‘An Attempt at Exhausting an Augmented Place in Paris’: Georges Perec, Observer-Writer of Urban Life, as a Mobile Locative Media User

This chapter describes a thought experiment in which a modern-day Georges Perec, equipped with a smartphone and actively committed to the use of mobile locative media such as Foursquare, would make an Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris today. The chapter argues that the initial project epitomized the way the neutral gaze of the onlooker is constitutive of urban public place and the way in which behavior in urban public places could thereby be described and accountable in generic terms intelligible to readers, themselves framed as strangers (in the sense of strangers in public places). This analysis is used as a baseline to show how a fictive, connected Perec would have to cope with the dual accessibility of places and people, both in the physical world and on screen, and especially the ‘parochialisation’ of place and individualization of digital personae online, in a way which would radically transform the initial literary project. This shows how the city augmented with mobile locative media might not be available to description in the same terms as the 20th century metropolis, and how a square in the augmented city might not be a public place in the same sense.

UnSearching for Rue Simon-Crubellier: Perec Out-of-Sync

Is it possible to bring something that does not exist into existence by searching for it? This is the ‘pataphysical’ question posed by artists Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda in relation to their 2004 work Searching for Rue Simon-Crubellier. These Australian artists play at tourists abroad, reading George Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi. Via a series of recorded meanderings through the streets of Paris, interviews with passers-by, civic officials and eventually Marcel Bénabou, the artists come close to tricking the world of actuality into believing in the existence of an imaginary place. The collision of the apparent ‘truth’ of video testimony and the fabulation of Perec’s fictional world is central to this work. This chapter proposes to dis-engage Neumark’s and Miranda’s Perec-inspired exploration of the real and imagined relations to location. Through a series of imposed constraints, inspired by the formalist construction of Searching for Rue Simon-Crubellier itself, this chapter will postulate leaving only a rhetorical that is the antithesis or dark matter of Perec’s novel: Is it possible to dematerialize something that does exist by unsearching for it?

The Afterlives of a Writer

When Perec died in 1982 he had published only 17 books and around 50 shorter pieces in periodicals and collective volumes. Over the past thirty years a dozen more books under Perec’s name have appeared—an unfinished novel, collections of published and unpublished articles and exercises, and in fine, a previously unpublished work written in youth and which the author himself believed lost. The ‘Perec corpus’ that we now read is therefore substantially larger and rather different from what Perec himself could have conceptualized as his contribution to literature. This chapter describes the evolution of the corpus over the last thirty years and seeks to understand what the ‘afterlife’ of a modern writer consists of—not just in terms of reception, use and appropriation, but in the very dynamic of retrospective publication.

Invoking the Oracle: Perec, Algorithms and Conceptual Writing

Although Georges Perec did not make use of computers in his writing, he employed algorithmic processes for structuring various formal and thematic elements of his texts. As a member of the Oulipo, he worked with others to develop new ways to write using constraints based on mathematics. In considering the effect of computational methods on writing, the Oulipo wanted to avoid the influence of chance without devising procedures that automated the writing process. Perec addressed this challenge by resorting to what he and other Oulipians, drawing on Lucretius, called the clinamen, a kind of randomizing function that promotes creativity through unpredictability. If constraints can be applied with a machine to writing (and many of the constraints used by Perec can be easily coded), the clinamen disrupts this computation and forces the writer to make unanticipated choices. Purposely thwarting the determinism of mechanical calculation, Perec’s irregular use of constraints on writing invokes what Alan Turing called an oracle, a resource outside the machine for performing uncomputable operations. Unlike a computer scientist who seeks to eliminate any need for an oracle by developing sufficient algorithms, Perec manipulates algorithms erratically in order to intervene in subverted computations and provide revelatory solutions that escape the machine.

Apoetic Life: Perec, Poetry, Pneumatology

For much of his life, it seems Georges Perec spurned poetry, identifying it with the sort of bourgeois sentimentalism that his own writing was constitutionally against. Once, however, he had been convinced by friends such as Harry Mathews that poetry was also exemplary of forms of compositional constraint, he returned to it with a vengeance — to the extent that his later work can even be seen to have received a new and decisive impetus from this realization. This chapter examines fragments from Shakespeare’s King Lear, Raymond Queneau’s oeuvre, and several works of Perec’s in order to identify key sets of operational constraints across their work. The differences and similarities between these operations are discussed, and consequences are drawn for contemporary poetry.

