An Attempt to Approach a Void, Or Georges Perec, Cause Commune, and the Infraordinary

An Attempt to Approach A Void, or Georges Perec, Cause Commune, and the Infraordinary

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Citation Liao, Proey. 2021. An Attempt to Approach A Void, or Georges Perec, Cause Commune, and the Infraordinary. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37367846

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Proey Liao

Bachelor of Architecture, University of Southern California, 2016

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master in Design Studies History and Philosophy of Design and Media

At the Harvard University Graduate School of Design

May 2021

The author hereby grants Harvard University permission to reproduce and distribute copies of this Final Project, in whole or in part for educational purposes.

Signature of the Author ______Proey Liao Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Certified by ______Ed Eigen Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape and Architecture Harvard University Graduate School of Design

• A N AT T E M P T • TO A P P ROAC H • A VO I D •

• G E O R G E S P E R E C • C AU S E C O M M U N E • I N F R AO R D I N A RY • No. 54 February 1971

The masters thesis

It might have been at Jean Duvignaud’s or maybe at Paul Virilio’s.

I notice a mimeographed work on the table and open it. It’s a masters thesis—devoted to [the infraordinary] it seems—written by [P.] while she was in [Harvard University Graduate School of Design]. I hadn’t heard about it, but I am at once surprised and pleased that she did something during her long stay.

. There is a particular detail: the title page was composed by [Ed Eigen] on an IBM 307 (let’s say).

I remember, on that note, that Pierre G. had once spoken to me of automatic composition.

This might take place at a cocktail party where things like this make for good conversation.*

*Original text from Georges Perec, La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams. Translated by Daniel Levin Becker. 1973. Reprint, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2012, 87. Text in brackets replaced by author. • AN ATTEMPT • TO APPROACH • A VOID •

Georges Perec, Cause commune, and the infraordinary by Proey Liao at Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Advised by Ed Eigen

Master of Design Studies History and Philosophy of Design and Media Master of Architecture II 2021 • Abstract • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • i •

In February 1973, Jean Duvignaud, By choosing interdisciplinary essays to The following thesis is an attempt to Paul Virilio, and Georges Perec intro- include in Cause commune, with a vast approach the infraordinary not only duced the infraordinary in the fifth issue array of subject matters, the editorial as the subject of exploration, but as of their small journal, Cause commune. team demonstrates the infraordinary is a method of writing itself. The aim of The infraordinary subsequently became this thesis is to trace the infraordinary attributed mostly to Georges Perec, to conceptually through the immediate describe his keenness for the everyday textual context of Cause commune issue in his prolific literary works.Infra -, a No. 5, the work of Georges Perec, and spatial preposition, meaning under or the work of Cause commune’s other con- below, modifiesthe ordinary, or every- tributors. It is not an origin story, but day life, in a call to action “to question a text enumerating ideas and forms of that which seems to have ceased forever thought on everyday life that coalesce in to astonish us.” Such a simple, local act this journal. By excavating what is below can have immense consequences. Rather everyday life, the infraordinary shows than removing “the everyday” from its just how unfamiliar we are with every- context in order to defamiliarize it, as day life in the first place as we constantly Cause commune critiques of mass media, not just applicable to the literary, socio- come up against and avoid a void, and the infraordinary studies the context logical, and architectural disciplines, but how we are equipped to do something itself, a seemingly blank space, or void, formulate an art of living upon a blank about it—through creative acts and life upon which the everyday is written. background. itself. • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • ii • • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • iii • Repères et Repaires* • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • iv •

JEAN DUVIGNAUD, “CODE AND GEORGES PEREC, “APPROACHES PAUL VIRILIO, “THE DEFEAT OF HYSTERIA” TO WHAT?” THE FACTS” • • • 2 5 7

MARC PAILLET, “THE JOURNALIST AND THEIR VILÉM FLUSSER, “TO BED” LANGUAGES” • • 19 10

ANNIE GUEDEZ, “THE EVERYDAY PIERRE FRESNAULT-DERUELLE, MARSHALL MCLUHAN, “THE BRICOLEU R” “THE QUOTIDIAN IN STRIPS” FUTURE OF THE BOOK” • • • 27 32 45 Repères et Repaires* • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • v •

CODE HABIT FACTS

COMPTE RENDU MEMORY

COLLAGE REPETITION FIGURE Repères et Repaires* • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • vi •

ARRIÈRE-PLAN BACKGROUND HISTORY

JOURNAL BED / CEILING

ISLAND MARGIN BOOK Repères et Repaires* • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • vii •

CELLARS INFRAORDINARY OBLIQUE

SOLIDARITY INTERSUBJECTIVITY

DIFFERENCE RELATIVITY ARRIÈRE-PLAN • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • viii •

REPÈRES ET REPAIRES* bibliography • • • xi • xviii • practice • • • 5 • 7 • 8 • 25 • 27 • 42 • description • • • 6 • 13 • 48–49 • code • • • 2 • 3 • 31–32 • 41 • 48 • inventory • • • 6 • 34 • reading • • • 7 • 19 • 21–22 • 24–26 • habit • • • 6 • 31–33 • 42 • mass media • • • i • xiii • 41–42 • 48–49 37 • 47 • mystified consciousness • • •29 –32 • • oblique • • • 7 • 8 • 28 • myth • • • xv • xvi • 27–31 • 34 • Sociological Art • • • 38 • 46–47 • 49 • other • • • xi • xiii–xviii • 2 • 3 • 5 • 7 • constraint • • • xix • 5 • 33 • 36–37 • spectacle • • • xiii • xv • 8 • 19 • 10–12 • 15–18 • 20–24 • 28 • 30–32 • extraordinary • • • xv • 5 • 15 • mediums 35–36 • 40 • 42 • 46–48 • abnormal • • • xi • book • • • xiv • xvii • anonymous • • • 7 • 23 • 29 • 32 • indifference • • • xi • 26 • 29–32 • 38 • comic strip • • • xviii • 32–36 • 38 • 40 difference • • • 13 • 17 • 27 • 29 • 31 • disillusionment • • • xiii • 4 • 34 • 36 • parachutiste • • • 11–14 • 17 • 28 • 37 • immigrant • • • 7 • 28 • 31–32 • 48 • 48 • marginal • • • 28–29 • 31 • 48 • sleepwalking • • • 22 • 25 • 27 • 32 • mirror • • • 25 • 33–34 • 42 • 46 • infraordinary • • • x–xi • xv–xix • 2–5 • prejudice • • • xiii • 31 • 6–7 • 8–10 • 11–19 • 20–27 • 28–32 • precise 34–45 • 46–49 • particular • • • xvii • recesses and basements • • • xiii • singularity • • • 2 • 6 • cellar • • • 2 • 3 • 28 • 31–32 • 37 • question • • • xvi • 6 • 46–47 • dialogue • • • xviii • 7 • 15 • 20–21 • labyrinths • • • 23 • 25 • 28 • 34 • 23–24 • 32 • 38 • 42 • 45 • 47 • net • • • xviii • 11 • 20–21 • 29 • 46–47 endotic • • • 7 • 12 • 15 • 20–21 • 28 • • 50 • 52–53 • • 47–48 • 30 • 32 • 42 • puzzle • • • 37 • 49 • newspaper • • • 5 • 7 • 10–11 • 18–19 • enquête • • • 12–13 • 17 • 18 • 20 • 48 • truth • • • 4 • 6–7 • 16–17 • 23 • 26 • 29 • 33–34 • 38 • 42 • 45 • imaginary • • • xii • 12–13 • 16 • 33 • journal • • • 5–6 • 10 • 13 • 17 • 25 • 38 47 • investigate • • • xiii • xv • 2 • 4 • 11 • • 49 • paper • • • 10 • 23 • 37–38 • 46 • 13 • 15 • 32 • diary • • • 23 • method mutual reification • • •20 • 24 • journal intime • • • 25 • an attempt to approach • • • xiv • xvi • oscillation • • • 21 • 48 • journalism • • • xviii • 8 • 13 • 17–18 • 35 • 49 • realism • • • 4 • 6 • 8 • 10–11 • 15–19 • 48 • bricoleur • • • 28–30 • 21 • 25 • 27 • 32–33 • 38 • 42 • 47–48 list • • • xviii • 6 • 26 • • • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • ix •

revisionism • • • xii • xv • 8 • 11 • 14 • blank • • • i • 5 • 23–24 • 27 • 29 • 31 • LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 27 • 34 • 36–38 • 40–42 • 46–49 • BY PAGE NUMBER sign • • • 31 • 40–42 • 47 • ecriture blanche • • • 16 • 18–19 • insignificance • • • xvii • 4 • 26 • 31 • 37 • ii Cause commune covers. Denöel/ 37 • 42–43 • nihilism • • • xiv • Gonthier. Bourdin, Alain, Chris- significance • • • xi • 4 • 7 • 33 • 41 • non-place • • • 30 • 48 • tine Brunet, Jean Duvignaud, Pas- solidarity • • • vii • xi • 6 • 15–17 • 19 • silence • • • 7 • 17 • 24–25 • 31 • 38 • cal Lainé, Francois Maillet, Georges 31 • 46 • 47 • Perec, and Paul Virilio, eds. “Cause empathy • • • 7 • years Commune.” Cause Commune, no. general line • • • 5 • 12 • 14 • 17 • 27 • 1968 • • • xii–xv • 8 • 10 • 12–13 • 22 • 1-9 (May 1972 to February 1974). La ligne générale • • • 11 • 27 • 45 • 48 • iii Cause commune cover. Denöel/Gon- space thier. Bourdin, Alain, Christine Brunet, arrière-plan • • • 2–4 • 32 • 45–47 • Jean Duvignaud, Pascal Lainé, Fran- ceiling • • • 23 • 25–26 • cois Maillet, Georges Perec, and Paul floor • • •8 • 20–21 • 27 • 32 • 46 • Virilio, eds. “Cause Commune.” Cause white space • • • 38 • Commune, no. 5 (February 1973):1. things bed • • • xviii • 6 • 19 • 20–25 • 38 • 42 xviii Cause commune inside cover. • 48 • Denöel/Gonthier. Bourdin, et al. intersubjectivity • • • 20–21 • 23 • 32 “Cause Commune.” Cause Com- • 43 • mune, no. 5 (February 1973):1. things that surround me • • • 6 • 19 • 28 • 31 • 45–46 • 51 • void • • • xiv • xvi • 4–5 • 12–13 • 17 • 1973 • • • x–xi • xiv–xvii • 2 • 7 • 10 • 3 Diagram of “fragment of a grid of levels 19 • 24 • 38 • 49 • 52 • 56 • 19 • 25 • 27 • 32 • 38 • 40 • 45 • in everyday life.” Henri Lefebvre. in Cri- abyss • • • 19 • 21–25 • 30 • 38 • 42 • 50–55 • tique of Everyday Life II: Foundations 46–48 • for a Sociology of the Everyday. Trans- avoid • • • xi • xiii • xvii • 32 • lated by John Moore. 1961. Reprint, escape • • • 4 • 25 • London ; New York: Verso, 2002, 125. background • • • xviii • 2–5 • 7 • 22 • 27 • 32 • 36 • 38 • 45–46 • 4 Cause commune inside cover. Fred Forest. in Bourdin, et al. • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • x •

“Cause Commune.” Cause Com- WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2009, 183. 41 Top: “Figure 1: a Map of the Ocean.” mune, no. 5 (February 1973):1, 1. epigraph in Georges Perec. “Species 35 Apartment building illustration. Saul of Spaces.” In Species of Spaces and 19 Illustration of “Du lit.” Fred For- Steinberg. in The Art of Living. New Other Pieces, translated by John Stur- est. in Bourdin, et al. “Cause York: Harper & Brothers, 1949, 41. rock, 1–96. Penguin Classics. 1974. Commune.” Cause Commune, Reprint, London: Penguin Books, no. 5 (February 1973):1, 1. 39 Top left: “The City Invaded by Blank 2008, 2; Bottom: “Ocean-chart.” Space.” Fred Forest. in Michael F. Henry Holiday. in Lewis Carroll. 24 Illustration of Dr. Dorsey’s office Leruth, Fred Forest’s Utopia: Media Art The Hunting of the Snark. New and couch. Roger Price. in In One and Activism. 2nd ed. MIT Press, 2017. York: Macmillan and Co., 1891, 11. Head and Out the Other. New York: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe- Simon and Schuster, 1951, 47-48. dia/commons/6/60/Lewis_Carroll_-_ Henry_Holiday_-_Hunting_of_the_ 26 Movie stills. from Queysanne, Ber- Snark_-_Plate_4.jpg nard, and Georges Perec. Un Homme Qui Dort. DVD. 1974. Reprint, La vie est felle editions, 2007, 1:56 and 11:03.

