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Posthumous News: The Afterlives of Georges Perec

Justin Clemens and Rowan Wilken

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

Georges Perec is considered one of the most significant twentieth century writers. While perhaps best known for his first breakthrough novel Things and his monumental Life A Users Manual and perhaps ... More

Georges Perec is considered one of the most significant twentieth century writers. While perhaps best known for his first breakthrough novel Things and his monumental Life A Users Manual and perhaps his involvement in the Oulipo group, over the course of his writing career Perec produced, in Alison James’s words, ‘a body of work that is astonishing in its breadth and originality’. Perec’s stated ambition was to ‘write every kind of thing that it is possible for a man to write’, from acrostics and palindromes, to crosswords and revealing parodies of academic journal articles. The sheer diversity of Perec’s own output and the richness and insight of many of his non-fiction essays has provided scholars, writers and artists with a veritable toolbox of ideas for adaptation and wider application. This chapter gives a brief account of Perec’s life and extraordinary literary output. It develops the argument that Perec was, in key respects, ahead of his time and that many of his literary experiments were prescient in the way that they speak to and shed significant light on a range of contemporary issues and debates.Less

Georges Perec’s Enduring Presence in the Visual Arts

Mireille Ribière

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

A former student of Roland Barthes, Perec rejected the dogmatism of the French avant-garde and the oppressive nature of theory in the late 1960s and 1970s, while dismissing the myth of the inspired ... More

A former student of Roland Barthes, Perec rejected the dogmatism of the French avant-garde and the oppressive nature of theory in the late 1960s and 1970s, while dismissing the myth of the inspired artist and upholding those aspects of modernism that enabled art to assert itself as constructed intentionality. When he reconsidered the issue of the subject in its relationship to history and society, to the real, and to time and space, he managed to steer clear of expressivity, psychology and conventional mimesis. The co-existence of autobiographical and sociological concerns with formal constraints that both challenge and integrate the notion of chance, as well as his particular brand of formal pre-composition, which does not exclude humour, playfulness and immediacy, constitute further aspects of his enduring presence in the visual arts. This chapter argues that Perec practised literature both as a craft and as a form of conceptual art, and examines how the fundamental questions he raised, the conversations he initiated and the various methodologies he proposed have made, and continue to make him relevant to contemporary artists.Less

Georges Perec: A Player’s Manual

Thomas Apperley

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

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 ... More

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.Less

The Afterlives of a Writer

David Bellos

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

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 ... More

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.Less

Invoking the Oracle: Perec, Algorithms and Conceptual Writing

Mark Wolff

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

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 ... More

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. Less

Perec and the Politics of Constraint

Alison James

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

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 ... More

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.Less

Georges Perec and the Significance of the Insignificant

Ben Highmore

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

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 ... More

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.Less

‘Things That Should Be Short’: Perec, Sei Shōnagon, Twitter and the Uses of Banality

Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

This chapter reconsiders Twitter as a ‘machinery that produces banality’ and the criticisms this attracts, by approaching it via the work of Georges Perec, and his enduring interest in the musings of ... More

This chapter reconsiders Twitter as a ‘machinery that produces banality’ and the criticisms this attracts, by approaching it via the work of Georges Perec, and his enduring interest in the musings of the late tenth century Japanese courtesan, Sei Shōnagon and her The Pillow Book. Perec identified in her work two specific elements that became crucial in his own writing: (1) an attentiveness to the inner workings of the everyday; and, (2) an appreciation of the uses and value of list-making. ‘Sei Shonagon does not sort; she lists and begins again. One theme sets off one list, of things or of anecdotes,’ he writes. In this chapter, we aim to present an account of both these strands of Perec’s work in order to suggest that, through them, we can gain insight into why the banalities of the everyday, as experienced via Twitter in particular, are both engaging and vitally significant. Less

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

Rowan Wilken

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

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, ... More

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.Less

Apoetic Life: Perec, Poetry, Pneumatology

Justin Clemens

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

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 ... More

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.Less

What Perec Was Looking For: Notes on Automation, the Everyday and Ethical Writing

Caroline Bassett

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

This chapter considers Perec’s interest in the infra-ordinary, on the one hand, and questions of the machine and automation, on the other. Investigating different ways in which the micro-scale ... More

This chapter considers Perec’s interest in the infra-ordinary, on the one hand, and questions of the machine and automation, on the other. Investigating different ways in which the micro-scale emerges in Perec’s work raises questions around life in relation to (computational) machines – particularly machines that are getting smaller (at once more discreet, and less discrete) – that are becoming ever more important today. This chapter examines the complex relationship between questions of life (the infra-ordinary life with its embedded habits) and questions concerning classification – here understood as a form of automation, as they are raised (and develop very differently) in Perec’s work on the self, the space, the object, and the language game.Less

The Architecture of Constraint and Forgetting

Sandra Kaji-O’Grady

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

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 ... More

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.Less

Vertical Travel, Listing and the Enumeration of the Everyday

Charles Forsdick

in What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st- Century French Literature and Thought

