22 Place

31
Eugne Atget, Coin de la rue dAlexandre va dispartre pour le prolongement 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.
PERECS ALTERNATIVE TOPOGRAPHY

Figuring Permanence and the Ephemeral in Lieux
Kate Morris
...And with these the sense of the worlds concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and closer to us: of the world, 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
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 arrondissement of Paris. After the print was developed, he inscribed on the back va disparatre pour le prolongement de la rue Dussoubs.2 Atgets photographic career was generally comprised of the production of documents for artists, architects,
edited by Eva J. Friedberg
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1 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 79. 2 George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film Online Catalogue, http://www.eastman.org /fm/atget/htmlsrc/atget_ sumooo4.html#78:162 8:0004 (accessed December 10, 2007). Wherever possible I have tried to use sources already translated into English. Where this has not been possible I provide translations in the notes, following the source citation these are indicated by Trans. followed by my translation of the citation. Trans. will disappear for the elongation of Dussoubs street. 3 Molly Nesbitt,
Photography and History: Eugne Atget, in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot (Kln: Knemann, 1998), 402.
4 Auguste Blanquis
Lternit par les astres, cited in Walter Benjamin, D [Boredom, Eternal Return], in The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedeman, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
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 the twenty-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 Perecs Lieux (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 work Espces 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
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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 space that 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 critical linguistic 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 undertheorized 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 investigates has already been variously described as permanence and the ephemeral and preservation and obliteration. Though in
Harvard University, 2002), 114. Benjamin cites Blanqui as a precursor to Nietzsches idea of eternal return. The full citation reads as follows: All worlds are engulfed, one after another, in the revivifying flames, to be reborn from them and consumed by them once moremonotonous flow of an hourglass that eternally empties and turns itself over. The new is always old, and the old always new. ... Here, nonetheless, lies a great drawback: there is no progress, alas, but merely vulgar revisions and reprints.
5 Perec, Species of
Spaces, 90.
6 Ibid., 91. 7 On this see JeanJacques Poucel, The Arc of Reading in Georges Perecs La Clture, Yale French Studies 105 (2004): 133: writing is cast as a means of shoring up space; Jacques-Denis Bertharion, Lieux, ou la mmoire fragile, in Potique de Georges Perec: !une trace, une marque ou quelques signes.! (Paris: Librarie A.G.Nizet, 1998), 233: les lieux deviennent ainsi les centres organisateurs (les noyaux) de la mmoire: ils sont les grands tmoins dune histoire personelle, dont la
morris perecs alternative topography octopus
34
description permet de retenir des signes contre loubli; Jacques Neefs and Hans Harte, Georges Perec: Images (Paris: ditions du Seuil, Octobre, 1993), 124: Le retour aux !lieux! est une manire de loger la mmoire dans lespace.
8 On this see John Sturrock, Georges Perec, in The Word From Paris: Essays on Modern French Thinkers and Writers (London: Verso, 1998), 192: Like other victims of the Holocaust, Perec was obsessed with memory and with the forces of oblivion that threaten it. This helps to explain his commitment to registering the infraordinary and his belief that none of us give enough attention to what is truly daily in our lives, to the banal habits of settings and events of which these lives almost entirely consist; Warren Motte, The Work of Mourning, Yale French Studies 105, (2004): 56-71. 9 Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 117.
10 Perec, Species of
Spaces, 91.
the 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 subversive qualities 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 is offered 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 concerns about 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,
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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 read the texts in a way that has not been immediately apparent to literary scholars. It has also been useful to look at representations of space and place 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 infraordinary 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 the Lieux 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 permanence in La vie: mode demploi (Life: a users manual) and Les 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 Everyday In the posthumously published collection of essays, Penser/Classer (Think/Classify), Perec outlines the four modes of his writing as sociological, autobiographical, ludic, and
11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 19. 14 Ibid., 11.
Spaces, 91.
36
16 Georges Perec, Notes on What Im Looking for, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 137. 17 Paul Virilio, interview by Enrique Walker, Paul Virilio on Georges Perec, AA Files 45/46, (Winter 2001): 16. 18 Andrew Leak, Phago-citations: Barthes, Perec and the Transformation of Literature, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no.1 (Spring 1993): 62. 19 Perec,
Guettes,!Les Lettres nouvelles 1 (1977); Vues dItalie, Nouvelle Revue du psychanalyse 16 (1977); La rue Vilin, LHumanit, (11 novembre 1977); Alles et venues rue de lAssomption, Larc 76 (1979); Stations Mabillon, Action Potique 8 (1980).
20 Georges Perec,
interview by Kate Mortley, The Doing of Fiction,The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no.1. (Spring 1993): 27.
21 Because few of the