30 Cover depicting immigrants on Ellis Island looking out to the Statue of Liberty. Cover design by Tania Gar- cia. Cover photo by Ellis Island. *: “Repères et repaires” is the title of the index of Georges Perec and Robert Bober. Ellis muse.jhu.edu/book/55966, 6; Bottom Georges Perec’s book La boutique obscure: 124 rêves. The English translation calls this “layers and lairs” Island. Translated by Harry Mathews left: “Space-media” in Le Monde. Fred to preserve the homonymic wordplay, but a more accurate translation would be landmarks and caves– and Jessica Blatt. 1994. Reprint, Forest. in Michael F. Leruth, Fred For- that above ground and that below, that visible and New York: The New Press, 1995. est’s Utopia: Media Art and Activism. invisible. This title is pertinent to theinfraordinary through its conflation of levels: the index is at once 2nd ed. MIT Press, 2017. muse.jhu. the easy-to-read sign, telling us what to look for because it is a “mark,” but also sublimating connec- 33 Peanuts comic strip with Snoopy typ- edu/book/55966, 3; Right: “Space-me- tions between words, concepts, locations (in a book) and dropping hints at its latent meanings. Everyday ing the longest scream in the history dia.” Fred Forest. in Bourdin, et al. life serves as this index, as this thesis explores, and Georges Perec’s methodology of lists, inventories, and of the English language, cut by the “Cause Commune.” Cause Commune, enumerations proves to work much like these repères/ margin. Charles M. Schulz. The Com- no. 2 (June 1972):1. repaires. See Georges Perec, La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams. Translated by Daniel Levin Becker. plete Peanuts, 1971 to 1972. Seattle, 1973. Reprint, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2012, 241. • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • xi •

infraordinary has presented itself as an backs of others, whose everyday experi- opportunity to find parallels between ences have not yet become numb to the the world that Cause commune was cri- politics that push them down. A FEW NOTES tiquing and our own. These essays, written nearly fifty A NOTE OF THANKS years ago, feel like they could have been A NOTE ON THE PRESENT written yesterday—as is any study of a Especially during an unexpected pan- history, as “history simply confirms, as a demic that strained everyone personally, The year spent researching and writ- bibliographical fact, that quite new ver- I am incredibly grateful for the wide ing this thesis, 2020, has been filled with sions of a work which is not altogether network of individuals who have given extraordinary events. For many, it also time and energy to help me through brought a focus on everyday life as we this thesis, and this is by no means an “stayed-at-home,” a momentary pause exhaustive list. First and foremost, for to a world moving at full speed. Yet a my advisor, Ed Eigen, for your wealth halted normality was not a peaceful of knowledge, for entertaining my inter- meditation—many everyday practices of ests, and pushing me to make them systemic violence and political manipu- happen. For other professors who went lation bubbled to the surface, building out of their way to take time to read my awareness and solidarity between social work and offer your thoughts, especially identity lines and hardening the divide K. Michael Hays and Lisa Haber-Thom- between others. This is not news: we son. For other amazing mentors and have been living with these injustices professors I have had in my time at the under our noses, under our everyday, dead, will be created.”2 Our design GSD who contributed to and influenced and our indifference is not neutral. It is practices—be it architecture, writing, or my frame of mind, including but not unfortunate that we must rely on “life other—have only just begun, belatedly, limited to, Mack Scogin, Tatiana Bilbao, reveal[ing] itself by way of the spectacu- to confront our avoidance of the study Iwan Baan, John May, Michael Mere- lar, as if what speaks, what is significant, of what is below: the infraordinary, the dith, Hilary Sample, Michael Herzfeld, is always abnormal…”1 Revisiting the social issues that provide the scaffold Jesse McCarthy, Bernhard Siegert, Kate 1970s in the guise of Cause commune’s for our own precarious comfort on the Balug, etc.—thank you. Also immensely

1 Georges Perec, “Approaches to What?,” in Species grateful for mentors outside of the GSD: of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock, 2 D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology Eric Haas, for introducing me to the Penguin Classics (1973; repr., London: Penguin of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Books, 2008), 209. 2004), 37. Emphasis in original. wonderful world of Georges Perec in • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • xii •

my undergraduate degree and encour- but a particular situation in France gave aging me to pursue graduate studies, rise to Cause commune. The relevance of and Enrique Walker, for the amazing Marxism was in question: French uni- summertime conversation on Perec and A BRIEF ACCOUNT versities became a hotbed for “revision- architecture. I hope these conversations OF CAUSE COMMUNE ist” Marxism, and those who joined the can continue beyond this writing as I am NO. 5 AND THE French Communist Party (PCF) during only beginning to scratch the surface. INFRAORDINARY or after the war left just as quickly. To all the M.Des program admin- Jean Duvignaud—a sociologist and istrators, thank you. To the Harvard anthropologist who supposedly coined University librarians, especially those the famous graffiti phrase “Be realistic! who have been tirelessly scanning books Demand the impossible!” during the and answering emails when physical May 1968 student protests—had trou- access became unavailable, and the Los ble with the anachronistic aspects of Angeles Public Library for providing Marxism that lingered in the PCF both local support, as public institutions do before and after 1968, asking a critical best. Huge thank you to my peers and question: “Is equalitarian socialism—a many cohorts at the GSD in HPDM, dream of the last century, contemporary M.Arch II, and beyond for being fan- with the beginnings of capitalism—still tastic interlocutors, editors, and moral a reasonable ideal, or does it now belong and mental support—Hiroshi Kaneko, to the museum of imaginary politics?”3 Bailey Brown, Kevin Liu, Blake Mitch- While the “revolution” of May 1968 was ell, Vrinda Kanvinde, Samantha Vas- an attempt to accomplish the dream, seur, David Kim, Andy Chau, Zack ON CAUSE COMMUNE and was in part successful for the work- Matthews, among others. A lot of ideas ers’ unions in France, it still left many came out of conversations and reflec- Cause commune was one of many left- questioning the effectiveness of any tions with you all. And, of course, big ist journals that sprung up in the post- sort of revolution on the status quo of thank you to my family for supporting war period, and more specifically after society. Duvignaud called this “the vul- me through years of academic pursuits, the revolutionary year of 1968. These garization of intellectual subversion,” as and Alex Weisfeld and our dog Ed for journals were prevalent across the globe he found the intellectual left “too often living everyday life with me. in both radical and mainstream form, 3 Jean Duvignaud, “France: The Neo-Marxists,” in Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas, ed. Leopold Labedz (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), 316. • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • xiii •

[using] barricades [as] the springboard became the declaration on the back of sectarianism, ideologies, 7 for careerism.”4 cover of each issue—signed C.C.: and schools of thought.

From this mentality, Cause commune To grasp at the root and to question The text reads like a manifesto, declar- was conceived in the winter of 1971/72 the ideas and beliefs on which the ing the aims of the journal, yet the infin- in an effort to reignite the passionate workings of our “civilizations” itives are relatively soft—“grasp,” “elicit,” and “culture” are based, and revolutionary in a world after 1968. Two to undertake an anthropology “undertake,” “analyze,” and “restore.” of Duvignaud’s younger colleagues, of contemporary mankind; Their hypothesis sought to avoid the Georges Perec and Paul Virilio, were To elicit the bases of a new critical radical revolutionary methods employed position so as to constitute a among the few scholars who partici- modern political theory free of the by their immediate predecessors in pated in the protests that supposedly suffocation of outdatedprejudices 1968—by creating more spectacle—but did not succumb to the general disillu- to fight against any sort of acceleration sionment with revolutionary thought, so or intensification with pause. It was a Duvignaud invited them to co-edit the politicization of all their disparate fields journal. Instead of a formal intellectual that often operated in disciplinary silos, endeavor, Cause commune was “orga- critiquing how academics commonly nized and run at convivial meetings of treated their subjects of study as objects. an editorial board that was open to all In the context of post-1968 France, in with contributions to make.”5 It was 1972, the focus of the editors’ ire was decidedly nonpartisan, nonpartial to any spectacular mass media — as popularly philosophical traditions, just a space for critiqued by their contemporaries, the those acquainted with the three editors6 Situationists — which was the obvious to discuss topics pertinent to French symptom of larger institutional issues society and culture in their time. and traditional humanism; within the intellectual circles that stud- To undertake an investigation of In the first issue, the editors laid out everyday life at every level, right down ied society and society itself. their aims in an editor’s note, which to the recesses and basements that In its journal form, Cause commune are normally ignored or suppressed; was short lived, only publishing 9 vol- 4 As quoted in David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in To analyze the objects offered up Words (London: The Harvill Press, 1999), 491–92. umes in a little more than 2 years under 5 Ibid., 492. to satisfy our desires—works of 6 Jean Duvignaud, Georges Perec, and Paul Virilio art, cultural objects, consumer the publisher Denöel Gonthier, plus are only three of the editors credited on the covers goods—in relation to our of the Cause commune journals. Others include an adjacent book in the same series, Alain Bourdin, Christine Brunet, Pascal Lainé, and lives and to the realities of our Francoise Maillet. Secondary literature on Cause com- social [commune] existence, 7 Alain Bourdin et al., eds., “Cause Commune,” mune, as well as other texts written by Duvignaud, To restore the free discussion Cause Commune, no. 1 (May 1972): 1. As translated Perec, and Virilio, attest that they were the core three in Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 492. Brack- editors—thus I focus on their editorship. of attitudes and ideas, outside ets of the original French by author. • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • xiv •

Georges Perec’s 124 Dreams (La Bou- catastrophic writing does a catastrophic Only containing three new articles, tique obscure: 124 rêves). Duvignaud society justice.10 Their attitude questions including an excerpt of Perec’s forth- spoke of his grievances with the pub- what is more nihilistic than nihilism, coming book An Attempt at Exhausting lisher after the journal was nixed, saying which, as we will see, is an attempt to a Place in Paris, the majority of the first Cause commune’s cut from circulation approach a void. 10/18 volume reprinted a few works over was a political enterprise.8 This first book underscores the high- the years of Cause commune: almost However, another opportunity arose lights of the first nine issues published exclusively those authored by the edi- in 1975, and Cause commune was by Denöel Gonthier. Duvignaud wrote tors themselves, and including all three revived in a small paperback book for- that these works best exemplified the essays by the editors included in the mat, under a new publisher—10/18. continuing aims of the Cause commune particular issue of the journal at hand in In the first volume, titled The Decay of this thesis, a testament to its importance Societies (Le Pourrissement des sociétés), in the overall run of the journal. Duvignaud introduces the new format This issue, No. 5, was published in with an “apocalyptic” tone, echoing the February 1973. While the journals words included in the manifesto of the were not typically named, this one was original journals. For Cause commune, titled “infraordinaire / infraquotidien,” the state of society is sounding their own a set of neologisms from which I take death knell: “French society is falling the subject of this thesis. As a journal, apart, our culture is in dissolution, our Cause commune did not insert itself in institutions are hollow: we don’t even the established history of ideas that it need to call ourselves nihilists anymore was clearly rounding out—but had it because we are living inside nihilism.”9 done so, it would have violated one of Duvignaud states, in the introduction to editorial board, and the concerns were its tenets of alignment, even in the lin- the new volume, that much criticism of still prevalent in French and global soci- eage of avant-garde theories. But this Cause commune was against their “cat- ety even more so two years later. These served the editors’ purpose—at the astrophism,” though he responded that Cause commune books went on to be time, in the years following the May published in 6 more volumes, before 1968 protests, the Communist Party 8 “À propos de ‘cause commune,’” Le Monde, 11 May 31, 1974, https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/ discontinuing in 1979. dominated leftist politics; the editors article/1974/05/31/a-propos-de-cause-com- mune_2523267_1819218.html. The editors of Denoël 10 Paul Virilio et al., eds., Le pourrissement des l’autogestion ? (1978/1), and Les imaginaires 2 (1979/1). responded saying the reasons were not political, but sociétés, vol. 1, Union générale d’éditions (Paris: Two other books were published by 10/18 under the economical. 10/18, 1975). series Cause commune, La Chambre à bulles : essai sur 9 Part of the Cause Commune back cover “mani- 11 These volumes were Le pourrissement des sociétés l’image du quotidien dans la bande dessinee by Pierre festo.” Bourdin et al., “Cause Commune.” As trans- (1975/1), Nomades et vagabonds (1975/2), Les ima- Fresnault-Deruelle (1977) and Art sociologique by Fred lated by Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 493. ginaires (1976/1), La ruse (1977/1), Qui a peur de Forest (1977). • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • xv •

