Interiors
Volume 7, Issue 1
pp 55–72 © 2016 Inform a U K Limited , tradin g as Taylo r & Franci s Gro
K. Pint
Looking through the keyhole

In a famous passage of L’être et le Néant (1943), Sartre gives the
example of someone who, “moved by jealousy, curiosity or vice”
(Sartre 1992: 347), is peeping through a keyhole. Totally absorbed
by his voyeuristic act, he coincides with his own gaze, his own
desire. But then he is startled by footsteps in the hall: “Someone is
looking at me!” (ibid.: 349) At that moment, the situation shifts com-
pletely: the observer now becomes the observed, painfully aware of
his own presence and of the fact that he has been caught in a rather
embarrassing position. In the eyes of the other he and his actions
become objectified, just like the subjects he was spying on were
turned into objects by his inquisitive gaze. Because the other has
the freedom to turn him into an object of derision and to despise
him as a Peeping Tom, his own freedom to act—and to act differ-
ently—becomes apparent. The sudden awareness of the presence
of someone else confronts him with his own subjective freedom
to choose. The voyeur’s feeling of shame proves that one cannot
coincide with one’s actual presence in the world as a mere object,
a ‘being-in-itself’ (en-soi). Our consciousness transcends the given
situation, as it can imagine other possibilities, consider different sce-
narios and reflect upon its own actions. For Sartre, this transcend-
ence makes us a being-for-itself (pour-soi). Yet as the example of the
voyeur illustrates, this being-for-itself is at the same time inevitably a
being-for-others (pour-autrui). Precisely because we do not coincide
with a given situation, because we are free, others can judge us
for our actions and our desires. Even on the other side of the key-
hole, one is always part of the scene one is watching, engaged by
this desire to take a secret look. The supposed gaze of the other—
evoked by his footsteps—is enough to confront us with this impos-
sibility to stand outside the scene, to escape the gaze.
The Sartrean example of the voyeur illustrates the awkward posi-
tion a scholar of interiors finds him- or herself in. Just like a voyeur,
the researcher looks into private rooms, turning them into an object
of study, apparently with the sole purpose to gain objective knowl-
edge in this specific subdomain of the humanities. But is this really
what is going on here? Is such an explanation not as implausible as
the pretexts of a voyeur who tries to justify his spying by claiming
that he is a mere servant of ‘the progress of academic knowledge’?
Sartre’s example makes clear that it is always an ‘I’ who is gazing
through a keyhole, not some impersonal registration machine. The
‘I’ spying at the door is inevitably part of the scene. As a scholar in
the humanities, one should thus be aware of one’s own subjective
involvement with the cultural artifacts under scrutiny. To deny this
involvement is a form of Sartrean bad faith, mauvaise foi: one tries
to convince the others (as well as oneself) that one is totally deter-
56 Interiors
mined by the situation, that one just does what is expected—just

like in Sartre’s famous example of the waiter in the café, who per-
fectly performs all the gestures of this trade in order to erase his
The experience of the interior: outlines of an alternative anthropology
own freedom as a subject and to fully coincide with his profession

(ibid.:101). But precisely this illusion of impersonal academic detach-
ment has important epistemological consequences, as it erases the
subjective context that is necessary to understand cultural artifacts,
and especially interiors.
The interior and the modern subject

The dynamic, inextricable link between subjectivity and the interior

is already implied in the word interior itself: originally, it referred to
an inner mental state, and it was only at the beginning of the eight-
eenth century that the term was also used to refer to the inside of
a building, and to representations of such interiors in drawings and
paintings (see Grant 2006: 137). Obviously, people lived indoors for
many centuries, and the specific relationship between one’s inti-
mate self and the representation of a living space can already be
sensed in the famous paintings of Dutch interiors by Vermeer or de
Hooch. But this specific connection between the chez-soi and the
pour-soi as a kind of default mode of subjectivity only fully emerged
during the eighteenth century. It was the result of the complex inter-
action and mutual enhancement of different processes in society:
the industrial revolution, the rise of capitalism and the philosophy
of the Enlightenment (see Reed 1996: 7). The Romantic ideology,
with its focus on individual sensibility, further reinforced this intimate
relationship between the subject and the interior, as is expressed
in the notion of Stimmung (see Praz 1982: 50). By the nineteenth
century, the conjunction of all these evolutions has turned the interior
into what Diana Fuss describes in The Sense of an Interior (2004)
as “a locus of privacy, a home theatre for the production of a new
inward-looking subject” (Fuss 2004: 9). Fuss gives the example of
Emily Dickinson: she led an extremely secluded life, often retreating
to her bedroom, avoiding as much as she could the intrusive gaze
and presence of others. The private interior became a safe haven
for her fragile state of mind, allowing her to explore this mental state
and express it in poems and letters. This was not only the result of
a Romantic appreciation of (hyper)sensibility, but also of domestic
changes due to technological inventions and growing prosperity.
Oil lamps and cast-iron fireplaces made it possible to light and to
heat different rooms in the house, allowing for more privacy. Or as
Fuss so succinctly puts it: “one is compelled to wonder whether
Dickinson chose to isolate herself within her bedroom for the simple
reason that, for the first time in the history of the domestic interior,
she could” (ibid.: 55).
The notion of the domestic interior as both a protective shelter
57 Interiors
and mirror of the self became the fundamental principle of the phi-
losophy of the interior as it was developed in the influential works of
Gaston Bachelard and Mario Praz. In the introduction of his Poétique
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de l’espace (1957), Bachelard summarizes this principle as follows:

“the house image would appear to have become the topography
of our intimate being” (Bachelard 1964: xxxii). Praz takes a similar
stance in his La filosofia dell’arredamento (1964), translated as the
Illustrated History of Interior Decoration (1982): “The surroundings
become a museum of the soul, an archive of its experiences; it reads
in them its own history, and is perennially conscious of itself; the sur-
roundings are the resonance chamber where its strings render their
authentic vibration” (Praz 1982: 24).

Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, this domestic mise-en-
scene of the bourgeois subjectivity in interior design was already
increasingly threatened by the dynamics of the industrial revolution
that has made this subjectivity possible in the first place. As Hilde
Heynen states in her Architecture and Modernity – A Critique (1999),
domesticity was something that had to be carefully protected:
The home must be shielded from the outside world. The sur-
roundings of the metropolis, with the demands it makes in
terms of social status, speed, and efficiency, goes counter to
an idea of dwelling that is based on familiarity, intimacy, and
personal history (Heynen 1999: 94–95).
But while Praz and Bachelard defended this bourgeois domestic-

ity and the intimate interiority that went along with it, lamenting the
destruction of this experience in modern architecture, other scholars
were not so negative about the modern conditions of dwelling. In
his famous analysis of the bourgeois interior in Das Passagen-werk
(written between 1927 and 1940, first published in 1982), Benjamin
defined “dwelling in its most extreme form as a condition of nine-
teenth-century existence” (Benjamin 1999: 220), but he also
acknowledged that this mode of existence, a subjectivity carefully
enveloped and embedded in the shell of an interior, was already
something of the past. Modernist architecture would inevitably
destroy this mode of existence, as Benjamin argued in his essay
Surrealism (1929).
To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence.

It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we bad-
ly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence, once an
aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of
petty-bourgeois parvenus (Benjamin 2005: 209).
In the modernist and communist utopia of Benjamin, Sartre’s voyeur-

istic gaze would simply cease to exist, as both discretion and shame
lose their meaning: the inhabitants would have nothing to hide.
58 Interiors
As an example of this new condition of dwelling, Benjamin

mentions the work of Le Corbusier, who “stand(s) at the terminus
of the mythological figuration ‘house’” (Benjamin 1999: 407). For
Le Corbusier, the house was an agreeable and hygienic, but only

temporary retreat from society, not a refuge for intimate rêveries.
In his Vers une architecture (1923), Le Corbusier still claims that
a house should offer shelter against “the inquisitive” (Le Corbusier
2007: 165), but as Benjamin noted, architectural innovations would
make it more and more difficult to protect the occupant from such
an inquisitive gaze. As an antipode of Emily Dickinson, we now have
Edith Farnsworth, who commissioned one of the icons of modernist
architecture: the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat, designed by

Mies van der Rohe. This famous example of modernist minimalism
would pose serious problems for its unfortunate occupant, not in
the least concerning the problem of privacy. The ‘glass architecture’
would turn this house into a kind of display case, leaving the interior
almost completely exposed to the view. Edith Farnsworth was not
only the victim of technological innovations, but also of evolutions in
communication, more specifically the reproduction and distribution
of images on a massive scale. This made that a lot of people wanted
to see what the fuss in the press was all about: “flowers brought
in to heal the scars of the building were crushed by those boots
beneath the noses pressed against the glass” (Farnsworth, quoted
in Friedman 1996: 187).
This danger of exposure, threatening the delicate bond between
the interior and the intimate inner life of its occupants, was in fact
already present at the moment that this bourgeois interior took
shape, precisely because it was reinforced by the circulation of
representations of these interiors. Or as Charles Rice states in The
Emergence of the Interior (2007): “the interior’s historical emergence
was bound up with its meaning being equally spatial and image
based” (Rice 2007: 19). The fact that the meaning of the word ‘inte-
rior’ started to refer at the same time both to a dwelling space and to
a representation of this space implies an intrusive gaze, that exposes
and exhibits what is private, secret, for specific eyes only. Forms
of mass communication like newspapers, magazines, television
series and more recently also the internet have led to a proliferation
of images of private interiors. Rice refers to Terence Riley’s notion
of the ‘un-private home’ to define our present condition of dwell-
ing: “Today, the private house has become a permeable structure,
receiving and transmitting images, sounds, texts and data” (Riley,
quoted in Rice 2007: 114).
Symptomatic of this evolution and its impact on privacy issues
is the fact that Big Brother, the dictator in Orwell’s dystopic 1984
(1949) eventually became the name for a hugely popular television
format. In a house full of cameras people lived, cooked, played silly
games, argued, made love and slept. The numberless voyeurs on
the couch or behind the computer screen felt not ashamed, prob-
59 Interiors
ably just bored by the banality of what they saw. Just like in the
communist society Benjamin described, late capitalism seems to
have turned discretion into an outmoded value. In our ‘transparent
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society’, as the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls it in his

