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The vulvic spaces of privacy: Reflections of a privacy scholar upon visiting the exhibition L’intime de la chambre aux réseaux sociaux, currently at the Musée des arts décoratifs

[Content warning: This blogpost includes images of a sexual nature.]

 

A grand exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris tells the history of intimacy through art and every-day objects. Offering contemporary as well as historic perspectives on privacy, this rich exhibition provides much food for thought. Unfortunately, however, an overly narrow focus on sexuality leads to the false understanding that intimacy and privacy are inventions of modernity.

As I approach the exhibition L’intime de la chambre aux réseaux sociaux, currently open at the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris, I am reminded of the words of the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991). He wrote that “verticality and great height have ever been the spatial expression of potentially violent power” (1991 [1972], p. 98). At the top of an impressive set of stairs leading into the galleries of the Marson Pavillon of the Louvre, I am met by a gigantic red keyhole carved out in a massive white wall of a triangular shape. Although already four or five meters tall, the red keyhole is visually prolonged by the triangular shape of the wall, which draws the eye upwards to the circular balustraded balconies that perforate the vaulted ceiling. The object reinforces the Louvre’s projection of phallocratic power. But the red keyhole also produces a strikingly different impression of authority. One that is distinctly vulvic.

The vulvic-cum-phallic keyhole wall embodies a two-fold spatialization which frames the entire exposition in a tension between vulnerability and domination. This is, to my mind, its indubitable strength. On the one hand, the form of the object (keyhole) straightforwardly implies that intimacy is found in closed-of private spaces which require either permission or violence to access. Simultaneously, however, the hollow space inside the keyhole suggests transparency and openness, thereby inviting us to peek through the façade and look at what lies hidden beyond. In other words, the keyhole-form imposes a spatial logic telling us that intimacy occurs when we draw boundaries of privacy and invite other to share them. The keyhole becomes analogous of intimacy as an intersubjective play with boundaries. On the other hand, the form of the object (vulvic-cum-phallic) introduces the reproductive organs as a key factor of this play on boundaries and, thereby, unleashes sexual desire. Insisting on the right of the individual to dictate and define these boundaries, the vulvic-cum-phallic keyhole also implies the (feministic) right to frustrate sexual desire (see Laneyrie-Dagen and Vigarello 2015, p. 200). Thereby, power and gender-dynamics are introduced into the space of intimacy.

The (vulvic) keyhole in the (phallic) wall is a strong symbol because it shows the complexity of intimacy as something that occurs through an ambiguous play between the private and the public. Unfortunately, however, the strong focus on the sexuality also produces a linear understanding of the history of intimacy. As the contribution of museum director Christine Marcel to the catalogue reveals, the fluidity between private and public is taken to be a post-modern phenomenon (Macel 2024, p. 12). Co-curator Fulvio Irace sees a “change in sensibility” in 20th-century paintings of René Magritte and Paul Delvaux, which construct the domestic as “a space of transition” (2024, p. 23 and 27). Thus, private space is taken to be an invention of the bourgeoisie in the 18th and 19th centuries and its dissolution as a late-modern or post-modern moment. Although a footnote in Macel’s text brings attention to the 4th century church father Augustine of Hippo as he who “inaugurated the notion of intimacy” and the 16th century French author Montaigne as he who “humanized it”, one gets the impression that private spaces did not exist before the 18th century. Indeed, the poster accompanying the vulvic-cum-phallic keyhole goes so far as to state that “it was during the eighteenth century that the word intime first appeared in France”. This statement is unfortunately as false as the perception that private spaces did not exist in the early modern period – Montaigne himself, for instance, uses “intime” to describe friendship and “privé” to describe the sexual relations between husband and wife (Montaigne 1595, 434 and 49), and it dampens my initial excitement. Nonetheless, the exhibition is rich and provides ample food for thought.

A vulcic-cum-phallic object greets me at the entrance to the exhibition in the Marson Pavillon of the Louvre.

Whether mesmerized, perplexed, or simply impressed by the vulvic-cum-phallic object greeting me, I for some reason enter the exhibition through the exit and therefore move through the rooms in the wrong direction. This reversed itinerary only accentuates the linear understanding that intimacy and privacy are inventions of modernity.