of Cause commune rejected aligning undertake an investigation of everyday just the ordinary, or everyday life? To themselves with a particular ideology life at every level, right down to the see everyday life at “every level,” as Cause or doctrine, yet remained determined recesses and basements that are nor- commune asks in its soft manifesto, we that “the effort of radical criticism is mally ignored or suppressed.”13 This often see the “extra”-ordinary, and then perhaps the only solid ground available becomes one of the primary tenets of the regular “ordinary,” but we rarely to us,” yet their most radical critique their manifesto, as the everyday is the aim to see what is below. At or above is on radicality itself.12 Cause commune premier site for nonradical radicalism. the surface, everyday life was otherwise was one of many journals by the radical To circumvent the constant envelop- riddled with means of recapturing: left that embraced revisionist trajectories ment of experimental ideas into the fold objects were there for the taking, out of Marxism as a means to critique not of the bourgeois culture, Cause commune of their contexts; rituals became myths, only the burgeoning neoliberal capitalist which became the mystical alternative states, but also the mainstream left. In to, at first, religion, and then, scientific the context of theories on everyday life, thought. Instead, the infraordinary Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau attempts to delve underneath all of this, are much more widely influential; in the unearthing the meaning—or, more study of spectacle and participation in often, lack of meaning—behind banal- the 1968 protests, Guy Debord and the ities, below what we consider to be our Situationists have established (perhaps everyday. exaggeratedly) their place in the canon; in the world of leftist French journals of ON GEORGES PEREC the 1960s and 1970s, Tel quel and La nouvelle revue française journals that are Of the three main editors of Cause referenced before Cause commune comes embraces the “infraordinary” as a tactic commune, this thesis will focus on to mind; in avant-garde literature, Alain (in the de Certeau sense),14 as elucidated Georges Perec, as the afterlife of the Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman in issue number 5 of the original run of infraordinary has resided mostly in the were first and foremost. It seems that the journal (herein referred to as Cause secondary literature around his work. Cause commune is, by all counts, the commune No. 5). Why add “infra” to In the first text Georges Perec wrote for smaller fish—but by design. Cause commune, he imagines “an answer 13 Ibid. as translated by Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life As stated in their opening manifesto, in Words, 492. to a few questions concerning myself”: Cause commune 14 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday one of ’s aims was “to Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of “To begin with, it all seems simple: I California Press, 1984), 35–39. “The space of a tactic wanted to write, and I’ve written. By 12 Bourdin et al., “Cause Commune.” Translation is the space of the other… In short, a tactic is an art by author. of the weak.” dint of writing, I’ve become a writer, • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • xvi •

for myself alone first of all and for a is impossible to recount all the cyclical to it and seemingly unrelated.18 This longtime, and today for others… I’m references that Perec makes to his other attitude toward himself and his writing a writer, that’s an acknowledged fact, works in his writing, or to his world of echo in Cause commune and the issue on a datum, self-evident, a definition… It friends and historical events that sur- the infraordinary, even though Bellos goes without saying that when you start rounded his mind during the writing of describes Virilio’s recollection of Perec having ideas like these (even if they are his texts. It goes without saying, though, during Cause commune meetings as one only a caricature), it becomes urgent that his texts are engagingly simple, yet who was present in body but not neces- to ask yourself a few questions.”15 The contain a deeply heavy baggage that we sarily mind.19 answer to who Georges Perec is, and cannot finish digging up—for example, The fifth issue of Cause commune why he writes, is indeed an impetus for the title of this thesis, “An Attempt to was published in 1973. The year ’73 more questions. holds a special place in Georges Perec’s Perec’s writing was self-declared, albeit self-image: he would turn 37 this year, with a big disclaimer of fluidity and on March 7th (3/7, or rather 7/3 by Euro- arbitrariness, as divided into four cat- pean convention). I apply here, also, egories: sociological, autobiographical, special consideration for all projects ludic, and novelistic.16 Although these conceived, terminated, or imagined in categories span many groups of friends the year 1973—his mythologized self he was involved in—most notably the would choose such a year as a lynchpin Oulipo, or the “Workshop for Potential moment of his life and career. For a man Literature”—as we will see, the infraor- of mathematical word play, the signifi- dinary relates to all four of these parts of cance of this palindromatic alignment Perec’s life, even though Cause commune plays out in several of his writings—one and his relationship with Jean Duvig- Approach A Void,” weaves together could even say that ’73 is more import- naud may have only been one aspect.17 It the titles of three of his texts that are ant than his birth year of ’36.20 The

15 Georges Perec, “Autoportrait: Les Gnocchis de both integral to the understanding of 18 Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place l’automne Ou Réponse à Quelques Questions Me the infraordinary and at once adjacent in Paris, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge: Wake- Concernant,” Cause Commune, no. 1 (May 1972): field Press, 2010); Perec, “Approaches to What?”; 19–20; As translated in Georges Perec, “The Gnocchi Georges Perec, A Void, trans. Gilbert Adair (1969; of Autumn, or an Answer to a Few Questions repr., Boston: Verba Mundi, 2005). Concerning Myself,” in Species of Spaces and Other 19 Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 493. Pieces, trans. John Sturrock, Penguin Classics (1972; helped Perec kickstart his writing career by connect- 20 In his imagined childhood, Perec “misremem- repr., London: Penguin Books, 2008), 119–23. ing him with the right people. Duvignaud seemed to bers” Hitler’s invasion of Poland as the same day 16 Georges Perec, “Statement of Intent,” trans. be almost a stand-in father figure for Perec (he had as his birthday. He then proceeds to end W with David Bellos, Review of Contemporary Fiction 29, no. many of such people). See Jean Duvignaud, Perec, chapter 37. See Georges Perec, W, or a Memory of 1 (2009): 31–32. Ou, La Cicatrice (Arles: Actes Sud, 1993), https://hdl. Childhood, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. 17 Duvignaud was one of Perec’s secondary school handle.net/2027/uc1.b3924182; Bellos, Georges Perec: Godine, Publisher, 1988). See also Georges Perec, teachers; the two kept in touch, and Duvignaud A Life in Words. “I Was Born,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • xvii •

combination of Cause commune No. 5 ground, of the Cause commune journal 1973.”22 It would be against the nature and the written works of Georges Perec as a “form” of the term, “infraordinary,” of Perec’s life and work to say there was show the infraordinary as a potential that this term could not exist without. a single titular moment, a literary style, method of approaching the world with Although the term is mainly attributed or a conceptual theme that encompassed more consciousness, more empathy, to Perec, it is often noted that it was entirely a single notion of what he stood more indignation against the many conceived in the context of Cause com- for—any instance of categorization is questionable societal codes we avoid mune—not Perec’s own brainchild, but instantly problematized. Despite this, confronting. a collaboration with Duvignaud and Perec’s writing is undoubtedly influ- Virilio. This is not the headline version enced by his peers in Cause commune, ON METHOD of Perec’s biography—David Bellos, especially from issue No. 5. Herein is the hypothesis that became There are two levels of inquiry here: my own working method for this thesis: one, of what this thesis is about (the the texts in issue No. 5 of Cause com- infraordinary), and another, on how it is mune (a particular collection)—pub- presented—through the book, in both lished in February 1973 (a particular its original form in Cause commune No. time), by a cast of diverse thinkers from 5, and in the form I have placed it in media theory to anthropology to math- now, in my own writing of them. It is a ematics (a particular cohort)—became bibliographic study, which D.F. McKen- the starting point for an insignificant zie calls a “sociology of texts”—the study concept in the prolific intellectual lives of a collection of texts under the circum- of the contributors before and after their stances of their becoming, their locale, involvement with issue No. 5. The con- their social context, their affinities, in his tome on Perec’s life and work, cept of the infraordinary was insignifi- their contents, and their form… texts dedicates 3 or 4 pages to this endeavor, cant in the biographical course of Cause are not only the media in which these first mentioned along with several other commune contributors’ eyes—the word thoughts are channeled, but are another works in progress in the chapter titled, “infraordinary” does not appear notably ecosystem of thought themselves.21 The “A Year in Splinters.” Yet, at the same in our contributors’ texts after this issue, first and foremost goal, then, that this time, Bellos emphasizes this moment’s save the title of one of Georges Perec’s thesis entails, is to take the “book,” or importance: “All of Perec’s subsequent posthumous collections—so we look writing is to some degree a prosecution of to this issue as our collection of case trans. John Sturrock, Penguin Classics (1988; repr., the aims he first formulated in February London: Penguin Books, 2008), 100–101. 21 McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. 22 Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 522. • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID •xviii •

studies. Despite the particular concept “infraordinary”); the third, a dialogue as a bibliography of texts constructing a of the infraordinary becoming—per- on the future of the book. semblance of the “infraordinary.” Thus, haps aptly—the background of these This list of essays can read as a disparate I assume the supporting essays in the intellectual works, Cause commune issue set of thoughts. Rightly so. What could latter two sections to be a purposefully No. 5 was important to the continued journalism, a bed, immigrants, and curated collection, that exemplify at exploration of the contributors’ work; comic strips possibly have in common least one if not all the definitions the edi- for example, Marc Paillet credited his with the future of the book, and how tors provide in the first section of Cause essay on journalistic language in Cause is all this related to the infraordinary? commune No. 5, and can also in turn commune as the impetus of his larger The commonality here is their inclusion be related to Georges Perec’s “infraor- book written a year later on the same in Cause commune No. 5, which serves dinary” works. While not using every subject.23 Just as Bellos attributes this moment to Perec as an interpolating splinter in his life, I take Cause commune No. 5 as such a splinter in the other contributors’ lives, which brings the concept of the infraordinary into a more cogent, yet more lo-res definition. The format of this issue of the journal, differing fromother volumes of Cause commune, divide up the essay into 3 sections: “I,” “II,” and “Xerox, Simulacrum, and the Death of Books.” The first section is a set of introductory essays by the editors, Duvignaud, Perec, and Virilio, and a conversation about the infraordinary; the second, a selec- tion of contributor essays on an array of topics (none of which mention the word

23 See Marc Paillet, Le journalisme: fonctions et langages du quatrieme pouvoir (Paris: Denoël, 1974), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015014449105. • Repères et Repaires* • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • xix •

single essay in the issue, the following text exemplify the connections that can be made between Perec’s work and the work of Cause commune. Unfortunately, at the time of collecting research, Jean Duvignaud’s archive was closed to even its archivists due to the Covid-19 pandemic—a look into the meeting minutes of Cause commune will either corroborate this hypothesis or demolish it in one fell swoop. This thesis seeks to define the “infraordinary” by oscillating between the more widely read Perec essays and novels and the Cause commune issue that neologized the term. These are the materials I had at hand when resources were limited, a happenstance constraint that happily feeds into the structure of the following text. Another constraint is my lack of French—so any translation by myself will be noted, with trepidation, and published English translations will be used wherever possible. I • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 1 • • I • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 2 •

