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Kate Morris

Figuring Permanence and the

Ephemeral in Lieux

PERECS ALTERNATIVE

TOPOGRAPHY

Introduction: All that is Solid Melts into Air

Sometime in 1907, Eugne Atget took a photograph of the corner of

rue Alexandre in the second arrondissementof Paris. After the print was

developed, he inscribed on the back va disparatre pour le prolonge-

ment de la rue Dussoubs.2 Atgets photographic career was generally

comprised of the production of documents for artists, architects,

31

Eugne Atget, Coin de la rue dAlexandre va dispartre pour leprolongement de la rue Dussoubs (2e), 1907. Albumen print,

21.6x17.7 cm (trimmed). Museum Purchase, ex-collection Mme.Louette via Kodak-Pathe, 78:1628:0004. George Eastman House

International Museum of Photography and Film.

3...And with these the sense of the worlds concreteness, irreducible,

immediate, tangible, of something clear and closer to us: of theworld, no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade, not as

a race without end, a challenge having constantly to be met, not as

the one pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the illusion of

a conquest, but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that

the earth is a form of writing, a geography, of which we had

forgotten that we ourselves are the authors.

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces1

edited by Eva J. Friedberg

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archives and the national libraries, although his subjects were

not always in the process of disappearing. The aesthetic value

of his photographs was inessential when compared to their

value as impersonal, expository documents used as references

in both the arts and sciences. Looking at this image now, in thetwenty-first centurypresumably after the elongation of rue

Dussoubs and the disappearance of the corner of rue

Alexandreit also presents the paradoxical possibility of

permanently seeing something disappear. The use of the near

future tense (ie., future proche, va disparatre) emphasizes the

liminality of the subject as it is captured just before its

disappearance and further situates the image as an attempt to

document things which would be obliterated by renovation

works.

3

I propose this photograph as a frame for my discussion of

Georges PerecsLieux (Places) project, because it is emblematic

of the tension between permanence and the ephemeral that

consistently emerges in his treatment of urban geography. To

this end, what the photograph distills on the one side (verso) is

space as a narrative of aging, transformation and, finally,

disappearance. Here, even a structure as supposedly solid as a

building, and as topographically significant as a street corner,

becomes ephemeral. While on the other side (recto), the image

itself works against these tendencies by fixing and preserving

the photographic subject eternally and in advance of its

imminent destruction. Both sides taken in turns, like the

monotonous flow of an hourglass that eternally empties and

turns itself over, construct a salient visual representation of the

perpetual preservation and obliteration of urban space.4 The

image further relates these tendencies to more general concerns

of twentieth-century modern French culture as articulated

specifically by Paul Virilio, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre

and Michel de Certeau, which will be expanded on in the body

of this paper. It also situates and structures these concerns in

the spatial geography of the city and more specifically the

neighbourhood, the street, and its buildings.

Preservation and obliteration, as spatial and temporal

experiences, consistently emerge in Perecs works, even if they

play a minor role when compared to the OuLiPian structure of

narrative texts and autobiographical issues attendant to Perecs

Jewish identity. Perecs most explicit articulation of this tension

is found, not surprisingly, in the closing pages of his 1974 workEspces despaces (Species of Spaces): I would like there to exist

places that are stable, unmoving, [...] unchanging, deep-rooted;

places that might be points of reference, of departure, of

| volume 4 surface fall 2008

321 Georges Perec,Species of Spaces, inSpecies of Spaces and

Other Pieces, ed. andtrans. John Sturrock

(London: PenguinBooks, 1997), 79.

2 George EastmanHouse InternationalMuseum ofPhotography and FilmOnline Catalogue,http://www.eastman.org

/fm/atget/htmlsrc/atget_sumooo4.html#78:162

8:0004 (accessedDecember 10, 2007).Wherever possible Ihave tried to usesources alreadytranslated into English.Where this has notbeen possible I providetranslations in thenotes, following thesource citation theseare indicated by Trans.followed by mytranslation of the cita-tion. Trans. will disap-pear for the elongationof Dussoubs street.

3 Molly Nesbitt,Photography andHistory: Eugne Atget,inA New History of

Photography, ed.Michel Frizot (Kln:Knemann, 1998), 402.

4 Auguste BlanquisLternit par les astres,

cited in WalterBenjamin, D[Boredom, EternalReturn], in TheArcades Project, ed.

Rolf Tiedeman, trans.Howard Eiland andKevin McLaughlin(Cambridge, MA: TheBelknap Press of

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33

morris perecs alternative topography octopus |

origin.5 But at the same time, he continues: My spaces are

fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them.

Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will

betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory.6 In this

representation it is clear that memory is embedded in a spacethat is perpetually devolving, and some critics have suggested

that space therefore becomes a projected metonymy of Perecs

memory itself.7 Indeed, this has been elaborated by many

critics that take stock of space in Perecs work through accounts

of his Jewish identity and the impact of WWII and the

Holocaust, which took his father and mother respectively.8 But

such scholarship may too readily subject Perecs preoccupation

with space to the imperatives of autobiography and personal

memory, while it also misses the opportunity to read criticallinguistic distinctions between place and space in Perecs work,

entirely eliding consideration of the stated sociological aspect of

his projects. One could easily cite Michel de Certeau in order

to nuance the reading of the above citation, for example, in

which place is represented as an indication of stability while

space has none of the univocity or stability of place.9

What is striking is the extent to which space and urban

geography are taken as givens in literary studies of Perecs

work, particularly considering the profound sensitivity with

which he describes the heterogeneous, collective spaces and

objects of the everyday, interrogating these through his

discourse of the infra-ordinary. For Perec, stable places dont

exist, and its because they dont exist that space becomes a

question, ceases to be self-evident.10 Furthermore, it is

because of this unreliability that Perec believes he must mark

space and designate it.11 He goes on to define writing as an

attempt to try meticulously to retain something, to cause

something to survive, to wrest a few scraps from the void as it

grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few

signs.12 The explicit connection made here between space,

memory and writing also conveys the idea that space, place and

urban geography are discursive. It is undoubtedly significant

that these closing remarks about the imbrications of space and

writing come from a text whose first species of space is The

Page. By extension, Perecs writing, particularly the under-

theorized Lieux texts, can be seen to enact space as a textual

construct, productive of places rather than merely reproductive

of the everyday spaces that he writes about.The central dichotomy and tension that this research investi-

gates has already been variously described as permanence and

the ephemeral and preservation and obliteration. Though in

Harvard University,2002), 114. Benjamincites Blanqui as aprecursor toNietzsches idea ofeternal return. The fullcitation reads asfollows: All worldsare engulfed, one afteranother, in therevivifying flames, tobe reborn from themand consumed by themonce moremonoto-nous flow of an hour-glass that eternallyempties and turns itself

over. The new is alwaysold, and the old alwaysnew. ... Here,nonetheless, lies agreat drawback: thereis no progress, alas, butmerely vulgar revisionsand reprints.

5 Perec, Species ofSpaces, 90.

6 Ibid., 91.

7 On this see Jean-Jacques Poucel, TheArc of Reading inGeorges Perecs LaClture, Yale FrenchStudies 105 (2004):

133: writing is cast asa means of shoring upspace; Jacques-DenisBertharion, Lieux, oula mmoire fragile, inPotique de Georges

Perec: !une trace, unemarque ou quelques

signes.! (Paris: LibrarieA.G.Nizet, 1998), 233:les lieux deviennentainsi les centres

organisateurs (les noy-aux) de la mmoire: ilssont les grands tmoinsdune histoirepersonelle, dont la

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34the Lieux texts the idea is clearly related to anxieties about

gentrification, putting too much emphasis on gentrification

may inadvertently misrepresent Perecs spatial writing (Lieux,

Species of Spaces, Attempt at Exhausting a Parisian Location) as

overtly political when in fact one of their more subversivequalities is their apparent neutrality. The difficulty in defining

these terms relates more to a general suspicion about the idea

of the coherent city and its linear narrative of progress, in

contrast to the heterogeneous specificity of the neighbourhoods

described. The tacit implication being that something

intrinsically and affectively valuable is lost to the efficiency of

wrecking crews. At the same time, Perecs representation of

space lends itself to concerns about capitalism and its capacity

for anything except solidity and stability.13 What is certain is

that permanence and the ephemeral, or preservation and

obliteration, are interrelated aspects of quotidian life in the

modern world, or to cite Marshall Berman, Perecs writing of

space can be situated within the maelstrom of perpetual

disintegration and renewal.14 What is also apparent is that

articulations of this dichotomy have their most dramatic impact

in representations of lived architectural and urban spaces. In

the Lieux project Perec describes specific Parisian streets and

quartiers as pieces of the past, effectively used up, and scarred by

traces of this former use. This is articulated explicitly in the

representation of architectural structures themselves, which are

more often than not figured in a state of disrepair, pending

demolition. The shops on the first floor of these buildings are

closed as a result of the obsolescence of the services they

provided and all are replaced by the hoarding boards of

building sites that are home to an endless stream of temporary

advertisements. These representations of the remnants of

everyday lives that have been surpassed, rendered obsolete and

relocated are intriguing because they are the obverse of what isoffered by urban development projects: the abject, perpetual

un-becoming that makes such projects necessary. Perecs

representation of urban space can therefore be seen as an

alternative topography, existing alongside the discourse of

urban development and its endless renewal projects.