Transparenzgesellschaft (2012), we are witnessing the disappear-
ance of the kind of interiority, both mental and spatial, that emerged
in the eighteenth century (see Han 2015). The interior increasingly
returns to what it was before: a semi-public space (even if this space
is now mostly virtual) of self-display.
Interiors and the care of the self

It is interesting to see how these representations of the interior
in mass media have provoked a counter reaction in contempo-
rary architectural theory. Scholars like Gernot Böhme, Wolfgang
Meisenheimer, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez show
in their work a renewed interest in existential phenomenology, focus-
ing on the intimate, subjective, embodied experience of dwelling
(see Meisenheimer 2004; Pérez-Gomez 2008; Pallasmaa 2011;
Böhme 2013). In his analysis of our current condition of dwelling,
Pallasmaa puts his finger on a latent feeling of subjective discon-
tentment. Implicit in the work of Pallasmaa is the belief that a more
authentic form of experience is possible to counter what Vidler calls
the ‘uncanny space’ that defines modern and postmodern dwelling
(see Vidler 1994). However, as Michel Foucault has argued in Les
mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966),
our view on subjectivity is not a universal feature of human exist-
ence, but an epistemological construction of the human sciences
(linguistics, biology, and political economy) that emerged at the
end of the eighteenth century. The knowledge produced by those
sciences was internalized and used as a discursive frame by individ-
uals to gaze upon themselves, to understand and to express their
own behavior. The result of this reflection was the kind of subjectivity
we know today. This implies that another constellation of knowledge
would create a different kind of subjectivity, hence Foucault’s famous
hyperbolic statement at the end of Les mots et les choses:
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if

some event of which we can at the moment do no more than
sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form
will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble,
as the ground of classical thought did, at the end of the eight-
eenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would
be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea
(Foucault 1973: 387).
It is no coincidence that this modern subject appeared at the same

60 Interiors
time as the emergence of the interior. Just as the subject saw itself
represented in the modern human sciences, the interiors became a
spatial and visual representation of this new kind of subjectivity. In
fact, the word ‘representation’ is too passive here, as the bourgeois

interior was not only an expression of the interiority of its occupant,
but in fact helped to create and sustain this interiority. As Beatriz
Colomina argues in The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism (1992)
architecture “is a viewing mechanism that produces the subject. It
precedes and frames its occupant” (Colomina 1992: 83). Discussing
the interiors of Loos, she claims that what this architectural viewing
mechanism creates and frames is precisely “the traditional scene of
everyday domestic life” (ibid.: 86). However radical Loos’ architec-

ture may have been on the outside, his view on interior and interiority
is still very much rooted in bourgeois subjectivity. But at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century a new architecture emerged that would
not only radically change the conditions of dwelling, but also of sub-
jectivity itself. As Colomina argues, the interiors of Le Corbusier are
very different from those of Loos: “the apartment defines modern
subjectivity with its own eye. The traditional subject can only be the
visitor, and as such, a temporary part of the viewing mechanism.
The humanist subject has been displaced” (ibid.: 121). The interi-
ors of Le Corbusier supposed a new kind of subjectivity that would
radically discard the values of bourgeois domesticity. The implied
occupant of these interiors was no longer the inward-looking, sensi-
tive subject, but an outward-looking individual who played an active
role in society. It is necessary to keep this historical dimension of
subjectivity in mind. We examine not only the subjectivity of those
who inhabited the interiors, but also the subjectivity of those who
study them. The implicit subject of Pallasmaa’s reflections on interi-
ors, and its nostalgic desire for a more authentic, ‘richer’ experience
of dwelling, is itself the historical result of this intimate connection
between the interior of the mind and the interior of the house. But
this does not mean that we should abandon the nostalgic desire
for an interior space in tune with our subjectivity. Foucault has been
too easily discarded (or promoted) as radical herald of the post-
human condition. In fact, the philosophy of Heidegger continued to
be an important intertext for Foucault’s thinking (see Dreyfus and
Rabinow 1983). His fundamental critique of existential phenomenol-
ogy was not that it took the subject as its starting point, but that
it neglected the fundamental implications of its embeddedness in
a specific historical and discursive context. The kind of experience
phenomenology talked about was determined by a kind of ‘common
sense’ that ignored those forms of subjectivity that went beyond
the set of socially accepted experiences, values, and habits; hence
Foucault’s interest in madness, in crime, in sexual ‘deviation’. In
his later work, Foucault not only wanted to examine how subjec-
tivity was shaped through outside disciplinary forces, but also how
it could shape itself. He became interested in the specific kind of
61 Interiors
relationship one could have with oneself, a kind of interiority that