The first/last room I enter displays some adolescent diaries dating from the 19th to the 21st centuries. They show that images and colours take primacy as we move up through 20th and 21st centuries. Intimacy is apparently invaded by the culture of visualization promoted by TV and post-war popular culture. In this room, I am most interested by the main poster. The curators seem to address the question I voiced above about the ability of intimacy to produce alternative social spaces. They do so through a distinction between “intimacy” (l’intime) and “the intimate” (l’intimité). If intimacy is that which occurs in private space, theintimate, they suggest, is that which “lies beyond intimacy” and consists of “the imaginations that inhabit us, buried deep within, impossible to take away”, “allow(ing) us to develop relationships with others”. Such an understanding of the intimate suggests that affective relationships of intimacy are nourished when we share with others that which is hidden within us.

The question of vulnerability is taken up again in the section devoted to present-day social media. I am struck by the reflections of the French influencer and entrepreneur Camille Aumont Carnel (born 1996), founder of the movement @jemenbatsleclito, devoted to speaking about sex without taboo. She gives voice to my intuition about intimacy as a space liberated from the power relations of the social sphere by defining the intimate in opposition to privacy: “What is privacy”, she asks, “when what happens there concerns us all? The intimate is more a place of silence than a place of secrecy”. To my mind, these words express a deep wish to carve out a social space liberated from the totalizing logic of the keyhole and its concomitant play of power on the ambiguity between visible/invisible, hidden/revealed, protected/transgressed. I associate Carnel’s distinction between the public nature of privacy and the silence of the intimate with the “tyranny of the sign”, which is to say the incessant effect of language to ascribe symbolic meaning to objects and actions. She expresses a desire to liberate the intimate from the totalizing space of the symbol. In doing so, she challenges the logic of the vulvic-cum-phallic keyhole, which imposes on intimacy a predefined (sexual) power dynamic of privacy.

@camilleaumontcarnel; @jemenbatsleclitot.

But as I move further through the exhibition and backwards in time, I begin to understand that Carnel’s voicing of the intimate as a longing to break free of the tyranny of the sign is an isolated instance. The logic of the keyhole dominates throughout: Privacy is spatialized in vulvic-cum-phallic form in so far as it is a space where social power dynamics reign queen. We are presented with different historical moments in which private spaces are constructed to protect intimacy. For instance, privacy as viewed through surveillance technology, situations of precarity such as homelessness and migration, or working from home. These sections all offer food for thought as to the permeability of the boundaries separating private and public in the 20th and 21st centuries. The question of how technology impacts on fluid delineations, and the kinds of intimacies they produce, is key.

Yet, as the keyhole at the entrance suggests, the body is central to the understanding of intimacy projected in this exhibition. This rules out the presence of private spaces before the 18th century. Turning a corner, I suddenly stand before a display of myriad sex-toys from the late 20th and 21st centuries. On the wall facing them are illustrated erotic novels written by libertins of the 18th century. Demonstrating how the space of bodily intimacy has been shaped by the feminist and queer movements, these objects are part of a larger ambition of the curators to show the diversification in the representation of sexuality in the post-modern age. This ambition persists in the following room showing that the visual arts have, especially through photography, ennobled homosexual intimacy and contested the “male gaze” through a reappropriation of sexuality. In the main gallery of the Marson Pavillon – which is the imposing hall hidden behind the white triangular wall with the gigantic keyhole described above – design icons from the 1950s onwards demonstrate the explosion of the nuclear family and the invention of new types of intimacy. Beds, sofas, and chairs display that the sexual revolution consists of a “transition to post-modernity” when “boundaries between public and private (…) begin to blur”.

A display of sex toys at the Musée des arts décoratifs.

The last exhibition rooms I enter, emphasize this historiographical narrative by taking us into the bedrooms and restrooms of bourgeois women. These are presented as intimate spaces of transition were women prepared to move from the private to the public sphere. 19th century visual representations of the domestic sphere such as Édouard Vuillard’s Personnages dans un intérieur. L’intimité (1896) and articles used in the cabinet de toilette, exemplify how the 19th century was a “golden age of privacy” when the “boundaries between professional activity and family life are consolidated” (Macel 2024, 13).

These objects are exceedingly interesting in themselves, but it annoys me how neatly they are made to fit into the historiography of the “invention of privacy” in the 18th and 19th centuries. How solid were the boundaries between the domestic and the professional in the every-day life of 19th century? Did porous boundaries of privacy not exist prior to the post-modern era? Was there really not “a trace of privacy as we think of it now” before the 18th century (Laneyrie-Dagen and Vigarello 2015, p. 19)? Macel does mention “intimacy of the 16th and 17th centuries” but, again, only to affirm Norbert Elias’ hypothesis that old regime social space dissolved the separation between private and public (Macel 2024, p. 14). From the point of view of historical privacy studies, a collection of intimate objects as rich as that of the Musée des arts décoratifs could have contributed more to nuancing the history of intimacy and private space.

Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940). “Personnages dans un intérieur : l’intimité”, décor de la bibliothèque du Docteur Vaquez. Peinture à la colle sur toile, 1896. Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais.

As I stated above, I find the vulvic-cum-phallic keyhole wall to be a powerful and well-chosen symbol for this exhibition because it accentuates the ambiguity of intimacy as a play of showing and hiding, establishing boundaries and allowing access. But it also awakens a resistance in me. The focus on the (sexual) body and privacy as an architectural space narrows the historical perspective on intimacy. Inspired by Carnel’s distinction between privacy as a space of secrecy and the intimate as a place of silence, this exhibition – rich and thought-provoking as it is – has made me wonder if the intimate is not a universal feature of all and any society. In this light, the intimate would be the will and desire to produce alternative social spaces that are liberated from the dominating ideologies or value systems. Or is it so that our most affective relationships will forever be subsumed under the totalizing logic of the vulvic-cum-phallic symbol and the social space it produces? According to this exhibition, it seems, it would be the latter.

Some strands of psychoanalysis might explain the longing for the silence of the intimate space as a case of infantile narcissism linked to a desire to regain the pre-linguistic state of the Real (Kristeva 1983, p. 282-283; Lacan 2005 [1966], p. 324). I, for my part, find it essential to identifying historical occurrences of intimacy and private spaces. As Lefebvre repeatedly pointed out in his criticism of structuralist semiotics, abstract systems tend to subsume everything under their own abstract logic. Psychoanalysis, for instance, appropriates the space of the intimate by supposing a “hidden” meaning and immediately proposes its own logic to bring it to light. Although the Real remains “impossible” it is also ever-present (Lacan 2005 [1966], p. 17). This is a power move with a tendency towards totalization. Why? Because it subsumes every aspect of physical space (even the most interior parts of our embodied selves) to a symbol that must be deciphered (although it escapes language) through the abstraction of the theory. In other words, structuralist semiotics risk stifling the liberating potential of “the intimate” to a physical space of privacy, making this space a slave of its own symbolic order and claiming the paradoxical right of definition over it.

Perhaps this exhibition does something similar. Fulvio Irace, for example, sites Sigmund Freud’s use of architectural metaphors to speak about “the unconscious” (2024, p. 22). By focusing so strongly on privacy as the right to define boundaries of intimacy, the liberating potential of the intimate is engulfed by the violent power embodied in phallocratic spaces. Reinventing phallic forms of domination in a vulvic form is not so much a critique of phallocratic social space as it is a reproduction of its will to power and domination. Perhaps the silent space of the intimate is a utopia. Regardless of how one answers this question, I believe the symbolic liberation of the intimate must be preserved, protected, and projected unto the public sphere not as an abstract theory but as an openness towards alternative social spaces. Historical privacy studies of the early modern period hold the potential to project such alternative spaces unto our present times by identifying how the intimate has particularized itself in specific contexts. The rich collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs are likely a treasure trove of objects that could shed light on the early modern history of privacy and intimacy.

A selfie of the author.

 

Bibliography

Christine Macel, “Les Objects de l’Intime”, in L’Intime de la Chambre aux Réseaux Sociaux, (ed. Christine Macel), Gallimard, Paris, 2024.

Christine Macel, Private Lives from the Bedroom to Social Media, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 2024.

Édouard Vuillard, Personnages dans un Intérieur. L’intimité, 1896, Paris, Petit Palais.

Fulvio Irace, Public et Privé: une Question de Modernité?, in L’Intime de la Chambre aux Réseaux Sociaux, (ed. Christine Macel), Gallimard, Paris, 2024.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA, 1991 [1972].

Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, W. W. Norton & Co., New York and London, 2005 [1966                               ].

Julia Kristeva, Histoires d’amour, Éditions Denoël, 1983.

Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen & Georges Vigarello, La Toilette. Naissance de l’Intime/The Invention of Privacy, Éditions Hazan, Paris, 2015.

Michel Seigneur de Montaigne, Les Essais. EDITION NOUVELLE TROVVEE APRES le deceds de l’Autheur, reveuë & augmentee par luy d’un siers plus qu’aux precedents Impression, Abel l’Angelier, Paris, 1595.