From the infraordinary to the extraordinary: Georges Perec and domesticity (original) (raw)

2022, Arq-architectural Research Quarterly

The design and organisation of domestic environments is fraught with decision-making, a process often dictated by fashion. The resulting inhabitation of domestic spaces blends together the routine and the banal, with occasional forays into the extraordinary. The spaces of domesticity range from single rooms to elaborate and complex spatial arrangements in which spaces are adjoined to or nested in other spaces. The spaces of domesticity can be functionally prescribed or openended, they support furniture, behaviours, and narratives. The writer Georges Perec (1936-82) provides a way of looking at the domestic realm and ordinary life through his many interrelated writings on the subject. After developing an early reputation as a writer, Perec joined the experimental literary group known as Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) in 1967. Formed in 1960, the group brought together writers, mathematicians, and pataphysicians, inspired by the leadership of Raymond Queneau, and by older writers such as Lewis Carroll, Alfred Jarry, and Raymond Roussel. The well-known Italian writer Italo Calvino joined Oulipo in 1973. The group was devoted to rule-based and constrained writing techniques; they also exploited older forms of structured writing particularly in poetry. Often using mathematical methods, the Oulipo writers looked for textual potential and combinatory results. Their works are sometimes attacked as formalistic and mechanistic. Queneau states that the objectives of the group were: 'To propose new "structures" to writers, mathematical in nature, or to invent new artificial or mechanical procedures that will contribute to literary activity'. 1 Perec was one of the leading proponents of Oulipo methods, which is particularly evident in two novels, A Void (La Disparition) the book that famously does not employ the letter E (example of a lipogram, or the omission of a letter in a text) and his major work, Life A User's Manual (a clinamen, or a swerve away from convention). Beyond the formal methods that Perec employs, were the many approaches to capturing the ordinary, or the everyday, inspired by writers and theorists such as Roland Barthes. Perec asks: theory Presenting Georges Perec's work as a contemplation of domestic space, nested into the wider structures of the city, and supported by the countless, structuring microevents of the 'infraordinary'.