The difficulty of defining these tensions in Perecs concept of

space may also be the product of disciplinary limitations

implicit in literary scholarship on Perec that has tended to focus

on memory and writing rather than his sociological concernsabout space and the peculiar way they are written. In response

to these limitations I have found productive considerations of

Perecs representation of space in the fields of architecture,

description permet deretenir des signescontre loubli; JacquesNeefs and Hans Harte,Georges Perec: Images

(Paris: ditions duSeuil, Octobre, 1993),124: Le retour aux!lieux! est unemanire de loger lammoire danslespace.

8 On this see JohnSturrock, GeorgesPerec, in The Word

From Paris: Essays onModern French

Thinkers and Writers

(London: Verso, 1998),192: Like othervictims of theHolocaust, Perec wasobsessed with memoryand with the forces ofoblivion that threatenit. This helps to explainhis commitment to

registering the infra-ordinary and his beliefthat none of us giveenough attention towhat is truly daily inour lives, to the banalhabits of settings andevents of which theselives almost entirelyconsist; Warren Motte,The Work of

Mourning, Yale FrenchStudies 105, (2004):56-71.

9 Michel de Certeau,The Practice of

Everyday Life, trans.Steven Randall(Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1988),117.


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cultural geography, ethnography and cultural phenomenology.

These fields have been invaluable to my research on the Lieux

project because they have allowed me to readthe texts in a way

that has not been immediately apparent to literary scholars. It

has also been useful to look at representations of space andplace in other modern literary works as a way of establishing a

general vocabulary of modern urban space in order to

consider similarities and differences between Perecs writing of

space and modernism more generally.

Part I Approaches to the Everyday begins with a brief

description of Perecs Lieux project and continues with a

discussion of Perecs sociological discourse of the infra-

ordinary and the endotic. These are related to similar ideas

expressed by Paul Virilio, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot,

and Henri Lefebvre. I also analyze the problems of realist and

ethnographic description that are at play in theLieux texts. The

contention is that in order to properly frame Perecs writing of

space and place in the Lieux project, to shift my analysis away

from autobiographical concerns, it is necessary to situate the

project within the canon of Perecs sociological writing. Part II,

Nothing to See: Ephemera Against the Autobiographical

analyzes Perecs representation of space, foregrounding an

alternative reading of the published excerpts of the Lieux

project. This section reads the Lieux texts as productive of a

particular kind of everyday urban space (in contrast to the

tendency to enlist these spaces as support for autobiographical

readings) using three central themes of the Lieux project: 1) a

preoccupation with vision, 2) the prevalence of advertisements

and public text embedded in the urban geography and

revealing the conflicting discourses that inhabit it, and 3) the

state of decline or repair of architectural structures. The

concluding section considers Perecs representation of perma-

nence inLa vie: mode demploi(Life: a users manual) andLes Choses:un histoire des annees soixante (Things: a story of the 60s). Even if for

Perec space melts like sand running through ones fingers.

Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds, the

meticulous attention and tenderness with which he documents

these abject spaces imbues them with a sense of everyday

tragedy, too insignificant to merit news coverage and often too

banal for literature and its scholars.15

Approaches to the EverydayIn the posthumously published collection of essays,

Penser/Classer(Think/Classify), Perec outlines the four modes of

his writing as sociological, autobiographical, ludic, and

35


13 Marshall Berman,All that is Solid Melts

into Air: The Experience

of Modernity(NewYork: Penguin Books,1988), 19.


14 Ibid., 11.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

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fictive.16 While all four of these modes are often active in any

one of Perecs works, his explicitly sociological textsThings

(1965), Species of Spaces (1974), Attempt at Exhausting a Parisian

Location (1975),Lieux (1969-1975)foreground ways of looking

at everyday objects and space. Much of this sociologicalwriting was affiliated with the journal Cause Commune (1972-77),

and Perecs friendship with its editors, Paul Virilio and Jean

Duvignaud, eventually lead to the writing of Species of Spaces as

part of Virilios series lespace critique (Critical Space).17 At the

same time, the sociological mode of Perecs writing is apparent

as early as 1965 when he published Things: A Story of the Sixties

that was influenced by Roland Barthess work on Myth and

has been read as a critique of emergent consumer culture in

1960s France.18

Perecs sociological interest in space began in its own right in

1969 with Lieux (Places). This was a project in which Perec

selected twelve Parisian locations and described one of them

each month in situ (rels), and once from memory (souvenirs)

according to an algorithmic constraint so that no place was

described twice in the same month. Each of these writings was

subsequently sealed in a dated envelope and titled either rels

or souvenirs. The intention was to open the archived

writings upon completion of the project twelve years later

(when each place had been written about once in each month),

but it was never completed and Perec published some of the

rels, organized chronologically.19 According to Perec, the

project was meant to document three kinds of vieillissement

aging. The aging of places, the aging of my writing, and the

aging of my memories.20 At least part of the intention of the

Lieux project can therefore be seen as an experiment in

conflating textual space, mental space and urban space with

time as the constant seam running between them.21 The

actual subject of the published rels centers on spatial and

material investigations of everyday life and Perecs theory of

the infra-ordinary provided a framework for explorations of the

everyday that placed importance on the endotic as opposed

to the exotic.22 The function of these inquiries into the infra-

ordinary is to question the habitual despite the fact that were

habituated to it.23

Gilbert Adair writes in the opening lines of The Eleventh

Day: Perec and the Infra-Ordinary: The word [infra-

ordinary] itself is a modest enough neologism, easily decipher-able as the reverse, or the negative, of extraordinary.24

Perhaps it is Adairs willingness to speak about the word

itself as if it were non-discursive, self-evident, and naturally


36

17 Paul Virilio,interview by EnriqueWalker, Paul Virilio onGeorges Perec,AAFiles 45/46, (Winter2001): 16.

18 Andrew Leak,Phago-citations:

Barthes, Perec and theTransformation ofLiterature, The Reviewof Contemporary

Fiction 13, no.1 (Spring1993): 62.

19 Perec,Guettes,!Les Lettresnouvelles 1 (1977);Vues dItalie,

Nouvelle Revue dupsychanalyse 16(1977); La rue Vilin,LHumanit, (11novembre 1977);Alles et venues ruede lAssomption, Larc76 (1979); StationsMabillon, ActionPotique 8 (1980).

20

Georges Perec,interview by KateMortley, The Doing ofFiction,The Review ofContemporary Fiction

13, no.1. (Spring1993): 27.

21 Because few of thecorrespondingsouvenirs have been

published my researchnecessarily focuses onthe diachronicrepresentation of spacein the rels texts.

16 Georges Perec,Notes on What ImLooking for, in Speciesof Spaces and Other

Pieces, 137.