In the first section of Cause commune examination of “background,” No. 5, the three core editors of Cause [arriére-plan] or “cellars” commune lay out their definitions of the [cavernes]. Lefebvre studies the infraordinary. From these essays, we see forms of the “code” and how three approaches to the same subject this “code” could enter into the that we could imagine being discussed composition of life. Yet this code in their “round table” discussions: Jean constricts or masks the nascent Duvignaud, as an anthropologist, is emergence of this “something” concerned with life that is suppressed by which we will separately call the surface of everyday society; Georges “hysteria.”2 Perec, as a writer, finds writing about daily events not truly about the every- As the opening essay in Cause commune day; Paul Virilio, as head of an architec- No. 5, Jean Duvignaud’s piece called “The infraquotidien is what ture school, challenges historical facts “Code and Hysteria (Le code et l’hys- we are always embedded and colonial mindsets. terie)” solidifies theinfraordinary’s ties in, by our very singularity. to theories of everyday life by evoking an But our singularity is a influential figure (who writes forCause common singularity, it is not JEAN DUVIGNAUD, “CODE commune occasionally) in the study of my singularity, it is also the AND HYSTERIA” everyday life. Yet, Duvignaud states singularity of the other. The that the infraordinary is not the study of fact, for example, that in the Henri Lefebvre, some twenty everyday life a la Lefebvre—rather than metro I have sweaty hands, years ago, proposed a “critique looking at the visible parts of everyday and people next to me are of everyday life,” an analysis life as Lefebvre does, the infraordinary sweating. I have sweaty hands of events and scenarios that looks at the “background.” While Duvi- with them. That’s it, it’s this comprise the fabric of economic gnaud claims their focuses are different, way of being in common because and social life. H. Lefebvre the aims of Cause commune (“to under- of the particularity of our examined the visible and no take an investigation of everyday life at entrenchment which manifests one has contested his acuity. every level”) seem to add to Lefebvre’s the infraquotidien.”1 However, the study of everyday visual everyday and expand on what is life is not to be confused with 1 Jean T. Desanti, Boris Rybak, and Jean Duvi- that of the “infraordinary,” 2 Jean Duvignaud, “Le Code et l’hysterie,” Cause gnaud, “La Structure Dechiree,” Cause Commune 1, Commune 1, no. 5 (February 2, 1973). Translation no. 5 (February 2, 1973). Translation by author. which involves the difficult by author. • I • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 3 •

The French word used here by Duvi- gnaud to describe the infraordinary is “arriére-plan,” literally “back-plan,” which implies a certain surface flatness—either of an architectural floorplan or a map—to the “ground” upon which everyday life is perused.5 With the alternate word, “cavernes,” literally “caves” but implying the underground of the floorplan aforementioned, Duvig- naud adds another dimension below the surface of the arriére-plan, implying that the uniform flatness of the background surface is actually a porous obscurity, a dark and unknowable cellar space upon which the floorplan is drawn. This word also appears in the original manifesto of below it, getting to an unapproachable and similarities between other “levels.”4 Cause commune printed on each issue’s core, within which we find an “infinitely He deems that the “last struggle” for back cover—not yet given the neologism latent potential” that allows for creative existence is between those who are com- of the infraordinary, but already meta- acts of “invention.”3 In the Critique of placent with the codes they live with and phorically referred to as cellars. Everyday Life, Lefebvre charts a “frag- those who aim to find the “something” Duvignaud revises these words as ment of a grid of levels in everyday life,” that is constricted by the codes. As a “code,” in Lefebvre’s terms, which in fact in which he describes “levels” as frames response to this, Duvignaud states that does not appear prominently in Critique of reference that clearly denote their the “something” is called the infraordi- of Everyday Life, but in The Production limited purview with both differences nary, which does not appear on Lefeb- of Space, which was not published until vre’s grid of levels, but is perhaps a riff on 1974, a year after this issue of Cause com- 3 Ibid. Translation by author. “La vie n’est pas faite de réel, uniformément, mais aussi de toutes les the term “infralanguage,” which appears mune. It is likely that Duvignaud was possibilitiés, les virtualités: tout ce qui pourrait être somnole au-dessous de ce qui est. Et l’existence finie at the bottom ofLefebvre’s diagram. aware of this project in the works, and est pressée de toute part par cette infinité latente. Infinité sans laquelle il n’existerait aucune possibilité 4 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life II: also likely that Lefebvre was in some way d’invention, qui pousse en avant ceux qu’on appelle Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. ‘artistes’ ou ‘écrivains,’ souvent les déviants, les John Moore (1961; repr., London ; New York: Verso, 5 See the last chapter for more on the arriére-plan, as hérétiques et certainement certains savants.” 2002), 118–25. used by Marshall McLuhan to describe the book. • I • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 4 •

seems be represented Fred Forest’s open- Blanchot’s review of the second volume ing illustration on the inside cover of the of The Critique of Everyday Life, “Every- Cause commune issue, where a crowd of day Speech.” Here, Blanchot deems that

people are depicted streaming out of a “the everyday has this essential dark threshold—perhaps the entrance trait: it allows no hold. It escapes. (or exit) to the cavernous world cut It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, out of the blank and flat background without reality, without secret, but beyond—only to be stopped at a cliff. perhaps also the site of all possible Those at the front of the crowd are ges- signification. The everyday escapes.”8 turing upwards, or downwards, with forlorn faces that look much calmer The connection between insignifi- than their present situation. While we cance and significance is key here— could disparage the use of l’hystérie while Lefebvre talks about the “signifi- in all its “coded” discriminatory sig- cant in the insignificant,”9 Blanchot sees nificance, I take it in its most baseline a level of everyday life that revels in its medical definition, which also describes insignificance. The moment one points the Forest image of a “mass hysteria”: a to a significant aspect of a banality, it informed by his involvement in Cause physical manifestation of psychological is no longer a part of the everyday and commune (he contributed several essays stress, which “secretly inserts itself into instead becomes mired in momenthood. to the original run of the journal). Here, the unknown.”7 When that stress is Our grasp of the infraordinary is slip- Lefebvre’s “codes” define a semiological expressed en masse, the physical manifes- pery at best; its tendency to escape us relationship between space and the rep- tations will not be on the outside surface makes it a difficult investigation to take, resentation of space, such that societal of bodies, but on the outside surface of thus only allowing us to approach it and codes inform, and often ossify, spatial the surrounding space, or the arriére- never truly get there—the moment we codes, such that the hardened surface plan, which the no longer gives us the do, we encounter yet another void. In of society (arrière-plan) no longer allows tabula rasa situation that we would sum, Duvignaud sees the study of the access to the cavernes that exist below it.6 expect from any sort of “background.” infraordinary as a diagnosis of invisible The emergence of the so-called “hyste- Perhaps the most apt summation of symptoms of a societal disillusionment, ria” from a fissure within thearri ére-plan Lefebvre’s “everyday life” at the fragmen- providing a metaphorical image of a Cause commune tary level of is Maurice 8 Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” trans. 6 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies, no. 73: Everyday Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; repr., Cambridge: 7 Duvignaud, “Le Code et l’hysterie.” Translation Life (1987): 14. Blackwell, 1991). by author. 9 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life II, 4. • I • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 5 •

blank ground breaking open to reveal Alison James, in Constraining Chance, something akin to Pandora’s box—at sees Perec’s study of the infraordinary the bottom of the heavily “catastrophic” as a study of “interpretive” constraints attitude lies not apathy, but some and their epistemological limits when amount of hope that there are people (he presented with a seemingly random list calls out largely writers and artists) who of everyday happenings, an effect of will aim to dig for this infraordinary. his membership in the Oulipo (Work- shop of Potential Literature). Michael Sheringham connects the infraordinary GEORGES PEREC, and Perec’s text in Cause commune to “APPROACHES TO WHAT?” his early sociological works, as well as at Exhausting a Place in Paris, which later ludic works that were more urban, But how does one do the “difficult appeared in the first issue of the repub- enumerating a definition of the infraor- task” of diagnosis? The practice of lication of Cause commune under 10/18. dinary via the many projects that Perec the infraordinary is best captured in Assuming the editor of L’infraordinaire undertook to investigate it—only a few the second essay in the issue, Georges was at least partially correct in diagnos- of which are mentioned here.10 Perec’s well-documented “Approaches ing specific Perec texts as containing Particularly in the context of Cause to What?” This essay has become the de “the infraordinary,” the common thread commune, Perec’s essay focuses mostly on facto definition of theinfraordinary, as through each of the essays is describ- the method by which the infraordinary Duvignaud and Virilio’s works outside ing everyday scenes with a journalistic would be found. Disparaging the state of of Cause commune have had less direct of attitude, focusing on the journalist’s the media, particularly the newspaper, a relationship to the infraordinary than immediate experience, crafted to draw a for only publishing the “extra-ordinary,” Perec’s, hence the popular attribution “general line” in the void left behind in the “spectacular,” the “Awful! Terrible! of the term to Perec. Theinfraordinary descriptions of the everyday. By describ- Monstrous! Scandalous!” Perec instead defined byother Perequian scholars is ing these places, with no structure other aims to question “the rest” of life, enu- largely based on his posthumously com- than the rigor of reporting what he sees merating, “the banal, the quotidian, the piled volume of essays, L’infraordinaire. in real time, Perec begins to build an obvious, the common, the ordinary, the Beginning with his essay from Cause aura of space. It doesn’t require thick infraordinary, the background noise, commune No. 5, the collection includes description, but rather a repetitive obser- samples of detailed urban and domestic vation, constrained by the singular eye 10 Michael Sheringham, “Georges Perec: Uncov- descriptions, of his own everyday life, but not beholden to subjectivity. ering the Infra-Ordinary,” in Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford ; including an excerpt from An Attempt New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 248–91. • I • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 6 •

the habitual…”11 In this laundry list of generalized assumption of a person. The nearly synonymous terms, Perec has yet infraordinary does not assume to know to define the infraordinary clearly—per- more than what it knows, which is the haps the fuzzy definition is the point, particular condition that one is in: a sin- which makes it incredibly hard to gularity. Yet, the particulars in our lives fight the urge to quote the entire work. are unlikely to be completely unique, Rather, what is necessary to describe in lest we fall into crippling solipsism. As detail, with several examples, is how to we will see in Perec’s grasp of realism, study the infraordinary: the precision of the list of questions and

What we need to question is bricks, its subsequent answers is exactly what concrete, glass, our table manners, gives rise to a general sense of solidar- our utensils, our tools, the way we method of questioning and the method ity between people. By holding every- spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have of inventory, or listing. Perec’s list may day life at arm’s length, Perec achieves ceased forever to astonish us. We live, appear elementary, but it is precisely what we will find to be a post-objective true, we breathe, true; we walk, we these “obvious” parts of life that consti- truth, one that relies on the relationships open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we tute the infraordinary, and such obvi- between people and people, people and lie down on a bed in order to sleep. ousness often slips through the cracks things, rather than focus on the things How? Where? When? Why? unless we make it a point to question it. themselves. Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare. In addition to describing, quite didac- Rather than let these everyday things Make an inventory of your pockets, tically, the how, Perec’s prose already be, Perec asks us to employ the ques- of your bag. Ask yourself about tells us what we should then be under- tioning methods that would otherwise the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you standing from all we have questioned. be reserved for journalists covering the take out. He oscillates, as we will see in his lit- big headlines—a few people asking only Question your tea spoons. erary works, between what seems to be a few questions about a few things. In What is there under your wallpaper? How many movements does it take to objective truth to reality, the anecdotal the end, even for the most well-inten- dial a phone number? Why? situations that become the subject of tioned journalist, “‘social problems’ What don’t you find cigarettes in study, and the truly infraordinary—that aren’t ‘a matter of concern’ when there’s the grocery stores? Why not?12 which he calls “our truth.”13 His lists a strike, they are intolerable twenty-four These directions contain two key appear personal—an inventory of things hours out of twenty-four, three hun- components to the infraordinary: the that surround me, not anyone else, not a dred and sixty-five days a year.”14 With