was not the manifestation of some inalienable deep kernel of human
existence, but the result of all the discursive forces that were working
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on an individual, including the ones that the subject exerted upon

himself. For Foucault, subjectivity was not something that had to
be protected from alienating forces (in the case of Pallasmaa: from
alienating modern architecture), but something that had to be pro-
duced and could be transformed by certain ‘techniques of the self’.
Foucault became interested in the notion of the ‘care for the self’, as
an important ethical directive in Antiquity (see Foucault 1988). In this
notion, he found an interesting alternative to this view on subjectivity
based on scientific knowledge. Here, the focus was not so much

on ‘knowing’ the subject (its biological programming, its economical
and libidinal drives, the discursive context that provided it with a
specific identity) but on ‘caring’ for it, transforming it. For Foucault,
such a ‘care for the self’ was not exclusive to the Greco-Roman era.
It also had its modern equivalents, like the Baudelairean dandy. As
Foucault stated in his essay Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (1984):
Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to
discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the
man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘lib-
erate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of
producing himself (Foucault 1997: 312).
The word Foucault uses here—‘task’—has definitely a Sartrean ring

to it. Just like Sartre, Foucault argues that human identity is never
fixed, but radically open to change, to resistance. Yet the freedom
this implies is at the same time more and less radical than Sartre’s.
It is more radical because for Foucault, subjectivity was not lim-
ited to the specific kind of consciousness that was delineated by
phenomenology. It was less radical because this subjectivity was
always a constellation of impersonal forces, the result of an ongo-
ing interaction with a physical and discursive environment that the
subject could neither escape nor control. For Foucault, the ethical
task of philosophy was to examine the interaction between power,
knowledge, and subjectivity, and also to look for new ‘zones of sub-
jectivity’ that allow us to explore what is beyond ‘normality’ and to
develop new ways of living (ibid.: 315ff.). Foucault influenced many
gender, queer, and postcolonial studies of interiors that focused on
the relationship between interiors and the implicit values it enforced
on its inhabitants, as well as on the forms of resistance that use
this very interiority to oppose and contest a dominant (Western,
masculine, heterosexual) view on the subject (see a.o. Silver 1996;
Rendell, Penner and Borden 2000; Heynen and Baydar (eds.) 2005;
Myzelev and Potvin (eds.) 2010…). But Foucault urges us to go a
step further and to include our own subjectivity as an integral part
of the scene we are examining: the camera has to zoom out from
62 Interiors
what we see through the keyhole to the hallway and include ourself
in the frame. We should take into account that despite the evolution
of the interior to an ‘un-private home’, there is still a private ‘interior’
left, both mentally and spatially. And it is worthwhile to explore the

‘zones of subjectivity’ that can be found in our intimate relationship
to domestic interior spaces. In his list of reasons a voyeur can have
for his indecent behavior, Sartre uses the word ‘intérêt’. The word is
correctly, but perhaps too unambiguously, translated as ‘curiosity’.
The word in French also denotes ‘concern’, ‘interest’: we gaze at
the interiors of other people, not only out of mere curiosity, but also
because they concern and interest us for what they have to say
about our own interior—in both senses of the word. Be they real or
imagined, historical or contemporary, interiors are the expression of
a ‘zone of subjectivity’ to which our own subjectivity responds. The
aim of such research is not only knowledge of the interior, but also a
care for this interiority. From this perspective, it can be argued that
interior studies as a discipline does not only belong to the domain of
cultural history, but also to the domain of anthropology, philosophy,
ethics: it can become a part of a present-day ‘care of the self’. The
work of anthropologist Tim Ingold provides us with some possible
outlines of such an ‘ethical’ approach to the interior. His work ena-
bles us to imagine an approach that includes the mental space of my
‘for-itself’ as a crucial element of the interiors we want to examine.
Armchair anthropology
One of the crucial aims of Tim Ingold’s recent work is to distinguish
anthropology, as a critical and philosophical endeavor, from eth-
nography as a social science. In Being Alive (2011), Ingold defines
anthropology as “a sustained and disciplined inquiry into the con-
ditions and potentials of human life” (Ingold 2011: 9). Human life is
not a ‘fixed’, biologically determined existence, but always the sin-
gular result of an interaction with a specific environment. As Ingold
argues in ‘Dreaming of dragons: on the imagination of real life’ (2013)
an anthropologist has to accept an “existential commitment to the
world in which we find ourselves” (Ingold 2013a: 746), and not only
try to collect raw ethnographic data that could be scientifically docu-
mented and analyzed in an endless flow of academic publications. For
Ingold, anthropology should not only be the exploration of the actual
conditions, but also of the possibilities of human life. Only such an
existential commitment makes it possible that one can actually learn
something from the environment, to ‘know from the inside’, as Ingold
calls it in the introduction of Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art
and Architecture (2013b). And why not cast the same anthropologi-
cal gaze on our own everyday interiors? At first sight, they are far less
spectacular and exotic than the wild landscapes of the Australian
outback or the circumpolar regions. But as Xavier de Maistre wittingly
63 Interiors
demonstrated in his description of a six-week travel in a small room,

Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794), even an everyday interior can
be a vast territory to explore, if we would only pay enough attention
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to it (de Maistre 2015). And indeed, Ingold’s motto for this kind of
anthropology—‘knowing from the inside’—seems particularly apt to
define an anthropological study of the interior. Following Ingold, such
studies should engage us in a form of learning that takes place in
the interior, taking our subjective involvement, our ‘existential com-
mitment’ as a starting point. The intention is not so much to collect
data about reality, but to look for ways in which this knowledge can
be used to transform us. Ingold is, of course, well aware that the kind
of knowledge that is produced by such an approach is very different

from what is considered as scientifically valid knowledge. To illustrate
the difference, Ingold gives the example of a fictive research topic: a
famous Russian cellist. A conventional ethnographic research would
focus on his place in a network of musicians, or in Russian culture in
general. Ingold asks the rhetorical question if it would not be more
interesting and relevant for the researcher to acknowledge his own
desire as an amateur cellist, and to use his stay with the Russian
master as an opportunity to become a better cello player, and to be
transformed by the experience:
I would return with a much enriched understanding of the pos-

sibilities and potentials of the instrument, of the depths and
subtleties of the music, and of myself as a person. This, in
turn, would open up paths of musical discovery that I could
continue to travel for years to come (Ingold 2013b: 3).
The example illustrates the epistemological difference Ingold sees

between learning about versus learning with. For Ingold, it is an
unfounded, but obstinate, bias that the first form of knowledge, the
objective collection and analysis of data in the fields of sociology,
history, or cultural studies is more valuable than the latter, the phil-
osophical exploration of the possibilities of human life. While Ingold
does not explicitly refer to Foucault’s work, the kind of anthropol-
ogy he proposes is very similar to Foucault’s view on philosophy as
an exploration of different possibilities of being. If modern ethnog-
raphy can be considered an heir to the human sciences Foucault
described in Les mots et les choses, Ingold’s anthropological project
can be seen as a variant of the classical care for the self, a research
that is not only looking for ‘qualitative data’, but for what Ingold calls
“lessons in life” (ibid.: 5).
For Ingold, the exchange of knowledge always concerns the
actual life in a specific environment. The knowledge that gradually
develops during such an exchange cannot be represented in a static
grid that provides a stable framework to categorize information.
Knowledge is not ‘stored’, but ‘storied’. Gaining knowledge thus
takes the form of listening to a story, in which we gradually learn to
64 Interiors
know different characters and plotlines, and in which different forms

of knowledge come together. That is why Ingold attributes such an
important role to stories in relation to an environment:
The process is rather like that of following trails through a land-

scape: each story will take you so far, until you come across
another that will take you further. This trail-following is what
I call wayfaring (…). And my thesis, in a nutshell, is that it is
through wayfaring, not transmission, that knowledge is carried
on (Ingold 2011: 162).
Ingold juxtaposes this kind of knowledge to our dominant herme-

neutic tradition, primarily focused on determining the meaning of a

text, to free it from interpretative distortions. The emphasis is always
on the original context, not the here-and-now of the listener or
reader. As Ingold states in Lines (2007), the kind of anthropological
‘reading’ he proposes, aligns itself more with the medieval way of
interpretation, where texts
provide the pathways along which the voices of the past could
be retrieved and brought back into the immediacy of present
experience, allowing readers to engage directly in dialogue
with them and to connect what they have to say to the cir-
cumstances of their own lives (Ingold 2007: 15).
The most important in interpreting these stories is not what they