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given while at the same time invented and newthat calls for

further consideration of the word itself. Consulting a

dictionary is hardly necessary given that the extraordinary is

that which is not ordinary, thus posing the question as to the

meaning of the infra-ordinary with respect to the ordinary andthe extraordinary. The distinction obviously hinges on the

prefix infra which modifies the meaning of the noun with the

relational position of being below, subordinate or underneath,

and this sense is found consistently across its usages: infrasonic,

infrared, infraclass, infrastructure.25 While the infra-ordinary is

clearly intended to be other than extraordinary, Adairs gloss

lacks the idea of sedimentation that is suggested by the prefix

and which is crucial to understanding Perecs writing of

everyday urban space.Moreover, Perecs concept of the infra-ordinary, as an inter-

rogation of the quotidian, attempts to articulate the residues

found beneath the ordinary occurrences of everyday life.26

This is made clear in the language used to describe the infra-

ordinary which is consistently figured in architectural and

archaeological tropes that literally drive language into the

concrete, exploring right down to the recesses and basements

that are normally ignored and insists on questioning bricks,

concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, theway we spend our time, our rhythms.27 Here the physicality of

building materials gradually gives way to the more abstract

37


22 Perec, Species of

Spaces, 53.

23 Georges Perec,

Approaches to What?,in Species of Spaces

and Other Pieces, 206.

24 Gilbert Adair, The

Eleventh Day: Perec

and the Infra-ordinary,

The Review of

Contemporary Fiction

13, no.1 (Spring 1993):

98.

26 Adair, The Eleventh

Day, 98.

27 Virilio, interview by

Enrique Walker, 15.Followed by Perec,

Approaches to What?,

207.

Siggi Hofer, Land II, 2007. Watercolor, ink, pencil on paper, 152x201

cm. Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna.

25 This is true in

French as well as

English.

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social and cultural habits that take place within and around

these concrete spaces. Whether Perec and the Cause Commune

group were aware of this architectural and archaeological

meta-language or not, the fact that much of their exploration

of the infra-ordinary is either centered specifically on urbanarchitectural space or is articulated through tropes of

architecture and archaeology (digging, sifting, excavating) is

indicative of an overall preoccupation with space and place.

Alternatively, the infra-ordinary is an exploration of

palimpsests, traces and inscriptions that leave behind a residue

that accumulates, but even here, the image invokes a kind of

fossilized information requiring excavation.28 What emerges

from Perecs spatial explorations of the infra-ordinary, what

they effectively dig up, is an alternative urban topographythat exists beside, or rather, underneath the official topology

and discourse of the city, its everyday objects and occurrences

and clearly relates to Benjamins materialist approach to

history. Indeed Perecs Lieux project can be interpreted as an

alternative to Benjamins provocation to make a film of Paris

based on the unfolding of its various aspects in temporal

succession in order to condense into one visual representation

a centuries-long movement of the streets, boulevards, arcades

and squares.29 Moreover, a connection should be made

between the infra-ordinary and Benjamins particular version

of historical materialism. This is articulated by Howard Eiland

and Kevin McLaughlin in the Translators Foreword to The

Arcades Project: it was not the great men and celebrated events

of traditional historiography but rather the refuse and

detritus of history, the half-congealed, variegated traces of

the daily life of the collective.30 In the Paris arcades what

interested Benjamin was the myriad displays of ephemera

which at a distance from what is normally meant by

progress, is the ur-historical, collective redemption of lost

time, of the times embedded in the spaces of things.31

Without this notion of the everyday as a site of historical

sedimentation and accumulation, even Adair is led to wonder

why does Perec bother recording any of these minutiae; or

rather, from the readers own point of view, why am I

bothering to read such a book?32 But what matters to Perec,

and what is most valuable about his interrogations of the every-

day, is that his subjects should seem trivial and futile; thats

exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as allthe other questions weve tried in vain to lay hold on our

truth.33 Certainly, the infra-ordinary stands in contradistinc-

tion to the journalistic tendency to privilege the exceptional,


38

30 Howard Eiland and

Kevin McLaughlin,

Translators Foreward,

in The Arcades Project,ix.

31 Ibid., xii.

33 Perec, Approaches

to What?, 207.


Spaces, 24.

29 Walter Benjamin C

[Ancient Paris,

Catacombs,

Demolitions, Decline

of Paris], in The

Arcades Project, 83.

32 Adair, The

Eleventh Day, 105.

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the sensational, and the spectacular but it does so in a way that

is more complicated, and more interesting, than merely repro-

ducing the ordinary or existing in opposition to the

extraordinary.34 It participates in a kind of cultural phenome-

nological description that is particularly problematic intreatments of the everyday.

In an interview with Frank Venaille, Perec said that the

submission to experience is a work of meticulous description

but the idea of the meticulous implies the possibility of

exhaustiveness that is necessarily excluded by the heterogeneity

of the everyday.35 Maurice Blanchot thought that the everyday

escapes every speculative formulation because of its endless

transformations and inherent ambiguity, thus making its

representation in language inadequate.36 While Adorno,

echoing Benjamin, saw it as an ephemeral object not yet

overdetermined by intentions.37 In seeking the linguistic

expression of...the history congealed in things, Adornos

materialist phenomenology speaks directly to Perecs infra-

ordinary, but it does not solve the problem of how these reflec-

tions are expressed.38 There is always the question of how to

represent the banal and the insignificant without either

succumbing to banality and insignificance or overvaluing par-

ticularity so that the banal object loses its defining mundanity.39

One of the difficulties in approaching the everyday as a

subject for philosophical and literary inquiry is the problem of

description and the inability of language to accommodate the

instability of the everyday and its sense of being incomplete. In

Approaches to What? Perec is preoccupied by these

questions:

How should we take account of, question, describe what

happens everyday and recurs everyday: the banal, the

quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-

ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? How should wespeak of these common things?40

Thinkers of the everyday have shared these same concerns:

how can we interrogate the structures of our everyday lives?

How can we describe the conditions of our daily existence?

While the central difficulty for Perec, in the above passage,

seems to hinge on the failure of language to adequately account

for these objects (how can he speakabout?), he also believes the

objects of the everyday can speak of the way things are, the

way we are.41 Making objects speak is invariably achieved bydigging them out of the mire in which they remain stuck but

inevitably, as will be seen from the discussion of Lieux in the

following section, this process and what the objects speak is not

39


34 Adair, The Eleventh

Day, 98.

35 Perec, The Work of

Memory, Interview

with Frank Venaille, in

Species of Spaces and

Other Pieces, 127.

36 Maurice Blanchot,

Infinite Conversation,

trans. Susan Hanson

(Minneapolis andLondon: University of

Minnesota Press,

1993), 239.

37 Theodor W.

Adorno, Negative

Dialectics, trans. E.B.

Ashton (London:

Routledge, 1973), 17.

38 Ibid., 52-3.

39 Perec, Je Suis N,

in Species of Spaces

and Other Pieces, 127.

40 Perec, Approaches

to What?, 206.

41 Ibid.

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clear or transparent by any means.42

Henri Lefebvre may be more interesting to consider on this

subject because of his writings on the everyday, social space and

the city and also because Perec knew Lefebvre through meet-

ings of the New Left.43

Indeed there are clear resonancesbetween the above Perec passage and the following Lefebvre:

Should philosophy be isolated for ever from the contamination

of everyday life and detached from everyday contingencies? Is

the quotidian an obstacle to the revelation of truth, an

unavoidable triviality, the reverse of existence and the

perversion of truth?44

Obviously for Lefebvre, as for Perec, the answer is negative.

Here, as in Perec, the implication is that among quotidian

things and the banality of everyday life there are truths thatexist and are of equal, if not greater, importance than those of

official discourse. But Lefebvre thought that the everyday can

be reduced neither to philosophical subjective definitions nor to

objective representations of classified objects such as clothing,

nourishment, furnishings, etc. because it is more than these.45

As Michael Sheringham has argued in his workEveryday Life:

Theories and Practices From Surrealism to the Present, the experience

of the everyday cannot be reduced to its content; it eludes

objectification because it consists in perpetual becoming.46Understanding the everyday is a task that lacks the closure of

arriving at a particular knowledge because it is inexhaustible in

its perpetual transformations. Writing about the everyday can

therefore only aspire to being a kind of practice that makes

visible and palpable the heterogeneity of its subject.