11 Perec, “Approaches to What?” 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. • I • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 7 •

this, Perec turns everyday life into a site describes our lives as a colonized by the for social activism, or nonradical radical- reign of “facts,” which are ism—reallocating the economy of atten- “torn from the anonymity of the tion, and even the economy of his words, banal, analyzed, and purified by which must be taken as a whole in order the tomb raiders, and is finally sublimated in the museum of to grasp a more complete empathetic the journal or the book… a understanding of the infraordinary. He visual necropolis, the history of also asks that this empathetic curiosity the event replaces the general history, the landscape is altered should be turned inwards, towards our but does nothing but deepen the own societies, which we often overlook same culture: that of plundering as if it was a given—background noise. the anonymous... The movement towards the infraordinary includes He calls this “endotic,” as opposed to moving the whole of our movement. the newspaper headlines are to Perec— “exotic,” encompassing our understand- From the afterlives of yesterday, regardless of the intention, the mere ing of what is other as already within tourists of the extraordinary, of “fact” of the narrow view renders all else, ruins, of facts; to refuse to move ourselves. This postcolonial sense of oth- because we lack the means of everyday life, to a subservient silence. erness will be seen in the Cause commune communication… because what is Paul Virilio had a prolific career in engagement of migrant workers, as well silence, is dominated, colonized…”15 critical theory, though in his oeuvre of as within an inner dialogue of reading. works, Cause commune sits between two The treatment of the other is inextricably Virilio’s language clearly aligns the notable eras of his career: after his archi- tied to the questions that we must ask in infraordinary with anticolonial issues, tectural endeavors and before he gained order to excavate the infraordinary. which, circa 1973, France was still grap- notoriety as a prolific critic. In the years pling with in the aftermath of the fall prior to his involvement with the jour- of the French Empire and the Algerian nal, and prior to any of his significant PAUL VIRILIO, “THE War. To Virilio, and the rest of Cause writings on dromology, Virilio and DEFEAT OF THE FACTS” commune, these issues traced far deeper architect Claude Parent ran an architec- than territorial bounds, but in histori- tural practice called Architecture Prin- This question of “ourtruth” is what cizing of events—even events where the cipe, most notable for their theoretical Virilio is most concerned with in his freedom of the “other” was victorious. work on the “oblique function,” which essay, rounding out the editors’ preface The historical event is to Virilio what explored architectural obliques—sloped to the fifth issue of Cause commune floors, walls, roofs, etc.—as a means with his piece “Defeat of the Facts.” He 15 Paul Virilio, “La defaite des faits,” Cause of destabilizing the body, which is commune, no. 5 (February 1973): 4. Translation by author. • I • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 8 •

perpetually in motion.16 Thepractice Twenty years later, Virilio’s book The was in the process of constructing “The Art of the Motor is introduced by the Pendular Destabilizer” at the University same epigraph that introduces his essay of Nanterre in 1968 as the student pro- in Cause commune No. 5: “For now, only tests broke out, which Virilio and par- the facts matter, and not for long.”18 His ticipated in, and caused the practice to article in Cause commune has premon- dissolve after 1970. Though they shared ished the “defeat of the facts” in the a common concern for destabilizing early internet age—”Whence not only space, Parent thought that the “oblique” the infamous and sinister ‘revisionism’ function they had been theorizing was or negationism that seeks to invalidate aesthetic and not political, whereas events occurring from the Second World Virilio believed it to be both aesthetic War on, but, more insidious still, the a huge role in proliferating competing and political.17 Unlike Claude Parent, computerized undermining of reality attitudes towards the protests. Mass the editors at Cause commune shared his that has today wound up in the defeat media became both the prosecuted and politics, and his view that architecture of the facts, since information now prosecutor, during “a great battle against serves more than an analogue to poli- wins out over the reality of the event.”19 the consumer society… [and] in the tics, but has the potential to change it. Like Perec, Virilio is disillusioned by society of spectacle, social protest itself The study of the infraordinary, in the the loss of focus on reality in terms was now appropriated as a consumer context of the oblique function, helps of the unadulterated and uncensored product…”20 Recorded in its moment, to destabilize the floor upon which we account of facts. The French student and aggressively interpreted and reinter- think we stand safely and comfortably, and worker protests were only one of preted after the fact, May 1968 becomes as we will see explored in Vilém Flusser’s the many social upheavals around the the epitome of the spectacle it wishes to “To Bed”; the oblique function aids the globe in its moment—and along with displace. emergence of “hysteria.” its contemporaries, journalism played

16 Irenee Scalbert and Mohsen Mostafavi, “Inter- view with Claude Parent,” in The Function of the Oblique: The Architecture of Claude Parent and Paul 18 Virilio, “La defaite des faits.” Virilio, 1963-1969, ed. Pamela Johnston, AA Docu- 19 Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie ments 3 (London, 1996), 49–57. Rose, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 17 Ibid. Press, 1996). 20 Ibid. II • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 9 • • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 10 •

Across mediums and disciplines, the afloat long enough ultimately saw trans- concerns of the infraordinary are found formations in their constituents, poli- to be underlying any “common things.”1 tics, or both.3 Cause commune was but one of the “little magazines” that Georges Perec MARC PAILLET, “THE was involved in. For the purposes of this JOURNALIST AND THEIR text, the “little magazines”—which go LANGUAGES” by many names even within the same language—will be referred to as “jour- Every journalist knows full well nals.” These French “little magazines” that this distance between the are usually called revues, or reviews. language of reporting and reality Reviews “are made, generally, top-down, in fact affects every aspect of the from a master to collaborators; this one world. More and more.2 would exist only through our convivial- ity.”4 However, in the text on the back The postwar period saw a rise in “little of every issue of Cause commune are the magazines” from several fields, as they words: “Cause commune n’est pas une were testing grounds for original work revue.” Instead, Duvignaud calls the before diving into the institutionalized publication a “tribune,” a forum, and one world of publishing. The fleeting nature of the primary mediums to be critiqued of these “little magazines,” printed on is that of the newspaper, or “journal” in cheap paper and distributed often to a French. Theother “journal” in French The following four essays were chosen small intimate group caused their aims translation is a diary, which, along with as starting points from which we can to be called into question constantly— the newspaper, implies “dailiness”—true see the influence ofCause commune on the “little magazines” that gained to its Latin root “diurnal,” or Anglo- Perec’s infraordinary. Two pieces (Paillet enough readership and traction to stay French “jurnal.” When talking about and Guedez) show how Perec’s writing 3 See Eric Bulson, “Introduction,” in Little Maga- style and politics go hand in hand; the 1 “Common things” in French, choses communes, zine, World Form, Modernist Latitudes (New York: is similar to Cause commune—a play of words used Columbia University Press, 2017), 1–32, https://doi. other two (Flusser and Fresnault-Deru- in much of Perec’s writing, and is also the title of his org/10.7312/buls17976; Ben Mercer, “The Paperback newspaper column. See Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life Revolution: Mass-Circulation Books and the Cul- elle) draw parallels between Perec and in Words. tural Origins of 1968 in Western Europe,” Journal of the work of Cause commune participants, 2 Marc Paillet, “Le journaliste et ses langages,” the History of Ideas 72, no. 4 (October 2011): 613–36. Cause commune, no. 5 (February 1973): 15–20. 4 Bourdin et al., “Cause Commune”; Duvignaud, namely Vilém Flusser and Fred Forest. Translation by author. Perec, Ou, La Cicatrice, 27. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 11 •

these reviews and “little magazines” as Duvignaud. Duvignaud brought him Duvignaud’s, resulting in a drunken a journal, though, the daily is no longer into the fray of Arguments journal—a speech, published posthumously as relevant to its publication cycle, but its leftist journal active from 1957 to “The Parachute Jump” in collection Je subject matter. This makes “journal” the 1962, headed by Edgar Morin, Roland suis né. In the recording, he described most apt descriptor for Cause commune, Barthes (for a time) and Duvignaud his experience as a parachutiste (para- which aims to “undertake an investiga- himself. At the same time, Perec was trooper) conscript amidst the Algerian tion of daily life”—which the editors pursuing his own venture into journals, War. Theparachutistes were publicized find is missing, and even antagonized, La ligne générale, which never took off. as the most grueling part of the French in dailies of the newspaper. Arguments was a “revisionist” journal military, glorified by the right and For Perec, these journals became “liberated from the Marxist ‘taboos,’” in demonized by the left, which “teenage search for a new politics unadulterated Rambos sought to join”—certainly no by secular partisanship.5 Duvignaud place for a budding writer to draw his carried this program into Cause com- inspiration.7 During the short months mune. Duvignaud had offered Perec of his military experience, he narrowly a spot at the “round table,” where the avoided being enlisted in the parachut- Arguments team congregated. The young iste troops that staged a military coup Perec turned it down, however, suppos- against the then-president Charles de ing that he would rather become a writer Gaulle in 1958, before Algeria was lib- than be cast in the role of intellectual by erated. His audience at Arguments were association with a journal. These three among those leftist intellectuals (none of journals—Arguments, La ligne générale, whom at that point were associated with and Cause commune—were the testing the French Communist Party anymore) important collections of intellectual grounds for Perec’s social and literary who signed “The Manifesto of the 121,” thought—a record of work in progress, ideas throughout his career, reaching which denounced the Algerian War, 6 excerpts from larger works—usually as full maturity at the infraordinary. 7 Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 184. For the fruit of discussion groups among Though he never actually wrote for more on paratroopers’ role in the media presence of the Algerian War, see John Talbott, The War friends, made possible by often self-pub- Arguments, Perec managed to attend a Without a Name: France in Algeria, 1954-1962 (New York: Knopf, 1980), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/ lished, cheap paperback media. For recorded meeting session as a guest of mdp.39015035309023. “The GaullistCourrier de la colère lavished its hysterical brand of praise on the a young aspiring writer like Perec, in paras [paratroopers]. The left-wing press, on theother 5 Duvignaud, “France: The Neo-Marxists,” 317. hand, portrayed the leopard men as a reincarnation of the late 1950s, the possibility of being 6 See Alison James, Constrainting Chance: Georges the SS… Thepara démonique and the para angélique published hinged heavily on who you Perec and the Oulipo (Evanston: Northwestern were telling projections of attitudes toward the war, University Press, 2009), 22–23 for a brief discussion but neither was a very good representation of reality.” knew, and for Perec, that who was Jean on Perec’s involvement in leftist journals. p. 88-89. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 12 •

saying “the cause of the Algerian People, beginning… it really was trusting in 1968, as described by Kristin Ross in which is contributing in a decisive way life… You’re facing into the void and The Afterlives of May1968 . For academ- to ruining the colonial system, is the you have suddenly to throw yourself ics studying the sociopolitical plights of cause of all free men.”8 out.”9 However, that answer was not the triumphant union, it was imperative Perec, like many of his contemporar- quite enough for Perec. “Why,” asks to do field research, but some drop-ins ies, was no stranger to war: he lost his Perec, on several occasions in his writ- “conjured up old associations of the parents to World War II, his mother to ing, and on more than one of those to a parachutistes of colonial wars” (such as the camps, and his father in the line of seeming void, to which the resounding very fresh Algerian War) due to their battle. Instead of writing off his com- response is one of optimism—that the uninvolved questions and eagerness to plicit actions in what Perec deemed had void is not void, but a space of meaning draw conclusions, often reinforcing ste- ripe for investigative “why”s. He claims, reotypes that were already perpetuated toward the end of “The Parachute by the state-censored French media. On Jump,” that the answer to “why jump?” the other end of the spectrum, “militant lay in its optimism that within the void, journalists” were positively referred to there lay latent meanings, that would as enquêtes (investigators), a different otherwise be inaccessible if he had not sociological method that did not look at jumped. Thus, to reach these meanings, the workers from the outside in—which it was necessary to jump. Ross calls “the logic of the police”—but After the Algerian War, the term instead takes the role of “production parachutiste became representative of the text acting as a unifying force” of the terror the troop reigned on around which the workers can unite.10 a decolonizing power: the physical Despite having served as a literal par- “fascist overtones” not unlike those his imposition of men dropping in from achutiste, Perec’s intellectual rejection family had suffered, he confronts the the sky, in arms, claimed a dark space of the military action was more like an rote military script that he acted in thir- in the French imaginary. Parachutiste enquête: the constant line of investigative teen times with the difficult question of was a term used by factory workers to (“endotic”) questioning was empowered “why,” which he posed to the Arguments analogically describe a certain sort of to represent a meaningful “general line.” group: “I’ve always asked myself why I intellectual attitude towards them a few In fact, through his experience of jump- jumped. At first, to start with, it wasn’t years later, around the events of May ing into the void, Perec transformed an a problem… It really was optimism 9 Georges Perec, “The Parachute Jump,” inSpecies of otherwise “fascist” and “macho” service Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock, Pen- 8 Talbott, The War Without a Name: France in guin Classics (1959; repr., London: Penguin Books, 10 See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Lon- Algeria, 1954-1962, 172. 2008), 113–18. don: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 109–14. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 13 •