corresponding souvenirs have been published my research necessarily focuses on the diachronic representation of space in the rels texts.
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 sociological writing 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 infraordinary 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 [infraordinary] itself is a modest enough neologism, easily decipherable 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
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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 and the 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 interrogation 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 infraordinary 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, the way we spend our time, our rhythms.27 Here the physicality of building materials gradually gives way to the more abstract
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.
25 This is true in
French as well as English.
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.
38
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 urban architectural 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 topography that 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 everyday, is that his subjects should seem trivial and futile; thats exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions weve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.33 Certainly, the infra-ordinary stands in contradistinction to the journalistic tendency to privilege the exceptional,
28 Perec, Species of Spaces, 24.
29 Walter Benjamin C [Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris], in The Arcades Project, 83.
30 Howard Eiland and

Kevin McLaughlin, Translators Foreward, in The Arcades Project, ix.
31 Ibid., xii.
32 Adair, The
Eleventh Day, 105.
33 Perec, Approaches
to What?, 207.
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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 reproducing the ordinary or existing in opposition to the extraordinary.34 It participates in a kind of cultural phenomenological description that is particularly problematic in treatments 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 infraordinary, but it does not solve the problem of how these reflections 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 particularity 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 infraordinary, the background noise, the habitual? How should we speak of these common things?40
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 and London: 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.
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 speak about?), 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 by digging 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
40 Perec, Approaches to What?, 206.
41 Ibid.
40
42 Adair, The
Eleventh Day, 98.
43 Eleonore 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 the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 13-14.
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 meetings of the New Left.43 Indeed there are clear resonances between 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
45 Ibid.
46 Michael
Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 16.
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, enumerating them, in the most banal way possible, in the most precise way possible.
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 that exist 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 work Everyday 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.46 Understanding 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 and Life: a users manual. The rels 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 relationship 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:
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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
48 Perec,
Think/Classify, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 194
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 exhaustiveness 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 attempt suggests 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 representation: 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 of parenthetical statements that mediate description by providing personal commentary and background information that gestures beyond what is immediately available for vision. This
49 Sheringham, Attending to the Everyday: Blanchot, Lefebvre, Certeau, Perec, French Studies LIV, no. 2 (2000): 194. 50 Perec, 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 quotidien 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.
42
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 a degree 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 Perecs Lieux 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 afterwards.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 in La Clture, film in Les Lieux dune Fugue and sound in his radio program recorded in Carrefour Mabillon. Leak makes the connection between the Lieux rels and a photographic record because of their specificity within a particular moment indicated at the beginning 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
56 Perec, Comings and Goings in rue de lAssomption.
57 Ibid. 58 Perec, Stances on Mabillon, trans. Andrew Leak, AA Files 45/46 (Winter 2001). 59 Georges Perec, Scenes in Italie, trans. Andrew Leak, AA Files 45/46 (Winter 2001), 34. 60 Bertharion. Lieux, ou la mmoire fragile, 240. 61 Philippe LeJeune, Lieux, in La Mmoire et loblique (Paris: P.O.L., 1991), 187. By contrast, LeJeune has found that the !souvenirs! were never submitted to any editorial revision; !aucune rature, aucune ajout; le premier 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 and Destroyed, AA Files 45/46 (Winter 2001), 31.
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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 its endlessly 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 Queneaus Loci Soli and 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 in Ethnography, 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 reading them. 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 is important, 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
63 Ibid., 28.
64 Stephen Clucas,
Cultural Phenomenology and the Everyday, Critical Quarterly 21, 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: descriptions of locations, streets, public squares, crossroads, written at regular intervals and subsequently sealed in envelopes.
66 Ibid., 141. 67 Ibid., 143, 167.
68 Howard Becker,
Georges Perecs experiments in social description, Ethnography 2, 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 the Lieux we have to attune ourselves to the rhythm of things, 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 the Lieux 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 a yellow 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 certain similarity; 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
70 Ibid., 266.
71 Perec, Glances at
Gait, and Scenes in Italie, trans. Andrew Leak, AA Files 45/46 (Winter 2001), 50 and 35 respectively.
Maix Mayer, delirious landscape, 2006. Photograph, 48.8x67.7 in. Courtesy of Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin.
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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 rels writings 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 I suspect 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
72 Perec,
Think/Classify, 194.
73 Adair, The
Eleventh Day, 99.
74 Motte, The Work