Interestingly, one of the ways that Perec represents the

content of the everyday is by making inventories of common

objects and this is as true of his sociological writings as it is of

his more fictional works like Things andLife: a users manual. Therels texts of the Lieux project organize space through

inventories based on vision. In ambulating through these

spaces, the house numbers or the order of shops along a street

organize and structure the writing of the places. The

frontispiece to Jacques Neefs and Hans Hartes Georges Perec:

Images demonstrates, in Perecs own handwriting, the relation-

ship between everyday things and writing: Au debut, on ne

peut quessayer de nommer les choses, une une, platement, les

numerer, les denombrer, de la manire la plus banale possible,de la manire la plus prcise possible.47 While the inventory is

less than a self-evident mode of writing, Perec was distinctly

aware of the problems of such enumerations:


40

47 Neefs and Harte,

Georges Perec: Images,

Frontispiece. Trans. In

the beginning, we cant

do anything but try to

name things, one by

one, plainly, listing

them, enumeratingthem, in the most banal

way possible, in the

most precise way

possible.

42 Adair, The

Eleventh Day, 98.

43Eleonore Kofman

and Elizabeth Lebas,

Lost in Transposition

Time, Space and the

City, in Writings on

Cities: Henri LeFebvre,

ed. and trans. Kofman

and Lebas (Oxford, UK:

Blackwell, 1996), 15.

44 Henri Lefebvre,

Everyday Life in theModern World, trans.

Sacha Rabinovitch

(London: Allen Lane,

1971), 13-14.

45 Ibid.

46 MichaelSheringham, Everyday

Life: Theories and

Practices from

Surrealism to the

Present(Oxford, UK:

Oxford University

Press, 2006), 16.

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In every enumeration there are two contradictory

temptations. The first is to list everything, the second is to forget

something. The first would like to close off the question once

and for all, the second to leave it open. Thus, between the

exhaustive and the incomplete, enumeration seems [...] before

all thought (and before all classification), the very proof of that

need to name and to bring together without which the world

would lack any points of reference for us.48

What is made clear in the above passage is that Perecs

seemingly endless inventories and enumerations do not aim at

objective description or an exhaustive and finalized totality but

rather serve as a way of marking space and apprehending

daily experience in its flow, its rhythm, its emergence.49

Following his enumerations, Perec has the characteristic habit

of adding an etc. thus calling into question the exhaustive-ness of the list just cited. In Comings and Going in the rue de

lAssomption, for example, after listing the posters found on

the hoarding board of a building site he writes etc. (I am sick

of noting them all down!) thus giving the impression of the

surface space of the hoarding board rather than an

accurate description of it.50 Perecs self-defined sociologie de

la quotidiennet nest pas une analyse, mais une tentative de

description.51 Indeed this sense of an attemptsuggests that the

writing both acknowledges the very problems of realist

description, if not the impossibility of totality promised by the

referential function of language, but proceeds to attempt a

description of what is seen regardless and often in a seemingly

neutral tone.52 As Warren Motte has demonstrated, Perecs

writing collects trivial details which accrete into an image of the

everyday.53 But for Motte, Perecs descriptive technique

remains caught in the problems inherent in realist representa-

tion: As long as he concentrates on the mechanics of

perception [...] even by observing more minutely, the only result

is a more minute realist description.54 Jacques-Denis

Bertharion uses a similar logic to create a divide in the Lieux

project between the rels, which are merely descriptive, while

the souvenirs are narrative.55 However, these notions belie

the fact that the rels are not purely descriptive. They often

narrate, comment, and use language to undermine the neutral

tone in which the rels are written, revealing a narrator

whose speculative experience of the world is particular and

openly productive or creative.

In the Lieux rels Perec frequently makes use ofparenthetical statements that mediate description by providing

personal commentary and background information that

gestures beyond what is immediately available for vision. This

41


48 Perec,

Think/Classify, in

Species of Spaces andOther Pieces, 194

49 Sheringham,

Attending to the

Everyday: Blanchot,

Lefebvre, Certeau,

Perec, French Studies

LIV, no. 2 (2000): 194.

50Perec, Comings

and Goings in rue de

lAssomption, trans.

Andrew Leak,AA Files

45/46 (Winter 2001):

58.

51 Warren Motte,

Description, in The

Poetics of Experiment:

A Study of the Work of

Georges Perec,(Lexington, KY: French

Forum Publishers,

1984), 70. Trans. My

sociology of the quoti-

dien is not an analysis

but an attempt at a

description.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., 73.

54 Ibid.

55 Bertharion, Lieux,

ou la mmoire fragile,

231.

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parenthetical commentary undermines the apparent neutrality

of the observations, lists and enumerations. For example after

listing an advertisement for the summer festival of Paris, Perec

writes (uninspiring programme) just as (rue de lAssomption

bores me shitless) clearly indicates his subjective responses.56

The parenthetical statements are also used as a means for

confessing erroneous facts about the descriptions, which seem

to be added during the editorial process prior to publication.

After citing a poster calling for aid to 200,000 Pakistani

children Perec writes (I noted down: 200,000 children...I think

I left off a zero and that it was actually 2,000,000 children.)57

Similarly, in a footnote he admits the caf-tabac is actually

called Le Saint-Claude but I persist in calling it Le

Diderot.

58

While these confessions attempt to reinstate adegree of objectivity, they inadvertently call the factual basis of

the descriptions into question. By openly admitting to the

erroneous production of the spaces described, the texts can no

longer be read as unmediated. The result is a slippage between

the parenthetical statements and what frames them, blurring

the boundary between subjective commentary and description,

which permeates the entirety of the texts.

In the forward to Scenes in Italie, one of the published

excerpts of PerecsLieux project, he states his intent: to write

down, simply, flatly, what [he] saw there.59 Whether Perec

thought he could achieve this flatness or not, the descriptions

inevitably construct the spaces and objects represented.60 More

significant may be the fact that Perec often re-wrote, re-typed

and edited his rels before publishing them so that regardless

of whether they attained a degree of unmediated simplicity in

the first place, they were subjected to a process of revision after-

wards.61 Andrew Leak, who translated some of these Lieux

texts, argues the impossibility of writing simply, flatly

claiming to describe a place is constantly to displace it.62

While it is clear that Perecs vision and his writing are not

simultaneous events, it is also clear that the Lieux project is not

homogeneous in its attempt to write simply, flatly. Perec

explored the possibilities of simultaneous description in other

projects and offered by other media: photography inLa Clture,

film in Les Lieux dune Fugue and sound in his radio program

recorded in Carrefour Mabillon. Leak makes the connection

between theLieux rels and a photographic record because of

their specificity within a particular moment indicated at thebeginning of the writing, for example, 2 April 1969, about six

oclock in the evening. But he goes on to argue that the

chronological ordering of the texts lends a sense of unfolding


42

60 Bertharion. Lieux,


240.

61 Philippe LeJeune,

Lieux, in La Mmoire

et loblique (Paris:

P.O.L., 1991), 187. By

contrast, LeJeune has

found that the

!souvenirs! werenever submitted to any

editorial revision;

!aucune rature,aucune ajout; le pre-

mier jet, tel quel; dans

les dactylographies

(vingt-cinq textes sur

soixante six souvenirs)

les fautes de frappes

(nombreuses) ne sont

jamais corrigs.

62 Andrew Leak,

Paris: Created andDestroyed,AA Files

45/46 (Winter 2001),

31.

56

Perec, Comingsand Goings in rue de

lAssomption.

57 Ibid.

58 Perec, Stances on

Mabillon, trans.


45/46 (Winter 2001).

59 Georges Perec,

Scenes in Italie, trans.


45/46 (Winter 2001),

34.

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time more akin to cinematic description than to a photograph

which necessarily presents a fixed and supposedly complete

picture.63 Regardless, if everyday space cannot be exhausted,

its heterogeneity can perhaps be recorded and rehearsed:

creating evenemental narratives which seek to preserve itsendlessly disseminated multiplicity, creating a series of

contingent local consistencies, which can help us to reflect on its

continuous unfolding.64

Nothing to See: Ephemera Against the Autobiographical

Philippe LeJeunes chapter on Lieux in La mmoire et loblique

states that lorigine, son intention tait de dcrire

uniquement des lieux rels. Une seule srie de textes tait

prvue: les descriptions des lieux, rues, places, carrefours, faites intervalles rguliers, scelles dans les enveloppes.65 At the

same time, Perec considered naming the project Soli Loci as

both a nod to QueneausLoci Soliand an allusion to soliloquy,

which would establish a connection between the lieux (places)

and rhetoric, highlighting the discursive production of space.66

Of the 133 texts produced as part of the Lieux project, Perec

published only five of the rels sets and organized the entries

in a series that privileged the diachronic reading of the spaces

considered.67 What is collected in each of these entries is

observation of the flotsam and jetsam to be found in each place

at a particular moment in time, but which are nonetheless

invaded by the past and future in ways that highlight the

competing narratives within everyday space, underscoring the

evenemental narrative that characterizes the everyday.