into one that was deeply contemplative, enquête must listen. The choices made coal mines, is it alright or not 12 and much more related to his everyday by enquêtes marks Perec’s infraordinary good enough, in your view, sir? experiences, merely by attaching the writing as inherently political, merely by In an entire page of questions, the question “Why jump?” to the otherwise the fact of its truly investigative nature, survey questions on everyday objects rote activity. The difference between a which blends the “real”—the everyday are sprinkled with pointed questions on parachutiste and a enquête is similarly life that is the subject of observation— social issues. To Perec, there is no dis- minute—the broad goal of investigation with the “imaginary”—the writer’s tinction to these questions: they show is the same, but the line of question- extraction of meaning within the that questions on everyday objects are ing one might expect from a journalist everyday. This description of a militant not innocent, but on par with those that empowers the enquête to dig beyond journalist in post-1968 France very well are directly addressing the “true scan- could be a description of Perec’s writing dals” that are often left out of the news- throughout his life, and captures the papers.13 Similar to his military experi- mentality of his parachutiste self, throw- ence as recounted to the Arguments crew, ing his writerly body out of the plane Perec must have questioned the scripted, hoping there is meaning in the void in capitalist “investigation” with another front of him. investigative why.Perec participated in Perec also engaged in a capitalis- Henri Lefebvre’s research team, where tic form of investigation as a market Perec interviewed coal miners that were research surveyor. He later ascribed this about to lose their livelihoods, but even profession nearly autobiographically the secretive nature of an academic to his characters, Jerôme and Sylvie, research project prevented any sort of in Things, his first novel, published in truly instrumental journalism from their assumptions: “the enquêteur can- 1960, immediately following his time as taking place.14 Instead, Perec reserved not, of course be neutral… Listen all a parachutiste. He writes the questions his “investigative journalist’s power of the way to the end: only then does the that Jerôme and Sylvie were asking their insight” for his own writing, even allud- enquête take on all its meaning… with consumers: ing to the coal miner investigations in all the explosive force that words repre- Do people like cheese in squeezy 12 Georges Perec, “Things: A Story of the Sixties,” sent when the imaginary and the real as tubes? Are you for or against public in Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep, trans. transport?... Describe a man who David Bellos (Boston: Verba Mundi, 2004), 38. lived from day to day become the basis 13 See Perec, “Approaches to What?,” 209. likes pasta. What do you think of for words…”11 In order to write, the 14 See Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, your washing machine?... Would 234–37. Also see Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth you rather have a washing machine Lebas, “Introduction: Lost in Transposition - Time, 11 As spoken by a militant journalist, quoted in Space and the City,” in Writing on Cities, by Henri ibid., 112. that dries as well? And safety in Lefebvre (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 3–60. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 14 •

both his novel Things, as quoted above, when Stalin came to power, as the film in “colonial issues” in French-occupied and in his Cause commune No. 5 article, proposed a “general line” for a proletar- territories, books often censored by the as an example of the importance of the iat-led, decentralized communism that state powers in order to quell dissent infraordinary combatting the headlines: was more sympathetic to Leon Trotsky, during the Algerian War.17 Maspero had “what is scandalous isn’t the pit explo- who fell out of favor as the film was in his own publishing house, which was sion, it’s working in the coalmines.”15 progress. Perec’s group of young friends also responsible for the Petite Collec- championed the romantic idealism of tion Maspero, “published in distinctive Eisenstein’s imagined dairy cooperative pastel covers, and priced at 6.15 francs and his innovative filmography which apiece… people simply bought (or stole) While Perec was a parachutiste con- focused on an everyday occurrence that each book in the series as soon as it came symbolized a “general line” of an entire out.”18 These books contributed to a political movement.16 This early refer- young generation of leftist scholars who ence already shows Perec’s cogs turning avoided university-condoned readings in in an infraordinary direction, oscillating lieu of what they found to be much more between the everyday and the “general poignant, contemporary topics in books line.” from La Joie de Lire. The shop “gave Several articles Perec originally tangible form to [Lg’s] political view of planned for Lg—some of his first pub- the world.”19 Similar to Arguments and, lished works outside of book reviews later, Cause commune, Maspero was par- that were mostly for a source of tial to a revisionist Marxism that had no income—were subsequently published party affiliations, and thus could explore in Partisans, a journal started by Francois ideological potential for a postcolonial script, he was taking part in his own Maspero, owner of the group’s favorite France through its revolutionary library. meetings of young intellectuals, La Ligne bookshop, La Joie de Lire. Maspero’s Lg was never published as its own générale (Lg). Their name was inspired bookshop contained books for those journal: the French Communist Party by a 1929 Sergei Eisenstein movie, “Old left of left, literature and current events (PCF) made sure of it in 1960.20 The and New,” which was originally titled 17 Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 269. See “The General Line.” Eisenstein was 16 The most famous scene inThe General Line is one also Raymond Kuhn, The Media in France (London: that focuses on a butter churning machine, flashing Routledge, 1995). forced to change the name of this film back and forth between various machinic parts and 18 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives. See also Mercer, peasants eager and amazed faces. See Bellos, Georges “The Paperback Revolution.” 15 Paul Virilio, “A Walking Man,” in AA Files Perec: A Life in Words. and Edgar Morin, The Cinema, 19 Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 269. No. 45/46, ed. Mark Rappolt, trans. Clare Barrett or The Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer 20 Interestingly, a new review similarly called (London: Architectural Association, 2001), 136–37; (1956; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Cause commune was started in 2018—“la Perec, “Approaches to What?” Press, 2005). revue d’action politique du PCF (the review of • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 15 •

young aspirational Perec and his col- later, when, “in politics, at least, Perec exhaustive descriptions of episodes it leagues were barred from publishing had hardly grown up at all.”21 believed to be intrinsically meaningful their review, as it would have been in It was in the several essays originally by virtue of its extraordinary circum- direct competition with other PCF written for the unpublished Lg, ulti- stances.” 23 Instead, Antelme excavates sponsored journals, and the group had mately published in Partisans, that Perec the “endotic” aspects of his experience, made the decision that approval was began to elucidate the infraordinary as a questioning his “precise circumstances,” necessary. Perec also declined Maspero’s mode of writing on the “everyday.” In a attaching the “why.” He never allows the offer to sit onPartisans editorial board, review for Robert Antelme’s The Human camp to escape as a given, and also does and Arguments was disbanded in 1962 Race (L’espèce humaine), written in 1962, not allow the reality of the Holocausts’ before Perec had an opportunity to join. elements of the infraordinary were brew- “extraordinary circumstances” overtake ing in Perec’s mind without a name: the “reality” of Antelme’s everyday expe-

“Solidarity is neither a metaphysical rience in Gandersheim, which consisted given nor a categorical imperative. overwhelmingly with the need to count, It is linked to precise circumstances. hold, peel, boil, eat, steal, and watch It is necessary to the survival of 24 a group because it ensures that potatoes. The paradox of the general group’s cohesiveness, and it only and the everyday become an important has to be outlawed for the world seed of Perec’s idea of the infraordinary, of the camps to appear in all its logic. L’espèce humaine, being an acknowledging that solidarity is a nec- everyday description, is also the most essary effect of realist writing—a hotly general description of a camp.”22 debated topic in literary circles at the time. Writing, meant to convey, meant For a book to be both everyday and to be shared, provides a space of connec- Perec was set up squarely to continue general seems like an inextricable par- tion between reader and writer in which with his critical investigation into the adox, but Perec here empowers the the precise conditions of Antelme’s relationship between everyday life and everyday with solidarity. Thatsolidar - concentration camp experience trans- writing with Cause commune, a decade ity arises from the everyday objects of late to general conditions for all readers a concentration camp, unlike other without patronizing universalism, in the Holocaust novels that “multiplied the same way that Eisenstein’s film intro- political action by the PCF).” As far as I can tell, 21 Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 270, 493. duces everyday objects as instrumental they do not call out any direct relationship to 22 Georges Perec, “Robert Antelme or the Truth Duvignaud, Perec, and Virilio’s Cause commune in of Literature,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 23 Ibid. the 1970s, which, again, was explicitly anti-par- trans. John Sturrock, Penguin Classics (1962; repr., 24 See Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. tisan. See https://www.causecommune-larevue. London: Penguin Books, 2008), 254–66. Emphasis Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (1957; repr., fr/dialogue_autour_de_cause_commune in original. Marlboro: The Marlboro Press, 1992). • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 16 •

in transforming the lives of the prole- roman as the avant garde literature that style, writing that no longer was literary, tariat. It is through this everydayness, critics loved to hate. In a response to writing that became purely writing. or the infraordinary, that Antelme is those who called Robbe-Grillet’s novels Perec’s realism is not completely con- able to build the solidarity that would too far flung from reality to be called tradictory to Robbe-Grillet’s—in fact, it otherwise be uncommunicable in its realism, Robbe-Grillet wrote, “I do not fits perfectly in the definition of respect- extraordinary horror. transcribe, I construct,” thus, his novels ing truth. Whose truth, though? For To communicate this solidarity, were “somehow more real because they Robbe-Grillet, and other nouveau roman Antelme’s “desire for simplicity, for a pre- were now imaginary.”26 He defined his writers, the truth was that of literature, viously unknown everydayness… goes version of realism as one that “respect[s] and ultimately, that of the writer, who so far as to betray the ‘reality’ in order the truth.”27 So long as his imagination needs to be nothing but “construct” a respects the truth, “without having to story faithful to himself. For Perec, that lean on anything external to the work,” truth is also constructed, albeit with then they must in fact be realism. “precise circumstances,” which aids in Roland Barthes, who obsessively the necessary program of solidarity he reviewed Robbe-Grillet’s work while asks of literature, especially that which “too busy” to review Perec’s,28 finds the attempts to reconcile the horrors of the effectiveness the nouveau roman realism Holocaust with the fact that it indeed in its ecriture blanche—literally “blank did happen. The precision of existing writing,” though translated into English circumstances is described not for the as the “zero degree of writing.”29 A blank sake of being as true-to-life as possible, writing achieved literary realism by but for the sake of exposing a truth, or, approaching the complete absence of lit- as David Bellos writes, of Perec’s defini- to express it more effectively and prevent erature—largely through the absence of tion of realism, “it presents a coherent us from finding it ‘unbearable.’”25 From and ‘totalizing’ vision of the world.”30 this came the redefinition of realism”“ Referring to the nouveau roman trend, that Perec hoped to instill in literature. 26 Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Realism to Reality,” in Perec writes, “No sooner are everyday For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Realism was a hot topic of debate in Howard (1955; repr., New York: Grove Press, Inc., gestures described than they become 1965), 162. French literature during the late 1950s, 27 Ibid., 160. lies… Between the lines we are invited 28 See Roland Barthes and Claude Coste, Album: when Alain Robbe-Grillet released For Unpublished Correspondence and Texts, ed. Éric Marty, to read that inaccessible end toward a New Novel nouveau trans. Jody Gladding, European Perspectives (New , establishing the York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 261–6. which every genuine writer owes it to 29 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. 25 Perec, “Robert Antelme or the Truth of Litera- Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (1957; repr., New ture,” 256. Emphasis in original. York: Hill and Wang, 1968). 30 Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 276. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 17 •

himself to tend: silence.”31 While sim- the everyday object is one that is “con- discredit or destroy professionally any ilarly approaching “the silence of writ- structed” in the image of the author. correspondent who resisted this poli- ing,” Robbe-Grillet’s “constructions” Meanwhile, Perec’s version of “realism” cy.”33 Maspero’s bookshop was set on begin and end at the object of language; finds the general“ line” in the parachut- fire during this time, because it had no the infraordinary, on the other hand, iste’s void, or the author’s silence. There’s institution backing it.34 A decade after aims to use silence as a reflexive mirror a strand of optimism here—by aiming the Algerian War, the French media was that casts the “precise circumstances” for solidarity, Perec’s realism hopes for subject to much less state censorship, but onto readers, in order to evoke the substance in the void of the everyday, a with the collapse of a common enemy, program of solidarity. The intention of substance provided by the general line, a the left was much more prone to dis- silence, strikes a difference between two collective care, but needing the excava- agree on what should be published, such tion of writing and the platform of pub- as the PCF’s refusal to publish Lg’s work lishing in order to be brought to light. under their own flag. Much of the issue Though everyday gestures and objects that the Cause commune team took to may serve as a common starting point, journalism was its supposed objectivity, Perec finds only theenquête achieves the which conflated lived reality”“ with true potential of literature. “constructed” journalistic language. It is this form of writing that Cause The state’s prosecution of media crit- commune advocated for, but could not ical to their actions caused the media find in the state ofjournalism in its providers themselves to self-censor in day. According to Marc Paillet’s article order to retain their business, pandering in Cause commune No. 5, journalists to a right-wing (or even centrist) reader speak multiple languages—that of their base. So, the journalists of this time were realisms, between the parachutiste and subject matter, their editors’ styles, the writing for the state, as well as for their the enquête—do you stay silent to say state’s censorship, the digestible content editors, for a readership that wished to nothing, or let others’ voices speak “our for the reader… By including Paillet’s disengage from the fervent politics of [collective] truth?”32 essay, editors of Cause commune were antinationalism, and for themselves The nouveau roman operates like the reflecting on the previous two decades of to keep their jobs (and in some cases, parachutiste journalist, selective in its censorship in France, especially against their lives)35—speaking these multiple representation of reality. Its version of the left, most egregiously during the 33 Kuhn, The Media in France, 58. See also Tal- 31 Perec, “Robert Antelme or the Truth of Litera- Algerian War: “There appeared no limit bott, The War Without a Name: France in Algeria, ture,” 265. to the government’s determination to 1954-1962. 32 See Perec, “Approaches to What?” “…we’ve tried 34 Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 271–72. in vain to lay hold on our truth.” suppress news that it did not like and to 35 Kuhn, The Media in France. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 18 •