 Drawing on the work of Georges Perec, and focusing on other authors such as Julio Cortazar and François Maspero, the chapter begins with an analysis of the phenomenon of vertical travel. It explores ... More

 Drawing on the work of Georges Perec, and focusing on other authors such as Julio Cortazar and François Maspero, the chapter begins with an analysis of the phenomenon of vertical travel. It explores the ways in which the disruption of the traditional (horizontal) axis of the journey provides access to often unseen aspects of the everyday. In discerning a poetics of such a practice, the chapter privileges processes of listing and enumeration. Perec's use of observational catalogues is seen in particular as a challenge to any understanding of the list as a ‘subsumptive’ form that identifies a thing by subordinating it under a particular category. Instead, he demonstrates how lists may articulate what is observed in very different ways: arranging, combining, and ordering words, observations and things sequentially not only subverts categorical hierarchies, but also has positively generative qualities in creating new epistemological orderings. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the power of the list to subvert established orders of knowledge and to suggest alternative means of making sense of the everyday.  Less

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

Christian Licoppe

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

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 ... More

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.Less

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

Darren Tofts

in The Afterlives of Georges Perec

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 ... More

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? Less

The destruction of art

Jared Pappas-Kelley

in Solvent Form: Art and destruction

Chapter one surveys examples from news articles, books, and exhibitions that take the destruction of art as their starting point, and attempts to gather these approaches and accounts as a framework ... More

Chapter one surveys examples from news articles, books, and exhibitions that take the destruction of art as their starting point, and attempts to gather these approaches and accounts as a framework for the book. Solvent form looks to recent examples such as critic Jonathan Jones’s concept of a Museum of Lost Art—a place where all the destroyed and lost artworks might hang—poet Henri Lefebvre’s book The Missing Pieces, the Tate Modern’s recent virtual exhibition Gallery of Lost Art, as well as literary parallels taken from Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Georges Perec’s character Bartlebooth in Life A User’s Manual. From here, it considers Georges Bataille’s concept of the negative miracle from The Accursed Share in relation to thoughts from Giorgio Agamben and Paul Virilio, while providing examples such as Rachel Whiteread’s House, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, and Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York.Less

Perec and Mathews: Translation and Analytic Philosophy in the South Seas

Dennis Duncan

in The Oulipo and Modern Thought

This chapter looks at a pair of related short stories, one by Perec, one by Mathews. Both concern South Seas ethnographers who stumble upon languages with highly limited vocabularies. These stories ... More

This chapter looks at a pair of related short stories, one by Perec, one by Mathews. Both concern South Seas ethnographers who stumble upon languages with highly limited vocabularies. These stories draw on the analytic philosopher W. V. O. Quine’s example of the gavagai language, by which he illustrates the indeterminacy of translation, and Perec and Mathews use their stories to similar ends. Perec’s story, from his novel Life A User’s Manual, encodes allusions to Wittgenstein’s ‘slab’ language from Philosophical Investigations, as well as to Borges’s famous Chinese encyclopaedia, in order to reflect on how the categories by which we understand the world, and which are so important to translation, are culturally specific. Mathews’s story meanwhile ends with a riposte to Quine: pure translation may not be possible, but we do as well as we can do.Less

Space

Robin Holt

in Judgment and Strategy

The French writer Georges Perec set out to ascertain everything that happened in a Parisian square. For three days Perec noted all the events he could, especially the incidental, and accidental. He ... More

The French writer Georges Perec set out to ascertain everything that happened in a Parisian square. For three days Perec noted all the events he could, especially the incidental, and accidental. He exhausted himself. The chapter discusses the story as exemplifying the inevitable limits to knowledge, and hence to strategy if all strategy concerns itself with is the production and use of knowledge. Measuring, analysing, and depicting a space (environment, market, territory, industry, theatre) does not have to be of the typically measured form, and even when such forms are used, such as structured representational techniques like grids, meaning is carried way beyond the statement of ‘facts’. By understanding the factual reading of space critically, the chapter suggests strategy exponents might envisage using multiple forms of organizing.Less

Managing the Consumers (1): Motivational Analysts

in Consumer Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature

In Georges Perec's 1965 novel Les Choses, the protagonists acquire names only in Chapter 3 after they become employed as ‘psychosociologues’. In this capacity, they carry out ‘études de motivation’ ... More

In Georges Perec's 1965 novel Les Choses, the protagonists acquire names only in Chapter 3 after they become employed as ‘psychosociologues’. In this capacity, they carry out ‘études de motivation’ or motivational studies whereby they analyse public's attitudes to products at a subconscious or unconscious level. The aims and methods of motivational analysis were exposed by Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders, while its ominous implications were denounced by Gustave Le Clézio in Les Géants. The protagonists' acquisition of their own names is connected to buying fashionable product names and brand names in named shops. In a consumer society, identity and brand identity are closely related. Les Choses tackles the problem of self-fulfilment in a mass society driven by commerce and consumption.Less