Howard Becker, writing inEthnography, succinctly articulates the

difficulty of generalizing Perecs project: it is as though there

was no other way to describe it than just to repeat and list what

[Perec] has already described.68 Indeed, the fact that Perecs

rels texts seem to speak for themselves is the main obstacle

to readingthem. The entries include information about what is

playing at the local cinema, detailed lists of the posters on a

hoarding board, graffiti, roadwork signs, the number of buses

that pass by, sirens of police cars and ambulances at a specified

moment, descriptions of people, their clothing and how they

hold a newspaper, the flow of car traffic is noted, the shops and

homes on specific streets and their state of disrepair or

amelioration are documented. As I read these descriptions I am

overwhelmed by the feeling that what they represent isimportant, namely they create a profound sense of wonder at

the ostensibly unremarkable.69 But in looking at the details in

themselves it is difficult to say why and I suspect this results

43


63 Ibid., 28.

64 Stephen Clucas,

Cultural

Phenomenology and

the Everyday, Critical

Quarterly21, no.1

(April 2000): 27.

65 Philippe LeJeune,

Lieux, 153. Trans. in

the beginning his only

intention was to

describe real places. A

single series of texts

was foreseen: descrip-

tions of locations,

streets, public squares,

crossroads, written at

regular intervals and

subsequently sealed inenvelopes.

66 Ibid., 141.

67 Ibid., 143, 167.

68 Howard Becker,

Georges Perecsexperiments in social

description,

Ethnography2, no.1,

(2001): 71.

69 Sheringham,

Everyday Life, 122.

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from the difficulty of thinking about the everyday without

conjuring its negative connotations: the tedium, the day-in,

day-out, work, banality, boredom.

Michael Sheringham believes that in order to understand the

texts of theLieux we have to attune ourselves to the rhythm ofthings, to the way sameness is actually ever-changing, and we

ourselves are part of this constant process.70 What emerges

from the rels is an endless series of differences that can only

emerge through the repeated descriptions of the same. While

theLieux texts were not published in a way that easily lends itself

to making these comparisons, in studying them it is difficult not

to recognize the way difference infiltrates. After his first entry

on rue Vilin, Perec returns later to see what the street looks like

after dark. Similarly in Glances at Gait Perec describes ayellow customer who has left her dog near the door of the

charcuterie where she has gone to purchase something while in

Scenes in Italie, a woman dressed in blue has tied up for a

few moments a big hairy dog with a tail that curls up (like a

husky, but brown) to a skinny tree just opposite me (probably to

go and buy something from the charcuterie).71 In Attempt at

Exhausting a Paris Location, Perec even wonders if changing what

he is drinking constitutes a valid difference in perception. For

Perec, these are things that are different yet also have a certainsimilarity; they can be brought together in a series with which

it will be possible to distinguish them and I believe this is a

significant part of the unstated goal of the Lieux project.

Making these differences salient is Perecs contribution to the


44

Maix Mayer, delirious landscape, 2006. Photograph, 48.8x67.7 in.

Courtesy of Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin.

70 Ibid., 266.

71 Perec, Glances at

Gait, and Scenes in

Italie, trans. Andrew

Leak,AA Files 45/46

(Winter 2001), 50 and35 respectively.

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discourse of everyday urban space.72

In the rels entries Perec situates himself within the setting:

describing both how he arrived at the location (ie., by metro, on

foot via which streets), and the particular vantage points from

which he writes, at times ambulating up and down the streets,at times seated in a caf drinking a Vittel, a beer or coffee.

These texts raise significant questions of how to speak and

write about the everyday, while asking the same questions about

methods for analysing writing that takes everyday space as its

subject. They mediate between realist descriptive technique,

feigning the neutrality inherent in more conventionally

serious disciplines, like sociological analysis, while also at

times appearing nostalgic and profoundly personal, an effect of

the writing that also rubs off on the reader.73

The relswritings of the Lieux project have been described as both

deeply affective and boringly, mechanical in their repetitive

objectivity. They have been written about as a psychoanalytic

ruse away from personal considerations that function to

keep despair at bay and also as Perecs justification for

ongoing emotional relationships with particular Parisian

locations.74 These contradictory readings of the Lieux project

inevitably situate the texts as either autobiographical or as

wearisome and futile reproductions of urban space that do not

speak to larger literary or cultural issues. In either case, space,

being subsumed under autobiographical or aesthetic concerns,

remains a question. The way Perec writes this space, like that

space itself, is rarely given direct attention. Indeed, it is rarely

read. Regardless of the seeming affectedness or objectivity of

the descriptions of the Lieux, Part II will take Perecs cue and

foreground space as a valid field of inquiry in itself, reading the

Lieux rels as sites of inscription that produce space and place

rather than merely reproducing it, and which therefore provide

an alternative topography of Paris during the 1970s.

It is undoubtedly because Perec selected the twelve locations

of the Lieux project for personal reasons and because the more

personal souvenirs were written alongside the rels, that

the project has tended to be read autobiographically. But as I

have previously suggested, focussing on the autobiographical in

this way usually amounts to critical insights that gesture far

beyond what is written in the rels texts themselves. The fact

that the content of the rels texts is rarely cited directly would

normally raise concerns about the scholarship on Lieux, but Isuspect that because the rels purportedly deal with the

insignificant and messy material of everyday life, this critical

oversight has been permitted and perpetuated. This often

45


72 Perec,

Think/Classify, 194.

73

Adair, TheEleventh Day, 99.

74 Motte, The Work

of Mourning, 59.

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amounts to a collection of statements about the project that

have no basis in the published writing itself and belies the fact

that the items recorded have no direct personal significance,

and are in many cases ephemeral or contingent.75 OfLieux,

Lejeune has said that il est le tombeau dun amour, uneimmense pyramide construite autour dune chambre secrte,

le lieu dun combat entre la vie et la mort.76 He claims that

Lieux is the matrix of all of Perecs autobiographical work

between 1969 and 1975 and echoes Adair in suggesting the

absurdity associated with the annual trip to these places in

order to make inventories of the shops and to count the buses

passing by. This marks a fundamental misapprehension of the

texts which, unable to make a connection between the return to

theseLieux and ones daily habit of walking the same streets androutes, would rather account for this absurdity by calling it a

pathology and reading it as such. Indeed, for Lejeune this

absurdity is countered by the fact that the lieux are

connected to Perecs personal life, once again underscoring the

autobiographical.77Jacques-Denis Bentharion goes so far as to

suggest that because the souvenirs aspect of the project was

added after its initial conception, this ultimately foregrounds its

primary (autobiographical) importance in reading the rels.78

Not only is this counterintuitive, but it also reveals the critical

difficulty of engaging with writing that represents what

happens when nothing happens.79 If it is easier to discuss

abstractions like life and death and the tomb of love than it is

to discuss what is seen on the street, then I would hazard that

the rels provide us with a tentative opportunity to approach

this material and materiality which is significantly lacking in

literary studies of Perec.

The bizarre collection of statements cited above clearly

mimics a psychoanalytic model in that it consistently posits a

secret chamber of Perecs identity, which the analyst-critic

can mine in the texts ofLieux. Indeed the idea of sedimenta-

tion outlined in the previous chapter, finds an analogy in the

Freudian method as much as it does in the Marxist one

previously discussed.80 But the fact that the rels texts

themselves are rarely investigated in depth before arriving at

this secret knowledge, is problematic. By positing a kind of

pre-history of the rels and situating it in Perecs personal

past, these critics create an origin for the writing of the texts

that functions as its final resolution. Ironically, because of theabsence of the author, these psychoanalytic insights into the

unconscious of the author cannot be confirmed either and so

they repeat the structure which critical insight normally seeks to


46

75 Sheringham,

Everyday Life, 259.

76 LeJeune, Lieux,

146. Trans. it is a

lovers tomb, a huge

pyramid constructed

around a secret cham-

ber, the location of a

battle between life and

death.

77 Ibid., 150.

78 Bertharion. Lieux,


231.


Enrique Walker, 15.