intrinsically mean, but how they correspond with my own actual sit-
uation and how they could help me to face the challenges posed by
the environment in which I find myself. Ingold is inspired by the way
hunters travel through the landscape: on the move, they tell each
other stories of gods and ancestors, of other hunters, stories that
relate to specific events that have happened, or to the places they
encounter along their path.
In retrospect, I did something similar when I began this text with
Sartre’s ‘story’ of the voyeur. Rather than reading the passage in the
whole context of Sartre’s oeuvre, as a way to gain deeper under-
standing of French existentialism, the story helped me to grasp a
problem I was dealing with in my own actual environment (the not so
very dangerous ‘hunting grounds’ of cultural studies) and on my own
intellectual ‘path’ in that field.
The ‘learning’ that takes place in a specific environment involves
more than just cognitive processes. The environment is, to use
Ingold’s phrase, not only a “storied world” (Ingold 2011: 141), but
is also an ‘experienced’ world. Our experience of the environment
is a result of the interlacing of perceptions, movements, thoughts,
affects, and sensations, and all of these aspects should be taken
into account. The scientific ideal that strives for an objective ren-
dering of data, free from any subjective deformation, is in this case
an epistemological fallacy. Not only because it is a form of Sartrean
65 Interiors
mauvaise foi—as if it were possible not to be engaged by my very

presence, my voyeuristic gaze that frames my research—but also
because without this subjective, embodied dimension, an essential
K. Pint
part of the knowledge an environment has to offer would simply

be left unexplored. The rejection of such a subjective, embodied
approach in the humanities still presupposes an implicit belief in a
Cartesian opposition between mind and body, an opposition that
has been made obsolete by recent developments in neuroscience.
Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human
Understanding (2007) uses modern neuroscience to propose a new
project for philosophy and aesthetics that allows us to overcome
Descartes’ influential dichotomy: “Reason is an embodied process.

Our ‘body’ and ‘mind’ are dimensions of the primordial, ongoing
organism-environment transactions that are the locus of who and
what we are” (Johnson 2007: 13). An objectified registration and
analysis of our environment neglects the sensations, embodied
affects and perceived qualities that also create meaning and help to
make sense of a specific environment: “meaning is not just a mat-
ter of concepts and propositions, but also reaches down into the
images, sensorimotor schemas, feelings, qualities, and emotions
that constitute our meaningful encounter with our world” (ibid.: xi).
Sartre’s example of the voyeur is a good illustration: to fully under-
stand the experience described in this scene, a purely philosophical
or psychoanalytical conceptual framework does not suffice. There
are also the strong emotions of desire, fear, shame, and a myriad
of perceptions, from the way light falls on a skin, the scent of the
wooden door, the sound of a heartbeat, the creaking of the floor
caused by unexpected footsteps…
However, it is one thing to take these forms of meaning into
account, it is quite another to express them in a relevant intersubjec-
tive communication. Concepts and propositions are far more easy
to convey: I can say of an interior that it was designed in that period,
discuss the social and cultural context, using objective parame-
ters to compare it with other interiors. One could clearly agree or
disagree with the used definitions, the theoretical framework. The
affective, perceptive aspects of the ‘interior experience’ are far more
difficult to express, especially when it comes to historical or fictional
interiors: here we have only minimal sensitive information: a drawing,
a photograph and if we are lucky, a personal, detailed description
of how it was to live at that place. But even this description would
always be a second-hand experience, based on the affections and
perceptions of another body. How to talk about interiors we cannot
actually visit? Here we cannot but use our imagination. Imagination
has the advantage that is already an elaboration, an intensification of
an experience—especially in that particular expression of the imag-
ination we call a ‘work of art’. In their Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?
(1991) Deleuze and Guattari argue that art is the creation of ‘affects’
and ‘percepts’ which become independent from the subjective
66 Interiors
affections and perceptions of the artist who experienced them (see

Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 163ff.). Not confined to one singular
individual, they become impersonal sensations that can travel from
one subject to another. Cézanne’s paintings of the Mont Saint-

Victoire are blocks of sensations that can also affect a body that has
never seen the actual mountain. Cézanne’s personal experience of
the landscape was translated into his work, and by this translation,
became impersonal, able to affect other bodies. Precisely because
of its ability to transmit meanings that go beyond concepts or prop-
ositions, both Ingold and Johnson regard art as an important ally for
research. Following Dewey, Johnson defines the arts as “a primary
means by which we grasp, criticize, and transform meanings”, as a

form of “worldmaking” (Johnson 2007: 210). Ingold takes a similar
stand:
Could certain practices of art, for example, suggest new ways

of doing anthropology? If there are similarities between the
ways in which artists and anthropologists study with the world,
then could we not regard the artwork as a result of something
like an anthropological study, rather than as an object of such
study? (Ingold 2013b: 8)
Precisely because the word ‘interior’ not only refers to a mental

