Kris Pint

The experience of the interior: outlines of an alternative anthropology

Abstract Cultural artifacts only acquire meaning in a subjective context. This is particularly the case for the domestic interior, which since modernity has a strong link with the subjects inhabiting them. Inspired by the later work of Michel Foucault, we want to present an approach to interiors that takes into account this subjectivity, not only of the inhabitant, but also of the researcher. Using the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold, we will argue that our bodily and existential engagement with an interior environment can be considered as a valid form of scholarship. Finally, we will apply this alternative anthropology in a short analysis of a painting by Pierre Bonnard.

Interiors and their temporalities: Etching time into Modernist Materiality

“Since the classical period,” Marvin Trachtenberg claims in his thought-provoking 2010 book Building-in-Time, “architecture has always been known as the victim of time – of the entropic agency of time’s arrow” (Trachtenberg 2010: 1). As a consequence, architecture has often been conceived of in terms of space rather than time. Within this dominant paradigm even so-called historicist phenomena such as the imitation of classical building principles in the 18th century or the vogue of neo-movements in the 19th century can be interpreted as attempts to arrest the passing of time in favor of “timeless,” transhistorical spatial structures. This evacuation of time from architecture, it is argued by Trachtenberg, reaches its climax in the “chronophobic” and even “chronicidal” nature of High Modernist architecture (Trachtenberg 2010: xxii). In contrast to the premodern way of building, he argues, modernist architecture lives “in its own timeless-time bubble”

An Unexpected Return: Barthes's Lectures at the Collège de France

‘I undertake therefore to let myself be borne on by the force of any living life, forgetfulness. (. . .) Now comes perhaps the age of another experience: that of unlearning, of yielding to the unforeseeable change which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of the knowledges, cultures, and beliefs we have traversed.’ (IL, 478)1 With this promise to deliver himself to the forces of forgetfulness, Roland Barthes concluded his inaugural lecture on 7 January 1977, when he joined the College de France as professor of literary semiology. He would teach there for three years, until he was hit by a laundry van while crossing the street— a traffic accident that would lead to his death a month later, on 26 March 1980. It is rather ironic that while Barthes’s writings continue to be read and taught as the work of one of the pioneers of more than one critical school in modern literary theory, this teaching of ‘unlearning’, this exploration of the forces of amnesia in his lecture courses at the College de France, was almost forgotten for more than two decades. Although his inaugural lecture was already published in 1978, it was not until 2002 that Barthes’s notes of the first two Cours appeared, entitled Comment vivre ensemble (1976–1977) (how to live together) and Le Neutre (1977–1978) (the neutral). The series was completed with the publication in 2003 of La Preparation du roman (1978–1980) (the preparation of the novel), consisting of the notes of the last years Barthes lectured at the College.2 In 2005 the first English translation of the courses appeared: The Neutral, translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier; translations of the other two lecture courses, by Richard Howard, are on their way. For Barthes-aficionados, these lecture courses may be somewhat disappointing, at least at a first reading. In terms of content, the notes are surely not the most exciting part of Barthes’s work. They were never intended to be published, and therefore they often lack the intensity of books like S/Z and A Lover’s Discourse, two books that were based on lecture notes Barthes rewrote before publication.