Georges Perec and the Significance of the Insignificant

Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of forty-five. What is he for us now, thirty-three years later, in the second decade of the twenty-first century? How do we make him our contemporary? To make Perec’s work part of our present-day involves (perhaps counter-intuitively) grasping his project in its historical specificity. It isn’t by cherry-picking useable aspects of the work that we will ensure some relevance to its afterlife: rather, it will be by recognising his larger project as a response to a particular historical situation. While Perec’s situation in the 1960s and 1970s in France is not ours, it still has a relation to our world. Perec becomes our contemporary in the act of seeing these relations, how a continuity of feeling and mood percolates through historical ruptures, and how changes in mood and feeling activate historical continuities. The central claim of this chapter is that a central aspect of Perec’s project was the latter’s attempt to register actuality, that is, that this project was a form of realism. Moreover, like many forms of realism, it was a quest and a question rather than an answer or solution.

The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog: Perec, Description and the Scene of Everyday Computer Use

This chapter takes up Georges Perec’s call to ‘question the habitual’ and applies it to the scene of everyday computer use. My questioning of habituated computer use is framed within a consideration, first, of human-computer interaction (HCI) research on skilled typing and, second, in relation to computer-based typing and everyday computer use. The central argument of this chapter is that Perec’s use of description offers an innovative method for generating new insights into the material contexts and conditions of media use, and can assist us in grasping the fuller significance of our ‘infraordinary’ techno-somatic interactions with keyboards and screens, and the places and situational contexts in which these interactions occur.

Georges Perec: A Player’s Manual

This chapter explores the well-established attribute of playfulness in Georges Perec’s work, a quality exemplified in his 1978 novel, Life A User’s Manual. In Perec’s oeuvre, Life is the culmination of experimentation with writing through play, games, rules, constraints and contingency. The themes and structure of the novel resonate with contemporary discussions of player agency, through the creative use of contingency and constraint in relation to an algorithmic structure, and this attribute of playfulness and experimentation in his work suggests an unintended and enduring afterlife for Perec’s work in Game Studies and critical literature on digital games. Perec’s work also flags an important and enduring issue for Game Studies: the contentious role that the digitally coded algorithm has in shaping player agency. This chapter begins by fleshing out the contexts from which Perec’s attentiveness to the ludic arose: his childhood and early experiences; his day job as an archivist and database designer; and his experimentation with constrained writing through his association with Oulipo. The chapter then proceeds to examine the writing process he used in Life, and how these processes are emphasised through the themes of the novel, particularly the failed attempts by the novel’s protagonist to create an overarching, programmatic vision of life.

The Architecture of Constraint and Forgetting

Georges Perec’s importance for architecture is twofold. First, Perec was interested in architectural space and the organization of the city. In his book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Perec attempted a systematic documentation of buildings, of apartment dwellers and the streets of Paris. Architectural students are referred to Species of Spaces because the techniques of observing or ‘stalking’ the ordinary that Perec developed in that text yield significant insights into how built space is composed and used. Perec’s stubborn empiricism, his attention to things and spaces-as-they-are is a useful antidote to much of the sensationalist and apocalyptic writing about the city, including that of his friend, Paul Virilio. Second, Perec approached writing with the deliberation of an architect approaching the problem of design. He established geometrical frameworks, numerical constraints and structural parameters. Perec’s practice of working with predetermined constraints should be a useful model for architects yet there is little evidence of engagement with this, despite the current practice of parametric architecture. This chapter will address architecture’s engagement with Perec, both in terms of what has been and what is yet to come.

Perec and the Politics of Constraint

This chapter argues that Perec’s engagement with the Oulipo at a crucial moment in the group’s history crystallizes the political potential of the Oulipian project, and determines the continuing significance of the group for today’s writers. Perec develops a mode of formal experiment that is perhaps ‘not so very anti’ when compared to the radically oppositional stance of the avant-garde, but which burrows beneath surfaces, exposing hidden determinisms and unexpected coincidences in the fabric of social life. Oulipian constraint thus operates, to borrow Jacques Rancière’s expression, as a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ that opens up the possibility of new forms of life.