80

Sigmund FreudDelusions and Dreams

in Jensens Gradiva, in

The Penguin Freud

Library, Vol. 14: Art

and Literature, ed. and

trans James Strachey

(Harmondsworth:

Penguin Books, 1990).

In this respect I am

thinking of the

archaeological

metaphor used inDelusions and Dreams

in Jensens Gradiva for

the psychoanalytic

model.

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resolve. If Freudian psychoanalysis can be brought to bear

productively on theLieux project, I would hazard that it is to be

found in the compulsion to repeat that characterizes the

project and its stated archival goals. One productive way to

situate theLieux

project in a psychoanalytic model may bethrough Jacques Derridas reading of the Freudian archive in

relation to a Judaic tradition and Julia Kristevas work on

abjection. After suggesting that there is no archive fever without

the threat of the death drive, aggression and destruction drive,

Derrida claims that the archive itself is an irreducible

experience of the future.81 Indeed, it is the affirmation of a

future to come thus reiterating the liminal and abject

temporal state of the spaces which Perec constantly figures in a

state of becoming.

82

Indeed, the everyday seems to be the mostpredominant example of the abject. If abjection is a resurrec-

tion that has gone through death, then Perecs descriptions of

architectural space make the case literally through document-

ing their destruction and reconstruction.83 In this sense Perec

could certainly be read as the deject [who] never stops

demarcating his universe whose fluid confinesfor they are

constituted as a non-objectconstantly question his solidity.84

While it is not the intent of this paper to pursue a sustained

psychoanalytic line of thought with respect to Lieux, there is

clearly much that could be done in this vein.85 However, if the

death drive is to be accounted for, then it should also be noted

that the rels texts reveal that these spaces are remembered

as something belonging to the past rather than as a contem-

porary experience of any repressed material and they go one

further by emphasizing the renewal projects that emerge in

these abject spaces.86 IfLieux can be read as an archive, then it

is one which remains open and is actively being compiled in the

writing process. Likening Perecs project to Benjamins figure of

the collector may be more apt in the sense that for both the

world is present, and indeed ordered, in each of his projects

and the goal of these is to work against dispersion.87 For this

reason, I would argue that following the initial entry for each

lieux (and regardless of his personal attachment to that place),

each location accumulates a history and a series of memories

within the repeated experience of the place, making each visit

a culmination of those that came before it. In this sense a

simultaneous visit of the place is initiated by each return to it

and this is manifested in any text subsequent to the first, by anabundance of temporal modes used to describe the buildings:

No 1 is stillthere, A whole block of houses has been knocked

down, the new expressway willwipe out the whole rue, or

47


81 Jacques Derrida,

Archive Fever: A

Freudian Impression,

trans. Eric Prenowitz

(Chicago: The

University of Chicago

Press, 1995), 19, 68.

82 Ibid., 68.

83 Julia Kristeva,

Powers of Horror: An

Essay on Abjection,

trans. Leon S. Roudiez

(New York: Columbia

University Press, 1982),

15.

84 Ibid., 8.

85 Rather than move

towards a

psychoanalysis of the

author (as is already

too common) research

relating the chora to

the Lieux project could

prove interesting.

86 Sigmund Freud,

Beyond the PleasurePrincipal, trans. James

Strachey (London: The

Hogarth Press and The

Institute for

Psychoanalysis, 1950),

19.

87 Walter Benjamin

H [The Collector], in

The Arcades Project,

207, 211.

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things are just still the same.

Before continuing with a reading of the rels, I want to

reiterate the main themes of Lieux that my research articulates.

Namely, these texts enact the tension between permanence and

the ephemeral that can be found in everyday urban space. Indoing so they emphasize the perpetual un-becoming of those

spaces themselves in contrast to an equally prevalent discourse

of urban development that is also found in the texts. While

Perec returns to the same places repeatedly, his texts

consistently register differences by focussing on specificities of

time and place. His writing insists, above all else, on transitory

and provisional conditions and a setting that registers the signs

of its own pending disappearance. Streets, walls, buildings,

shops, posters, cars and people are sustained for a moment inwriting, before being released back into a process of slow

decline.88 As each text focuses on the particularities of the local

neighborhood it is difficult to make generalizations about the

five rels that will be discussed. At the same time, these texts

share certain characteristics: 1) a preoccupation with vision,

2) the prevalence of advertisements and public text embedded

in the urban geography and revealing the conflicting

discourses that inhabit it, and 3) the state of decline or repair of

architectural structures, all of which combine to suggest that

everything passes by, everything is always in the process of

unreeling.89

If vision is central to description then the physical

particularity of the five places Perec visits determines the types

of vision available to him, which in turn determines his

description. His writing necessarily foregrounds the values of

observationthe fact that looking is not self-evident and

suggests that things are hidden not in the obscure, but in the

obvious.90 While Perec noted the difficulty of paying attention

to this very thingdespite yourself, youre only noting the

untoward, the peculiar, the wretched exceptionshis

descriptions consistently redirect attention to the endotic

objects of everyday space.91 In the rue Vilin and rue de

lAssomption, Perec tends to ambulate up and down the streets

recording details of the buildings, shops and people as he goes.

The facility of vision in these streets is exemplified by the fact

that unlike the three other rels which are dominated by

problems of vision, here it is rarely discussed. In rue Vilin the

only mention of vision comes implicitly through statementsabout the traces of lettering on storefronts that are still

visible.92 In rue de LAssomption, Perec mentions vision only

when he is seated in a caf where his perspective is situated and


48

88 Neefs, Georges

Perec, Ma Ville,

Magazine Littraire

332, (1995): 60.


Enrique Walker, 17.

90 Ibid.


Spaces, 53.

92 Perec, The Rue

Vilin, in Species of

Spaces and Other

Pieces, 208.

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limited. From my seat I can see soon turns into a description

of what he cannot: even if [he] leans forward [he] cant see

the butchers that he knows is at no. 54.93 Interestingly, the

regularity of Perecs vision as a subject for the description itself

corresponds directly to the difficulty of seeing. Scenes inItalie begins by acknowledging there is no spot, apart from

the roof of a block of flats, from where one can get a satisfac-

tory view of the whole square and this preoccupation with

what is unavailable for vision is a constant theme of the

description itself.94 In light of this difficulty, Scenes in Italie

describes what blocks Perecs view but does so in a way that

reveals the conflicting visual demands of everyday urban space.

In these rels, what is hidden from view is replaced by what

hides that vision, so that the object in the foreground isdescribed, thus implicating each space in the other and

constructing a continuity of space between foreground and

background objects. While most of the square [...] is hidden

from [his] view by the Morris billboard and the trees, Perec

overcomes this blind spot by listing the advertisements on the

Morris billboard and describing the trees which are without

leaves.95 These types of indiscriminate substitution are repeat-

ed again from another caf in which Perec describes a yellow

curtain that blocks his vision of the square between rue Bobillotand avenue dItalie. While supposedly there is nothing to see

in Place dItalie, Perec repeatedly changes vantage points in an

attempt to see what he is apparently missing or what is behind

the objects that both withhold a certain vision and produce an

alternative one. But inevitably with each change in perspective

new blind spots are produced and alternative visions are

enabled.

As mentioned above, the Morris billboard came to replace

the square in Perecs description, but in a later entry hedescribes how another Morris billboard is partially hidden by

parked cars. Superimposed, therefore, onto the Place dItalie

are the ephemeral details that accumulate there for a period of

time. Superimposed upon these are ephemera of an even

shorter life span. The advertisements of the Morris billboard

prevent any picturesque image of the Place, just as the cars

temporary parking prevents the full vision of the advertise-

ments on the billboard. Paul Virilio in The Aesthetics of

Disappearance has described this occurrence:Particular selection of what is seen, recording of insignificant

facts that gradually transforms the true objects into a sort of

background against which another designation of meaning

emerges, a background which would be already a kind of

49


93 Perec, Comings

and Goings in Rue de

lAssomption, 65.

94 Perec, Scenes in

Italie, 34.