of Mourning, 59.
46
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 Of Lieux, Lejeune has said that il est le tombeau dun amour, une immense 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 these Lieux and ones daily habit of walking the same streets and routes, 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.77 Jacques-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 of Lieux. Indeed the idea of sedimentation 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 the absence 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
75 Sheringham, Everyday Life, 259. 76 LeJeune, Lieux, 146. Trans. it is a lovers tomb, a huge pyramid constructed around a secret chamber, the location of a battle between life and death.
77 Ibid., 150. 78 Bertharion. Lieux, ou la mmoire fragile, 231. 79 Virilio, interview by Enrique Walker, 15.
80 Sigmund Freud
Delusions 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 in Delusions and Dreams in Jensens Gradiva for the psychoanalytic model.
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resolve. If Freudian psychoanalysis can be brought to bear productively on the Lieux 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 the Lieux project in a psychoanalytic model may be through 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 most predominant example of the abject. If abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death, then Perecs descriptions of architectural space make the case literally through documenting 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 contemporary experience of any repressed material and they go one further by emphasizing the renewal projects that emerge in these abject spaces.86 If Lieux 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 an abundance of temporal modes used to describe the buildings: No 1 is still there, A whole block of houses has been knocked down, the new expressway will wipe out the whole rue, or
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 Pleasure Principal, 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. In doing 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 in writing, 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 statements about 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
88 Neefs, Georges
Perec, Ma Ville, Magazine Littraire 332, (1995): 60.
89 Virilio, interview by
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 in Italie begins by acknowledging there is no spot, apart from the roof of a block of flats, from where one can get a satisfactory 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 is described, 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 repeated again from another caf in which Perec describes a yellow curtain that blocks his vision of the square between rue Bobillot and 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 he describes 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 advertisements 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
93 Perec, Comings
and Goings in Rue de lAssomption, 65.
94 Perec, Scenes in
Italie, 34.
95 Ibid., 35.
50
96 Paul Virilio, The
Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 37.
dissolving view [...] all is calm, and yet: this world as we see it is passing away.96
97 Ibid., 47.
98 Perec, Stances on Mabillon, 70.
99 Perec, Scenes in
Italie, and Comings and Goings in rue de lAssomption, 63.
Perecs is a characteristically unmotivated vision that enables such meanings to emerge. Understandably, therefore, Perec doesnt seem particularly bothered by these substitutions and continues 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, drifting from 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 the previous 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 from view is repeated in different ways throughout the texts:
A couple sitting at a table outside block my view.100
100 Perec, Stances on

Mabillon, 74.
...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
101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 72-73.
With increasing frequency Perec finds productive ways of dealing 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
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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 to introduce 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 of observation in order to claim that there are five billiard tables in the caf: he cant see them, but he can hear the characteristic 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. In Attempt 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 of Scenes 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
103 Perec, Stances on