“languages” that distorted journalism on what the most truthful compte rendu These would fall under the category into propaganda. is. Paillet, in the book Le journalisme: of faits divers in the newspaper, or the Such is the popular conception of fonctions et langages du quatrième pou- “miscellaneous” section, events of no journalism: writing that means to be voir—which was inspired by his essay notoriety. For example, in Rue Vilin, objectively journalistic—in French this in Cause commune No. 5—considers Perec describes a street he lived on over a reportage is called compte rendu, literally compte rendu only one side of an oppo- few years, stating what stores are where, “rendered account.” If taken in its pure sition that exists within the journalistic which shutter up one by one, until form, this would be exactly the ecrit- profession. Theother side is ressaisisse- 1974, where much of the block went ure blanche that Barthes sees literature ment critique, which includes more from closed to demolished: “At No 25, approaching: “writing at the zero degree hotly political journalism—cartoons, opposite, a house with a double porch opinion columns, polemical debates.37 opening on to a long, gloomy courtyard The French translates, loosely, as criti- and a shop that appears closed but from cal “recapturing,” implying that there which a regular sound is coming… / was something lost to journalism in its At No 25, a shop, closed. / Nos 25, 27, other half, the compte rendu, that neces- shops, closed. Starting at No 27, fences. sitates replacing the missing opinion. / No 25, a shop, closed. / Nos 23 and The infraordinary takes these two parts 25 have been gutted. Past No 25, noth- and sees them as one—or, rather, that ing any longer. / Almost the whole of the ressaisissement critique inherently the odd-number side has been covered is present in any truly ecriture blanche with cement fences. On one of them “rendered account,” by the valuation of a graffito: WORK = TORTURE.”39 becoming rendered in the first place. These descriptions are listed indiscrim- is basically in the indicative mood, or if This is exemplified by the posthumous inately—surely each description was not you like, amodal; it would be accurate collection of writings, L’infraordinaire. worthy of any statement at all. However, to say that it is a journalist’s writing, if Unlike the headlining compte rendu of Perec’s enquête eye dares, optimistically, it were not precisely the case that jour- big events, this particular collection 39 Georges Perec, L’infra-Ordinaire, La Librairie nalism develops, in general, optative or of Perec’s work focuses on, aptly put Du XXe Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 15–32. As translated to English in Georges Perec, “The Rue Vilin,” in 36 imperative (that is, emotive) forms.” by Gilbert Adair, “phenomena that Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Stur- 38 rock, Penguin Classics (1981; repr., London: Penguin The issue thus far taken up by the real- ‘do not deserve’ to be seen in print.” Books, 2008), 212–21. This piece was published as an excerpt of a larger project that Perec undertook ism debate in literature is a contestation 37 Paillet, Le Journalisme, 31–32. but never completed, Lieux, in which he was to visit 38 Gilbert Adair, “The Eleventh Day: Perec and the twelve places in twelve different months across twelve Infra-Ordinary,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 29, years. “The Rue Vilin” only includes six entries, each 36 Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 76 –7. no. 1 (Spring 2009): 181. one shorter than the last. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 19 •

to dwell on a seeming void, in order to in 1970, and republished in French as excavate from the void the meanings La force du quotidien (“The Force of the that it holds. It is the choice to journal Everyday”) the same year as Issue No. indiscriminately that allows such truth VILÉM FLUSSER, “TO BED” 5 of Cause commune in 1973, but in to be uncovered. Here, the initial view of slightly different versions.41 The original the Rue Vilin is a surface reading of the I fell asleep. I know that I fell, title more aptly captures the phenome- street and its adjoining shops. Each year, because I let myself fall. I know nological attitude that Flusser takes to however, a new view presents itself—by that I shall be back, because his explorations: that “things” is plural no impetus of Perec’s own, a story of a I shall be called. But there is and concrete, rather than captured in familiar city, occupied by an everyday an abyss between these two the singular vague concept of the “every- life, is demolished building by building, knowings. I cannot speak about word by word, until there is nothing left that abyss, because I am beside to be excavated but construction fences. myself whilst I cross it. I am in Was this “deserving” of print? For the bed whilst I cross that abyss.40 infraordinary, the answer is yes. Perec “constructs” the reality by asking the Vilém Flusser’s contribution to Cause right questions to places that look like commune No. 5, “To Bed (Du lit),” is there is nothing to ask. The mentality of seemingly the only essay that has to do the infraordinary, on surface level, seems with an object of everyday life. The essay to only have to do with the enumera- was taken from A coisas que me cercam tion of banalities, which contrasts the (in Portuguese, “Things That Surround “big event” of spectacle that is typically Me”)—originally published in Brazil reported on in a newspaper. However, in day,” and they comprise an environment 40 Per a short biography of Vilém Flusser by Finger line with the program that Cause com- et al., this collection of essays in particular was writ- in which all “things” exist under equal ten in Portuguese, translated into English, edited in mune set out for itself, the infraordinary English, and then translated into French for publica- importance. The bed is but one of these challenges, by way of a reality studied at tion. However, in C.C. No. 5, the essay is said to have things, so the resulting essay in Cause been translated directly from Portuguese. Neither of arm’s length, the assumption that these the English versions have been published (see Anke commune No. 5 in fact has little to do K. Finger, Rainer Guldin, and Gustavo Bernardo, banalities written in ecriture blanche Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, Electronic Mediations, v. 34 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, have no politics. Indeed, they do—and 2011).) For my purposes, I reference the second English manuscript, which corresponds directly to 41 Flusser’s texts often exist in several forms, a to write about them is to create poten- the French text in Cause commune: Vilém Flusser, product of his nomadic life. For more on Flusser’s tial opportunities for solidarity vis-à-vis “Beds” (1973), http://flusserbrasil.com/arte27.pdf. For multilingual writing, see Finger, Guldin, and the published French version, see Vilém Flusser, “Du Bernardo, Vilém Flusser, chap. 3: Translation and words on a page. Lit,” Cause Commune, no. 5 (1973): 21–27. Multilingual Writing. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 20 •

with the bed at all, but rather, all else (per Perec). The elusive “codes” delude This dialogue transforms the tradi- that surrounds it. us to believe we lead rational lives that tional relationship between subjects and “How should we take account of, are founded on immovable answers— objects, the object being, importantly question, describe what happens every but for Perec and Flusser, it is in fact for Flusser, a fluid definition of “bed” day and recurs every day…?” Perec asks. irrational to assume the solidity of the that is constantly modified by its cul- Flusser answers, at the beginning of “To “floor” (read: arriere-plan) upon which tural context. In the case of Flusser’s Bed,” by asking a series of questions we “dwell.” Instead of the solid ground, exploration, the “bed” is seen in differ- evocative of the enquête questioning that we rest upon unknowable fecundity ent stages of life, from infancy, to sleep, was explored last chapter—i.e., “Where (read: cavernes). With this text, Flusser to sleeplessness, to bedridden sickness, is the center of our world? Are our sur- sets up the meaning of beds to be to death. The mutually reifying process, roundings really a world?”—to which he explored: an unstable restriction full of follows (but does not answer): potential, slightly above what is infra-,

The questions corrupt the answers. and excavated by way of questioning. They gnaw, rational rats that they are, Our understanding of everyday life is the irrational basis of our dwelling. based on living itself—the bed, a sup- They destroy infra-structures and they give birth to new questions. posedly stable object, is made unstable Our dwelling rests on the teeming by our living in it. backs of explosively fecund questions. Flusser explores the bed as his “other,” The fecundity of the questions is the floor of our dwelling. An oscillating in a phenomenon he calls “mutual and undulating floor… We dwell reification”: in the restriction of beds.42 For the moment, it is just a point in my field of vision. It is my object. But Flusser packs into these few sentences soon it will no longer permit me to where one self considers the other self reify it that way. It will try to make a similar sentiment that Perec expresses of me an object of its own. By this as an object of study, is a product of an in “Approaches to What?” Hearkening mutual reification we shall recognize internally driven questioning—precisely back to the opening essays of Issue No. each other… We shall talk and the “endotic” process that Perec uses to dialogue. The great conversation of 5, the destruction of current infra-struc- culture will program that thing over excavate the infraordinary. tures is precisely the aim of the infra-or- there. Culture will become the net When reification becomes a mutual dinary (per Duvignaud), and the in which that thing will be captured, phenomenon, it becomes what and it will exist within the net.”43 ammunition is indeed the “question” Edmund Husserl calls intersubjectivity. Flusser takes his definition of subject 42 Flusser, “Beds.” Emphasis added. 43 Ibid. and object mainly through Husserl’s • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 21 •

phenomenology: instead of subjective Unfortunately, this information society be changed.” Flusser admits, however, thought driving our interpretation of is a premonition of the Internet, and “I cannot read without prejudice. My the world, we rely on intersubjectivity. suffers exactly the attitude that Virilio prejudices discriminate.” The intention Metaphorically, “society will be seen feared in The Art of the Motor—that to receive the outsider, the other, as as a net composed of intersubjective information and reality live in parallel a part of “the floor of our dwelling” is intentional relations… If the knots are and separate worlds.46 A bed is not a bed unable to achieve total change. Instead, unknotted, the net will collapse and as object, but a space—or, in Flusser’s the intersubjective attitude accepts the disappear: it comprises of the knots. ‘I’ words, an abyss—for the particular con- “oscillation” between the stable prej- and ‘society’ are abstract extrapolations templation that he ensues in his essay: udice and the change via reading, or, [the knots] from concrete intersubjective between himself, the “I,” and the other, dwelling on the bed. relations [the net]. And these relations the conception of the bed—in other are ‘intentional’. They ‘mean’.”44 This words, the bed is the concrete, intersub- intersubjectivity illustrates the effect that jective “net” of the subject “I” and the the study of the infraordinary should object of the culturally-definedother, achieve. To Flusser, and the Cause com- which are “knots.” mune team, the subjects and objects, the This intersubjectivity defines our rela- knots, comprise the ordinary, but the tionship to the world around us with an intersubjective relations are that which attitude in which our being is receptive is unseen—this is what requires “endot- to constant dialogue with the culture by ics,” the excavation of the infraordinary. which we are surrounded: the “I” itself Flusser believes that Husserl’s phe- is not a stable knot. Theabyss of sleep nomenology evokes a new politics, “‘a is crossed over again and again, and universally dialogical’ vision sometimes with that crossing comes change, which Here we can engage with the source of called ‘information society,’” which Flusser analogizes with reading, another the title, “to bed,” an infinitive caught places intersubjectivity at the forefront transformative act. How do I read when in the moment between sleeping and of understanding the difficulty in seeing asleep, in bed? What is there in an abyss waking. At the end of each section of past subject and object to see the con- that can be read? “To read” is a moment Flusser’s essay, he quotes a passage from creteness of the relations themselves.45 when the author, rather than claiming Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