95 Ibid., 35.

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dissolving view [...] all is calm, and yet: this world as we see it is

passing away.96

Perecs is a characteristically unmotivated vision that enables

such meanings to emerge. Understandably, therefore, Perec

doesnt seem particularly bothered by these substitutions andcontinues his patient accumulation of details. In this respect we

are presented with an image of everyday urban space in which

there is no blindness because it is simply replaced by a new

object for vision. Therefore, the text represents the supposed

permanence of the geographical location of the Place dItalie

through a topography of the impermanent objects that flow in

and out of it and dominate it both visually and materially. In

this sense Perec escapes from the source of habit by looking

sideways, always sideways, rejecting fixity of attention, driftingfrom the object to the context.97

The overlapping of visual space is present in Stances on

Mabillon where a failure of vision is also at work and which

amounts to a constant preoccupation with vision in the texts.

After listing posters on a hoarding board Perecs enumeration is

halted because the remaining words [...] are covered by

smaller, yellow and green bills that are presumably illegible.98

This accumulation of posters and bills is emblematic of the

idea of sedimentation of the infra-ordinary described in theprevious section. The hoarding board becomes a site where

posters and announcements are preserved despite their

ephemeral messages and significantly, as material precipitates,

they are preserved underneath the very posters that come to

replace them. This is apparent in the inclusion of descriptions

of the tattered remains of numerous bills and tattered

election posters: the ephemeral nature of such texts which

nonetheless leave traces of their existence.99

The substitution of what is hidden by what blocks it fromview is repeated in different ways throughout the texts:

A couple sitting at a table outside block my view.100

...some shops I cannot make out, partially hidden from my

view by a news stand.101

Snack B(AR) Restaurant (the A and the R of bar remaining

hidden from me).102

With increasing frequency Perec finds productive ways ofdealing with the supposed blind spots that he encounters.

Looking in a mirror he describes the sign of a Chinese

restaurant that must actually be behind [him] creating an


50

96 Paul Virilio, The

Aesthetics of

Disappearance, trans.

Philip Beitchman,

(New York:Semiotext(e), 1991),

37.

97 Ibid., 47.


Mabillon, 70.

99 Perec, Scenes in

Italie, and Comings

and Goings in rue delAssomption, 63.


Mabillon, 74.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid., 72-73.

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observation point that allows him the possibility of seeing what

is ostensibly out of his field of vision. The example of the snack

bar cited above, in which Perec confesses his failure of vision,

while simultaneously convincing us of the irrelevance of his

failure (because it is clear that the two missing letters are, in fact,A and R) is highly instructive of his peculiar descriptive style.

Perec will describe how something is just visible (but thats only

because I know its there) or a particular title obscured by

white and purple exclamation marks, which [he] happen[s] to

know (because [he] saw it up close a moment ago) openly

implies a discrepancy between vision and description that

foregrounds the texts construction of space and the objects in

it.103 Here the narrative time seems incompatible with vision,

and in order to see, it [has] become paradoxically necessary tointroduce a disordering of vision.104 When there is a failure of

vision Perec also occasionally enlists other senses to inform the

description. Glances at Gait!uses synaesthesia as a mode ofobservation in order to claim that there are five billiard tables

in the caf: he cant see them, but he can hear the characteris-

tic sound of the balls.105 Similarly he observes: In rue de

Maine, trees, a little park where one can sense, rather than see,

children playing.106 While Perec otherwise mimes neutrality,

these passages suggest an intuition about the space as a whole,

underscoring the associations frequently made in everyday

space that are necessary to understanding it and which mark

the tendency in Perecs writing to move beyond description into

an interpretation of space. While clearly the parenthetical

statements play a significant role in how these texts produce

space, what is significant is the way that confessions of the

constructedness of the descriptions reveal at the same time, that

accuracy was important to Perec and his writing of the rels.

Yet he does not hide the constructedness itself but rather calls

attention to it, which undermines his reliability as an objective

witness and demonstrates a more creative representation of

space.

Furthermore, the descriptions reveal a competition for

attention that parallels the everyday and is manifested in an

uneven distribution of description for certain objects in relation

to others. InAttempt at Exhausting a Parisian Location, the passage

of buses and the habits of pigeons occupy Perecs description

significantly, yet this only makes their absence from other parts

of the text more obvious. Similarly in one of the entries ofScenes in Italie, Perec gives half of his attention to war

veterans laying wreathes on a war memorial, describing them

in detail and even speculating on where they are destined to go

51



Mabillon, 72.

104 Virilio,Aesthetics

of Disappearance, 84.


Gait, 44.

106 Ibid., 49.

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next but spends little time describing any other people in the

square. What this disparity suggests is a process of selection on

the part of the viewing subject (Perec) that is productive of the

phenomenology of that space itself.

Perhaps the most salient example of the competition forattention is the prevalence of advertisements and signage in the

rels through which the city emerges as a space constructed

through text and therefore requires reading. For Michel de

Certeau the city is a texturology whose meanings are

produced in the spatial practices of walking through it.107 The

coincidence of architectural space and textual space can there-

fore reveal an active and literal discursive formation that the

text of the rels describes.108 In all five of these rels,

description of the space gives way to a reading process of themultiple texts to be found in that space which are in turn cited

directly as lists and enumerations. The abundance of these

ephemeral texts includes posters, advertisements for consumer

products and entertainment, shop and window signage, news-

paper headlines, graffiti, and municipal announcements. While

the identification of shops is clearly made through readings of

window signs, these quickly multiply to include temporary

information about what is on offer in the store at the moment

Perec is writing. For example, included in the description of the

shop La Chemise Franaise is the detail reduced items,

oddments and we find out La Dcothque, offers home

furnishing, everything thats now.109 What these details

achieve is a slippage between the actual location of commercial

transactions with the advertisements for those transactions

themselves. As Bertharian has arguedin his most productive

engagement with the relsChaque slogan ou affiche

constitue une citation directe ou sabolit toute fonction

reprsentative, une matire verale qui se reprsente delle

meme, une sorte dintrusion directe du rel dans lcriture.110

At the same time, the endless proliferation of texts found in the

space, suggests a perte de lisibilit du rel.111 This parallels

the disorienting texts found in urban space and which, like the

advertisements themselves, does not attempt to bridge the gap

between text and materiality. Therefore when stand-alone

advertisements are described there is little difference between

them and those found on the windows of actual shops, except

that the multiplication of these advertisements is not matched

by a multiplication of places of purchase thus severing theadvertisement from any local, material space. In fact where

buildingslocations for transactionare demolished, hoard-

ing boards take their place and advertisements invade. The


52

107 de Certeau,

Walking in the City,

in The Practice of

Everyday Life, 91.



243.


Gait, 51.



244. Trans. Each

slogan or poster

constitutes a directcitation where all

mimetic function of

language is abolished,

a viral language that

represents itself, a sort

of direct invasion of the

real into the writing.

111 Ibid., 245. Trans.

loss of legibility of the

real.

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proliferation of these texts is made clear on the hoarding

boards where texts intermingle to create accumulations of

meaning: Imagine Life in Levis! Pernod Pastis! Sex tech-

niques.112 The suturing of these texts within the space of the

hoarding board, matched also in the rel, represents urbanspace as a reading process that gathers varied little elements

into a coherence, an organization or a style.113 Except that the

temporary coherence presented, never achieves any sense,

remaining a purely ephemeral textual surface. It describes the

paroxysms of real life that submerge [and] that are continually

undoing the work of setting in order.114

Although there is an abundance of advertising cited in the

rels, there are other conflicting discourses that exist in the

spaces described. Comings and Goings in rue delAssomption documents competing political ideologies

through the graffiti on the street. One piece of graffiti claims

All States are Police States while another small poster

demands Down with Leftist agitation.115 These ideologies

are multiplied and radicalized by a swastika spray-painted on a

hoarding board, a monarchist symbol and an anarchist symbol

making explicit the space of the street as a competition between

political ideologies. Even official ideology participates, using the

space of the street to make public announcements about that

space itself. One of the entries in Scenes in Italie lists A small

poster: 24 January 1970/ Popular meeting/ Neighborhood

Regeneration Scheme.116 While it is clear what this popular

meeting is about, the poster is ambiguous in its relationship to

the regeneration scheme. It remains uncertain as to whether the

meeting is to discuss concerns over the regeneration project or

rather to discuss concerns over the current state of dereliction

thus providing a forum for articulating the need for regenera-

tion. What is certain is that the poster targets local citizens by

being situated in the spaces of the neighborhood so that ones

engagement with the poster in the context of everyday life

occurs in the same space as ones engagement with changes to

that space itself.

More dramatically, two posters in The rue Vilin reveal a

more explicit exchange with authority: Compulsorily

Purchased. Closing Down 24 December and Official Notice.