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 for attention 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 therefore 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 the multiple 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, newspaper 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 the advertisement from any local, material space. In fact where buildingslocations for transactionare demolished, hoarding boards take their place and advertisements invade. The
107 de Certeau, Walking in the City, in The Practice of Everyday Life, 91. 108 Bertharion, Lieux, ou la mmoire fragile, 243.
109 Perec, Glances at Gait, 51. 110 Bertharion, Lieux,

ou la mmoire fragile, 244. Trans. Each slogan or poster constitutes a direct citation 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 techniques.112 The suturing of these texts within the space of the hoarding board, matched also in the rel, represents urban space 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 de lAssomption 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 regeneration. 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 been made 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
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 and Goings in Rue de lAssomption.

Italie, 37.
117 Perec, The Rue

Vilin.
118 Neefs and Harte,

Georges Perec: Images, 141. Trans. in the process of disappearing.
54
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 transformations.119 What is more surprising than the manner in which this woman assumes the inevitable fate of the street is the way that the 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 the ground 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 representation 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 future date 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
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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 preservation and obliteration are difficult, if not impossible to read, in the 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 obliteration 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 as if 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
122 Perec, Comings and Goings in Rue de lAssomption, 59; Stances on Mabillon,73.
123 Virilio, interview by Enrique Walker, 16.
124 Neefs and Harte,

Georges Perec: Images, 133.

Gait, 44.
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 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.128 Scenes in Italie outlines a similar narrative of urban destruction. 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
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. 128 Perec, Species of
Spaces, 91.
56
Italie, 41.
already begun in rue Bobillot, and there is every reason to suppose that it will be on a similar scale to that already undertaken on the other side of the avenue.129
130 Perec, Comings and Goings in Rue de lAssomption, 62.
131 Leak, Paris: Created and Destroyed, 28. 132 Ibid.
The liminal is given form in these descriptions, which figure an abject, in-between state of architectural development as exemplified 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 is disavowed in reality.
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Fredrich Kunath, Untitled, 2006. Enamel, varnish on wood, and sheet metal, 233.6x25.5.x92 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. Joshua White.
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 of time, the rels document the dialectic at a standstill lending permanence to what will ultimately be obliterated by regeneration 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 articulating this desire in the context of fiction, the tacit implication is that permanence is fictional in itself. Things presents a young couple living beyond their means, desiring a lifestyle of bourgeois luxury that is unavailable to them and is arguably impossible for their generation. However, alongside their endless accumulation of commodities, Things insists on an attendant desire for permanence and solidity.
58
133 Perec, Les Choses: un histoire des annes soixante (Paris!: Ren Julliard, 1965), 90. Trans. Sometimes, they would have liked that everything remained, that nothing moved. 134 Ibid., 98. Trans.
They dreamed of offices, of fixed locations, of regular days, of defined status.
Ils auraient voulu, parfois, que tout dur, que rien bouge.133 Ils revaient de bureaux, de places fixes, de journes regulires, de statut defini.134 Ils auraient aime la solidit, la certitude, la voie limpide vers le futur. Ils taient attentifs tous les signes de la permanence: ils voulaient tre riches.135
135 Ibid., 96. Trans. They would have liked solidity, certitude, the clarity of the future. They were attentive to all the signs of permanence: they wanted to be rich. 136 Ibid., 148. Trans. in the rubble of a very old dream, in formless debris.
137 Perec, Life: a users

manual, trans. David Bellos (London: Harvill, 1992), 3.
138 Sheringham, Everyday Life, 283. 139 Perec, Life: a users