state, but also to dwelling spaces and their representation in painting
and stories, we could argue that the artistic presentation of an inte-
rior is at the same time also a presentation of a specific subjective
interior experience. The careful study of representations of interiors
is thus a way to explore the different meanings of such an inte-
rior experience. Works of art can become thinking-tools, thinking-
environments, offering insights that are not only conceptual, but also
perceptual, emotional, and affective. The exploration of such works
of art is always an experiment in which my own subjectivity must be
engaged as an agent. Not as a stable, clearly identified ‘I’, but as a
‘subjective zone’ that emerges at the crossroads of different cultural
intertexts, stories, as well as bodily affects and percepts. In the final
part of this paper, we will assume the role of Sartre’s voyeur, go
down on our knees and look through the keyhole. We will explore
the intimacy of one of the most private interior spaces, by contem-
plating a painting about a bathroom.
Imaginary immersion
La Baignoire was painted in 1925 by Pierre Bonnard, and depicts
Marthe, his model, his lover, and finally his wife. Because of Marthe’s
weak physical and psychological health, the couple led a secluded,
quiet, and uneventful life, moving in 1925 from Paris to Cannet,
near Cannes. For Marthe, a bath was “the sole luxury she desired”
67 Interiors
(Natanson, quoted in Bocquillon 2012: 116). Obviously, Bonnard’s

painting contains a lot of useful historical information. Marthe’s bath
can, for example, become a case study to illustrate how an erotic,
K. Pint
hygienic, and medical outlook on the body correlated with the grow-
ing importance of the bathroom in twentieth-century interiors. From
the perspective of art history, the painting is an interesting combina-
tion of two established genres, the nude and the interior. The paint-
ing can also be examined in relation to other works by Bonnard or
his contemporaries. Such an (art) historical analysis would no doubt
generate valuable insights, but if we want to ‘know from the inside’,
we should go one step further. More specifically, we should try to
learn with this painting how a body relates to the interior space (both
‘storied’ and ‘experienced’) in which it is immersed. On a purely
visual level, the first thing that strikes me is the way the body and the
room bathe in the light. The strokes of the brush allow the depicted
body to be literally touched by the brightness of the light; a sensa-
tion of touch that is also evoked by the water caressing the skin,
the chin touching the chest, the hand stroking the thigh. Another
remarkable feature is the horizontality of the work. There are dif-
ferent horizons, created by the contours of the body, the edges of
the water, the rims of the bathtub. If I ‘zoom in’, I suddenly get the
sensation of ‘zooming out’: I see a seascape, with the contours of
the body as coastline, the water as the sea and the white porcelain
of the bath as a white, cloudy sky. And behind that sky, there is
another sky, a sunset, evoked by the warm colors of the tiles. This
gives a sense of vastness to the scene that is contradicted by the
contours of the bath, which does not allow the body to fully stretch
itself. This narrowness is accentuated by the frame of the painting,
which cuts off the feet and the top of the head. Suddenly, the body
seems to be bigger than the space. A visual paradox that activates
conflicting ‘sensorimotor schemas’: a sensation of actively wander-
ing, walking on the beach, blissfully floating away and at the same
time the opposite sensation of being constricted, even trapped. This
paradox has also an emotional impact: I feel both relaxed, at ease,
my thoughts floating peacefully, but at the edges of my conscious-
ness, I become aware of a sense of sadness, melancholy. I begin
to experience the profound ambiguity of the work. At first, it just
seems to express marital intimacy. The body stretched out under
the water, the neck bended ungainly forward against the rim of the
bath: an unadorned, realistic domestic scene. But the woman in the
bath seems totally unaware and even uninterested in the person
who is looking at her (the painter, the viewer), as if she belonged to a
different realm of existence. It is not that she seems lost in her own
thoughts; the experience is more unsettling than that: she seems to
get lost in my thoughts as a viewer. Another paradox appears, typ-
ically for Bonnard and aptly described by Evelyn Benesch, defining
his work as “at once intimate and distanced” (Benesch 2012: 15).
Suddenly, a very personal, daily scene loses its intimacy: the body
68 Interiors
becomes impersonal, its individuality dissolves in a vast field of cul-

tural images: the woman becomes an incarnation of the Sleeping
Beauty, a floating Ophelia, the goddess Diana taking a bath… The
intimate domestic ‘horizon’ that frames this painting changes in the

distant, unreachable ‘horizon’ of a mythical, sacred, and undefined
space: the ‘here and now’ becomes the ‘once upon a time’ of fairy
tales. The figure seems forever out of focus and out of reach, and
perhaps this too explains my unexpected feeling of melancholia,
as if at this very core of intimacy reveals the unbridgeable distance
between bodies, between subjects.
Obviously, I can only actualize a few of the stories and sensations
that present themselves to me in this unique and brief constellation

of percepts (colors, lines…), affects (relaxed, melancholic …) and
concepts (the intimate, the sacred…). But even such a short con-
templation requires the same sense of privacy that Emily Dickinson
needed to write her poems, the same mental solitude as the woman
in the bath. A cough by another visitor in the museum, or some-
one entering my room when I look at the reproduction, is enough to
throw me out of the imaginary interior space in which my subjectivity
became immersed. The impact of such an interruption makes clear
how crucial this subjective immersion is in relation to the ‘knowl-
edge’ the painting has to offer. In this environment of light and water,
colors and contours, affects and emotions, skin and stories, an
embodied thinking takes place that differs from a detached analysis
of the painting. This engagement allows us to slowly and carefully
explore the ‘meaning’ of this scene, understanding it as a ‘lesson in
life’, more specifically an existential lesson in the all but trivial action
of taking a bath.
Conclusion
When asked about how his views on a contemporary care of the self
differed from Sartre’s existentialism, Foucault answered:
I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what

Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice
of creativity – and not of authenticity. From the idea that the
self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical
consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
(Foucault 1983: 237)
By replacing the problematical notion of ‘authenticity’ with the

notion of ‘creativity’, it becomes possible to combine an existen-
tialist approach to anthropology with the view on the ‘self’ as a
contingent construction, inseparably interconnected with the larger
ideological and material network out of which it emerged at a spe-
cific time and place. And there is no reason why such a subjec-
69 Interiors
tive, phenomenological perspective cannot be combined with other,

more recent theoretical frames to analyze interiors (for an example of
such a multi-angled approach, see Pombo et al. 2011). The kind of
K. Pint
anthropology advocated by Foucault and Ingold does not presup-

pose an authentic, clearly demarcated ‘self’, a more authentic form
of dwelling that could be discovered by careful analysis. Studying
interiors from a subjective perspective means examining different
creative approaches of the ‘self’ to the environment that created it.
Works of art offer us not only conceptual, but also perceptual, sen-
somotorical, and affective frameworks to reflect upon interiors from
such a perspective. They can become thinking-environments, con-
fronting us with different modes of dwelling, and helping us to take

into account our bodily and existential engagement with the interiors
in which we live. Paintings like Bonnard’s La Baignoire reveal the eth-
ical dimension of research in interior design. As Foucault remarked:
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become
something which is related only to objects and not to individ-
uals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or
which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t every-
one’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the
house be an art object, but not our life? (Foucault 1983: 236)
This remark is, of course, important for a discipline that takes the
study of lamps and houses very seriously. It is an invitation to link
the design of interior spaces with the ‘life’ of those who inhabit it, as
well as of those who gaze at it through the keyhole of critical schol-
arship. Following Foucault and Ingold, we should thus not be afraid
to approach our research as lessons in life, explorations in the vital
art of dwelling.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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Looking through the keyhole

mined by the situation, that one just does what is expected—just

own freedom as a subject and to fully coincide with his profession

The interior and the modern subject

The dynamic, inextricable link between subjectivity and the interior

de l’espace (1957), Bachelard summarizes this principle as follows:

authentic vibration” (Praz 1982: 24).

But while Praz and Bachelard defended this bourgeois domestic-

To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence.

In the modernist and communist utopia of Benjamin, Sartre’s voyeur-

As an example of this new condition of dwelling, Benjamin

Le Corbusier, the house was an agreeable and hygienic, but only

architecture: the Farnsworth House, a weekend retreat, designed by

society’, as the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls it in his

Interiors and the care of the self

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if

It is no coincidence that this modern subject appeared at the same

fact, the word ‘representation’ is too passive here, as the bourgeois

everyday domestic life” (ibid.: 86). However radical Loos’ architec-

relationship one could have with oneself, a kind of interiority that

on an individual, including the ones that the subject exerted upon

based on scientific knowledge. Here, the focus was not so much

The word Foucault uses here—‘task’—has definitely a Sartrean ring

left, both mentally and spatially. And it is worthwhile to explore the

demonstrated in his description of a six-week travel in a small room,

of knowledge that is produced by such an approach is very different

I would return with a much enriched understanding of the pos-

The example illustrates the epistemological difference Ingold sees

know different characters and plotlines, and in which different forms

The process is rather like that of following trails through a land-

Ingold juxtaposes this kind of knowledge to our dominant herme-

neutic tradition, primarily focused on determining the meaning of a

The most important in interpreting these stories is not what they

mauvaise foi—as if it were possible not to be engaged by my very

part of the knowledge an environment has to offer would simply

Descartes’ influential dichotomy: “Reason is an embodied process.

affections and perceptions of the artist who experienced them (see

one subject to another. Cézanne’s paintings of the Mont Saint-

means by which we grasp, criticize, and transform meanings”, as a

Could certain practices of art, for example, suggest new ways

Precisely because the word ‘interior’ not only refers to a mental

(Natanson, quoted in Bocquillon 2012: 116). Obviously, Bonnard’s

becomes impersonal, its individuality dissolves in a vast field of cul-

intimate domestic ‘horizon’ that frames this painting changes in the

that present themselves to me in this unique and brief constellation

I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what

By replacing the problematical notion of ‘authenticity’ with the

tive, phenomenological perspective cannot be combined with other,

anthropology advocated by Foucault and Ingold does not presup-

fronting us with different modes of dwelling, and helping us to take

221. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

Bocquillon, Marina Ferretti. 2012. “Bathrooms: from shallow tub to

Corbusier, Le. 2007. Toward an Architecture. Translated by