City of Paris. 25-26-27 August 1974. Compulsory Purchase

Order, Nos 28 & 30. Creation of a public open space in Paris

20e.117 These posters make official what has already beenmade clear by Perecs previous entries on the street: for many

years le rue Vilin has been en train de disparaitre.118 The

ongoing sense of urgency that adumbrates this project is made

53


112 Perec, Scenes in

Italie, 38.

113 Sydney Levy,

Emergence in Georges

Perec, Yale French

Studies 105, (2004):

42.

114 Georges Perec,

The Work of Memory,

128.

115 Perec, Comings


lAssomption.


Italie, 37.

117 Perec, The Rue

Vilin.

118 Neefs and Harte,Georges Perec: Images,

141. Trans. in the

process of

disappearing.

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clear in the rel text when a woman on the street, believing

Perec to be a surveyor, says so youve come to knock us down?

revealing the human side of these inevitable transforma-

tions.119 What is more surprising than the manner in which this

woman assumes the inevitable fate of the street is the way thatthe description of the buildings on it have already made this

apparent. Over a six-year period, the records of Perecs

annual visits demonstrate the steady decline of rue Vilin

through the increasing dilapidation of the buildings on it.

Initially only some of the buildings are no longer being done

up, but increasingly, the shops are closed and the buildings

boarded up, windows bricked in. What happens in reading

these entries diachronically is that the buildings become

characters distinguished by their facades and the shops on theground floors. One shop that stands out, if not for its marked

obsolescence today, is No. 4 a shop selling button holes which

remains long after the others but inevitably closes as well. The

fact that Perec includes enough information about these

buildings for us to distinguish their transformations, reading

them as small narratives in their own right, is best exemplified

by the fact that his personification of Nos. 51, 53, and 55 as

survivors seems natural and apt. Regardless, these too are

condemned and turned into terrain vagues, loosely

translated as grey zones or wastelands. Following this narrative,

the implication of the cranes in the distance frames the

progress of the street with both the threat of gentrification and

imbues the writing with the sense that these are documents of

its transitory and abject decompositionrecording it in the

midst of decline as well as in its reconstruction. At the same

time, this is not a particularly nostalgic view of the street and

does not idealize a bygone past. The first entry on rue Vilin

undermines the facility of such a reading by emphasizing the

inevitable process of decline and suggests eternal return rather

than progress: The rue Vilin starts level with No 29 in the Rue

des Couronnes, opposite some new blocks of council flats,

recently built but with something old about them already.120

While these new buildings are only mentioned here, the repre-

sentation of the new as old already recalls Walter Benjamins

statement that we begin to recognize the monuments of the

bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.121 In

this respect, there is a dialectical process that recedes into a past

when Perecs dilapidated buildings were new and posits a futuredate when the new buildings will be condemned as well. This

idea is also found in a passage in rue de lAssomption where it

is difficult to tell whether [a small private house] is being done


54

119 Perec, The Rue

Vilin, 213.

120 Perec, The Rue

Vilin, 208.

121 Benjamin, The

Arcades Project, 13.

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up or demolished and is reiterated in Stances on Mabillon

where a black building [is] in the process of being renovated

or demolished.122 The visual signs of repair are the same as

those of destruction so that the material processes of preserva-

tion and obliteration are difficult, if not impossible to read, inthe moment of transformation they describe.

The over arching subject of the Lieux rels is architecture

that is consistently positioned in relation to its state of oblitera-

tion or permanence, though inevitably each building is

implicated in a process of constant transformation.123 What

is striking is the frequency and number of renovation and

building projects occurring throughout Paris over the course of

the Lieux project. In the context of a Paris transformed by la

speculation immobilire the rels texts become more than

merely descriptive scenes.124 These spaces are invested by the

writing with an opaque and permanent presence that is not

afforded them in reality. Four of the five published rels

textsGlances at Gait, Scenes in Italie, Comings and

Goings in the rue de lAssomption, and Notes on rue

Vilinare dominated by the mutability of architectural

structures. Like rue Vilin, described above, Glances at Gait

is framed by the following commentary, which opens the piece:

it is closed, not apparently for refurbishment; it looks more asif it has gone bankrupt or been sold (in anticipation of a

radical transformation of the quartier over the next few years):

the new expressway will wipe out the whole of rue

Vercingetorix.125

Indeed the diachronic arrangement of the entries follows this

anticipation through the process of its actualization. The

time worn buildings found there are gutted or replaced by

building sites and eventually new buildings. While the shops are

replaced by a giant future shopping centre, the rue

Vercingetorix becomes barely a memory.126 There is an

active historical materialism at play in the rels as each entry

posits a present which is not in transition, but in which time

stands still and has come to a stop.127 For Benjamin this

notion defines the present in which he himself is writing

history and in this sense it is useful to reiterate Perecs concept

of writing as the attempt to retain something, to cause some-

thing to survive, to wrest a few scraps from the void as it grows,

to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.128

Scenes in Italie outlines a similar narrative of urbandestruction. Perec enumerates shops and then admits:

This whole block, all the shops I just listed, including this cafe,

are due for demolition in the near future[...] The work has

55


123 Virilio, interview

by Enrique Walker, 16.

124 Neefs and Harte,

Georges Perec: Images,

133.


Gait, 44.

126 Ibid., 46, 51-52.

127 Walter Benjamin,

Theses on the

Philosophy of History,

in Illuminations, ed.

Hannah Arendt and

trans. Harry Zohn

(New York: Schoken

Books, 1968), 257.


Spaces, 91.

122 Perec, Comings


lAssomption, 59;

Stances onMabillon,73.

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already begun in rue Bobillot, and there is every reason to

suppose that it will be on a similar scale to that already under-

taken on the other side of the avenue.129

The liminal is given form in these descriptions, which figure

an abject, in-between state of architectural development asexemplified by the modes and tense in which they are written

about. For example, things are due for demolition or else

demolition has already begun. Inevitably, however this

architectural liminality leads to descriptions of the solidity that

comes after it: On the horizon, a new, white, prefabricated

building, two clusters of new buildings or in the case of rue

de lAssomption this liminality is replaced by an abundance of

advertisements for new flats often built to buyers

specifications.130

Andrew Leaks article Paris: Created and Destroyed

problematizes Perecs stated goal of documenting an aging

process by claiming that it would sound very odd to say that

the Italie quartier had aged since the commencement of the

grands travaux in the 1960s: leaving aside the aesthetics of the

result, it has been entirely renovated, made new, rejuvenated

even.131 Furthermore, he claims that such development

projects could have had as their motto: out with the old, in

with the new, so that rather than capturing an aging process,

Perec seems to have captured the galloping capitalization of

space.132 While Leak is right to register the capitalism involved

in the transformation of the spaces described in the Lieux

project, he underestimates the dialectical process by positing a

linear model of time and development necessarily negated by

capitals tendency to revolutionize and make new ad infinitum.

The brilliance of Perecs project is that it provides concrete

evidence of the cyclical passage of time neither privileging a

facile notion of progress nor romanticizing the outmoded.

Leaks framework reiterates the characteristic myopia of

capitalism that Perecs project has made salient: the dialectical

obverse of making new is the process of disintegration and

un-becoming that makes development projects necessary and

which also inevitably follows them. In cutting off the aging

process at the very point when these new buildings arrive,

Leaks critique cannot account for the desire for permanence

that this endless cycle creates. While the Lieux rels gives a

kind of permanence to architectural structures it does so only

in representation, preserving a present in writing, which isdisavowed in reality.


56


Italie, 41.

130

Perec, Comingsand Goings in Rue de

lAssomption, 62.

131 Leak, Paris:

Created and

Destroyed, 28.

132 Ibid.

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Conclusion: Fixing Fictions

While the diachronic organization of the published Lieux

rels demonstrates the dialectic process of un-becoming that

makes renovation projects necessary, it only achieves this sense

through an incremental temporal structure of writing that

lends temporary permanence to the architectural spaces

described. In situating the descriptions in a specific moment oftime, the rels document the dialectic at a standstill lending

permanence to what will ultimately be obliterated by regenera-

tion projects. The fantasy of permanence that is created by the

endless transformations of these architectural spaces is made

more explicit in Perecs fictional works Things and Life: a users

manual. In articula

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