manual, 127.
140 Ibid., 129.
Here, fixity and permanence are figured in an unrealized and unrealizable conditional tense, as something desired in the past and which is therefore disavowed in the present. Interestingly, in the last example acquiring permanence is imagined as the direct result of having wealth. One of the more provocative implications that can be divined from Les Choses is that while consumer culture supposedly desires an endless stream of new products, the unconscious desire attendant to these accumulations is a world in which nothing changes, in which a calme plat, dternit settles in. But the characters never realize this and the novel closes on them, lost dans les decombres dun trs vieux rve, dans des debris sans forme.136 In Life: a users manual the desire for permanence is found throughout. However, it is most explicitly represented by the narrator figure Valne, who as the oldest resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, narrates the accumulated past of the building. It is worth noting that Valne is most often figured On the Stairs which, in the fluid movements of the inhabitants of the buildings, is much like the space of the everyday. The stairwell is described as a neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly resounds.137 Valnes idea of painting a crosssectional picture of the building with all of its inhabitants in their apartments among their possessions seems to be the fictional analogue of Perecs Lieux project. Michael Sheringham succinctly articulates the dynamic of permanence and the ephemeral as figured by Valne because his dream of preservation and perpetuation is the obverse of his nightmarethe dark fantasy of the houses slow decline and final destruction.138 In chapter twenty-eight Valnes dream is represented as a desire for fixity: sometimes he had the feeling that time had been stopped, suspended, frozen around he didnt know what expectation.139 The expectation is, of course, that one day, above all, the whole house will disappear, the street and the quartier will die.140 The imbrications of permanence and the ephemeral become a self-perpetuating
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system of eternal return. Here a connection should be made to de Certeaus architect who without knowing it is working toward the political freezing of the place and [eventually] there is nothing left for him to do.141 Yet this promise of the architect and his redevelopment projects is never fully realized because it constantly posits an abject, perpetual un-becoming that makes such projects necessary. The obsolescence attendant to even the newest buildings ensures that there is something old about them already which re-creates the initial impulse to reconstruct.142 Significantly for Perec, resistance to capitalism, consumer culture and the promise of the fashionable is not found in the outmoded or the unfashionable. Rather it can only be what is present, what is there, anchored, permanent, resistant, inhabited. The object and its memory, being and history.143 Recording and rehearsing this tenuous permanence, making it visible and palpable, is the goal of Perecs writing of space and place.
141 de Certeau, The

Practice of Everyday Life, 128.
142 Perec, The Rue

Vilin, 208.
143 Perec, Je suis n,

129.

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31

PERECS ALTERNATIVE TOPOGRAPHY

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morris perecs alternative topography octopus

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21 Because few of the

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24 Gilbert Adair, The

26 Adair, The Eleventh

morris perecs alternative topography octopus

28 Perec, Species of Spaces, 24.

30 Howard Eiland and

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34 Adair, The Eleventh

35 Perec, The Work of

40 Perec, Approaches to What?, 206.

morris perecs alternative topography octopus

47 Neefs and Harte,

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52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 73. 54 Ibid. 55 Bertharion, Lieux,

morris perecs alternative topography octopus

56 Perec, Comings and Goings in rue de lAssomption.

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66 Ibid., 141. 67 Ibid., 143, 167.

69 Sheringham, Everyday Life, 122.

morris perecs alternative topography octopus

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74 Motte, The Work

morris perecs alternative topography octopus

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82 Ibid., 68. 83 Julia Kristeva,

84 Ibid., 8. 85 Rather than move

87 Walter Benjamin H [The Collector], in The Arcades Project, 207, 211.

morris perecs alternative topography octopus

92 Perec, The Rue

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morris perecs alternative topography octopus

98 Perec, Stances on Mabillon, 70.

100 Perec, Stances on

101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 72-73.

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103 Perec, Stances on

104 Virilio, Aesthetics

105 Perec, Glances at

106 Ibid., 49.

morris perecs alternative topography octopus

109 Perec, Glances at Gait, 51. 110 Bertharion, Lieux,

111 Ibid., 245. Trans.

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112 Perec, Scenes in

113 Sydney Levy,

114 Georges Perec,

115 Perec, Comings and Goings in Rue de lAssomption.

116 Perec, Scenes in

117 Perec, The Rue

118 Neefs and Harte,

morris perecs alternative topography octopus

119 Perec, The Rue

120 Perec, The Rue

121 Benjamin, The

123 Virilio, interview by Enrique Walker, 16.

124 Neefs and Harte,

125 Perec, Glances at