44 Vilém Flusser, “On Edmund Husserl,” Philosophy authority as the subject, engages in dia- To bed, to bed: of Photography 2, no. 2 (2012): 237. Emphasis in original. It is well noted that Flusser’s biggest philo- logue with culture: “I read in order to there’s knocking at the gate. sophical influence is Husserl: see Finger, Guldin, and Come, come, come, come, Bernardo, Vilém Flusser. give me your hand. 45 Flusser, “On Edmund Husserl,” 238. 46 See Virilio, The Art of the Motor. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 22 •

What’s done, cannot be undone. commune group, it is not a horrendous “The Scene of a Stratagem.”49 In it, Perec 47 To bed, to bed, to bed. act of murder that needs “parenthesis,” recounts a series of visits to a psychoana- Lady Macbeth says this passage while but everyday life: the parenthetical curve lyst, along with a project on dreams. she sleepwalks, a moment in between must be turned on its side and used to He recorded 124 dreams between sleeping and waking, ruminating over excavate what would have otherwise 1968 and 1972 and published the col- the murders she took part of as a mani- been “background noise.” By separating lection as a book called La boutique festation of her irreconcilable guilt. The herself from the act of murder, treating obscure. The last recording is incidentally action that replays in her head, though, is it as her other, a sleepwalking Lady Mac- dated as just after the first two issues of this “knocking at the gate” which inter- beth creates the same intersubjective rec- Cause commune. These records oscillated rupts, suddenly, a heightened moment ognition that Flusser does with his other between memory and dream, aided by drunk with darkness. As literary critic by way of reading. Thomas De Quincey wrote of this semi- For Georges Perec, that reading is nal moment in the play, an ordinary and dreaming—which, not unlike sleep- concrete action, in the context of extraor- walking, is a moment in between sleep- dinary circumstances, is a “parenthesis” ing and waking. During the years lead- that is necessary to see the act of murder ing up to and during his involvement as what it is, to “insulate” it as such. with Cause commune, the themes of The reminder of ordinary life brings sleep, dreams, and beds are a poignant Lady Macbeth back to her senses, that part of his personal life, which inevitably transformative, infraordinary moment, become sources of inspiration for his lit- in which she crosses over the abyss “to erary work, culminating in an essay for bed.”48 For Flusser, and for the Cause one of the later volumes of Cause commune, “The Stratagem La( Ruse),” under “the coenesthetic certainty of my body 47 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. A. R. Braun- muller, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge ; the new publisher. This essay was called in the bed, the topographical certainty New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Act V, Scene I. of the bed in the room … Just as a word 48 See Thomas De Quincey, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” in De Quincey’s Literary Criticism (1823; repr., London: H. Frowde, 1909), passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when 49 “The Scene of a Strategem” was published 149. “The murderers, and the murder must be the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of in another English translation elsewhere, titled insulated-cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: “Backtracking.” However, translator (and, Perec’s ordinary tide and succession of human affairs-locked the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes biographer) David Bellos notes the translation of the up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must known audibly that the reaction has commenced; French title Les Lieux d’une ruse “means both ‘The be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; Site of a Ruse’ and ‘the Rhetoric of Deception,’ since suddenly arrested—laid asleep-tranced-racked into a the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and Perec often used the word lieu (“place”) in its older dread armistice; time must be annihilated; relation to the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in rhetorical sense.” See Georges Perec, “Backtracking,” things without abolished; and all must pass self-with- which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of trans. David Bellos, Grand Street, no. 44 (1993): drawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.” 194–202. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 23 •

brought back from a dream can, almost for writing. The materialization of his renowned French psychoanalyst, J.B. before it is written down, restore a whole dreams on a page is the intersubjectivity Pontalis, whom he visited from 1971 memory of that dream…”50 This is an that excavates his truth. The bed is the to 1975, apparently to cure his writ- intersubjective dialogue between Perec page, both being “a rectangular space… er’s block.54 Pontalis often described himself and his memories that become in which, or on which, we normally lie Perec as his “other,” exchanging notes informed, modified, or completely fic- longways,” in order to read, or “gaze at between psychoanalysis and literature, tionalized by his time in bed, in sleep. the ceiling with a tranquil eye,” which overcoming the traditional doctor-client Perec here acts out Flusser’s dialogic he found to contain “labyrinths, woven dynamic, and becoming a more dia- narration—he is a man asleep, in bed, from phantasms, ideas and words.”52 In logic relationship. While it is expected falling into the abyss. Species of Spaces, which is divided into that Perec wrote about Pontalis, Pon- Both Perec’s dream world and his chapters based on “spaces” increasing living world is affected by this dialogue. in scale, the bed immediately follows For him, the act of dreaming, unlike the page, as the first three-dimensional Freudian psychoanalysis, is not one’s space, the “elementary space of the subconscious speaking what the subcon- body.”53 For Perec, the dialogue between scious has suppressed. Instead, by virtue the bed and the ceiling—the blank page of being recorded on paper, the dreams and the “Muse”—suspends between it could easily be fabricated, not “lived in the abyss in which Perec sleeps. In this order to be dreamt, but dreamt in order to abyss he “reads” labyrinths of meaning, become texts.”51 His act of creation is far which he is compelled to fill with his from intending to be deceptive: instead, dreams. the dreams become potential material Toward the end of his dream diary, in 1971, Perec began to visit famous talis also wrote of Perec often in both

50 Georges Perec, “Species of Spaces,” in Species of psychoanalyst J.B. Pontalis, in which his clinical analyses and his personal Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock, Pen- guin Classics (1974; repr., London: Penguin Books, these dreams became a focal point of writings, albeit under the confidenti- 2008), 21–22. his visits. The quickened pace of record- ality of false names “Simon,” “Pierre 51 Georges Perec, “The Scene of a Strategem,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John ing his dreams in 1971 was in no small G.” or “Stéphane”—demonstrating a Sturrock, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 172. He directly confronts the problem he way affected by his relationship with reciprocal relationship that dismantles has with the Freudian conception of dreams in this text: “Beneath the ephemeral glitter of these 54 Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 475–77. verbal collisions, the measured titillations of this This was also after an attempted suicide, so the little illustrated Oedipus, my voice met only its own reasons for starting these visits to Pontalis are not emptiness… responses that were ready-made, an necessarily clear. If it was truly to solve his writer’s anonymous ironmongery, and all the exaltation of a 52 Perec, “Species of Spaces,” 16–18. block, though, it was successful: he had his most ride of a scenic railway.” 53 Ibid., 16. productive years immediately following. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 24 •

psychoanalytical hierarchy.55 Perec used care of customers in his haberdashery Perec asks, in “The Scene of a Strata- “a stream of words” to compulsively fill downstairs.”58 gem,” “The stratagem is something that an abyss in his life—namely, as assessed The apparent vacancy left by Pontalis’ circumvents, but how to circumvent the by Pontalis, that of losing his parents silence is filled vicariously by the couch, stratagem?”60 Rather than a dialogue at a young age—which was a recurring similar to Flusser’s bed, a site for dia- between Perec and Pontalis, these psy- theme in Perec’s writings, especially logue between Perec and his other, in choanalyst trips were really a dialogue in his text La disparation, or A Void.56 order to excavate the void. With Perec between two Perecs: one, whose dream- There was also the void of silence during serving as Pontalis’ own source of inspi- ing for the sake of writing helped him fill the psychoanalysis sessions that require ration and self-analysis, and Pontalis the abyss (the stratagem), and the other, the patient to speak, which also drove serving as the silent “other” that Perec whose impulse instead was to excavate Perec to compulsive speech, as when he attempted to fill with writing, the dia- “tried to be silent… the silence all of a logic relationship followed no rules, but sudden became unbearable.”57 In Species benefitted both subjects symbiotically of Spaces, Perec includes the psychoana- from the “mutual reification” they lyst’s couch as one of the few moments performed on one another, illustrated outside of the bed where we lay in a by Perec as “a tedious game of mirrors “horizontal posture.” In the words of in which the Möbius strip of images Perec’s favorite humorist Roger Price, reflected one another endlessly.”59 They “the chair is placed behind the couch, each were changed by the reading of the so that the patient cannot see the ana- other (think back to Flusser’s reading). lyst… This is so that once the patient But, like Perec illustrates, the “other” begins talking, Dr. Dorsey can sneak is really just a reflection of the self: the out the door, telephone friends, and take need to step outside oneself in order to see what otherwise would be unseen— the infraordinary—by way of “reading” the dialogic other, excavating the blank 55 Henry P. Schwartz, “On the Analysts Identi- page, the abyss of the bed, to create, to fication with the Patient: The Case of J.B. Pontalis and G. Perec,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 85, no. 1 write. (2016): 133. See also Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 475–76, 518. 58 Roger Price, In One Head and Out the Other 56 See J.B. Pontalis, “Boundaries or Confines?,” in (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951), 47–49. Perec Frontiers in Psychoanalysis: Between the Dream and wrote the introduction to the French version of this Psychic Pain, trans. Catherine Cullen and Philip book. See also Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, Cullen (London: Hogarth, 1981), 155–66. 356. 57 Perec, “The Scene of a Strategem,” 171. 59 Perec, “The Scene of a Strategem,” 170. 60 Ibid., 166. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 25 •

what already existed within the abyss The moment memory is spoken, or the at painting in art galleries as if they were (the stratagem against the stratagem). moment forgetting is given fictional bits of wall or ceiling, and how to look Perec countered the creative impulse of voice—the moment the ordinary gives at the walls and ceiling as if they were the dream journal with what he called way to the infraordinary—they escape. paintings whose tens and thousands of a “journal intime” (French for diary, In January 1973, one month before paths you follow untiringly, endlessly or literally, “intimate journal”) with an the publication of Cause commune No. retracing your steps, as if they were mer- obsessively “objective” journal. In this, 5, Georges Perec and director Bernard ciless labyrinths…”62

Perec “remembers” the “ordinary side” Queysanne began collaborating on an “Indifference to the world is neither to analysis: its regularity, its coming and adaptation of Perec’s 1967 novel, A Man ignorance nor hostility. You do not going, the routine that he and Pontalis Asleep (Un homme qui dort). According propose to rediscover the robust joys of illiteracy, but rather, in reading, played each session, which required to David Bellos, Perec’s article for Cause certain performances, like opening the commune No. 5 “was as much the fruit double doors, or laying down a new of his work with Queysanne as a French handkerchief on the pillow to lay down. reinvention of ethnomethodology.”61 The seeming opposition between the The film follows the life of an unnamed intimate and the objective is renounced student—referred to in the second per- by Pontalis, in his Perec-inspired writ- son as “you” by yet another unnamed ing. Pontalis refers to Perec’s excessively narrator—who performs, repeatedly, precise “objective” journaling as the various gestures of living an urban hypermnesia and his text-dreams as the life, often never leaving their room, or insomnia. Both of these are infraordi- their bed. They are characterized as a nary in practice: they record repetitively “sleepwalker.” Their concernsmirror by design, circumventing the abyss of that of Perec’s own self, on Pontalis’ not to grant a privileged status to silence, and by doing so, excavate mean- psychoanalysis couch—for example, an any one thing you read… It is not ing from it. Thebed is the concrete site obsession with reading the ceiling as a exactly that you seek to accomplish these actions in total innocence, for of the “abyss” between the dream world labyrinth. This is restated several times innocence is such a loaded term: and real world, but rather than taking in both the novel and the film, most but merely, simply (if this ‘simply’ this in the Freudian sense, the dream poignantly when “you learn how to look can still mean anything) to relegate these actions to some neutral, self- world, to Perec, is the world of writing, contained territory, a space cleansed 61 Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 521. See the elucidation (and even the creation) also the booklet insert to the 2007 DVD copy of A of memories that are even more true Man Asleep: Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec, 62 Georges Perec, “A Man Asleep,” in Things: A Un Homme Qui Dort, DVD (1974; repr., La vie est Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep, trans. Andrew Leak to reality than the real world itself. felle editions, 2007). (Boston: Verba Mundi, 2004), 164. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 26 •

of all value-judgements, but not, especially not, a functional space: the functional is the worst, the most insidious, the most compromising of all values. No, let this space be self evident, factual, irreducible.”63

The value of “indifference” here hearkens back to Flusser’s reading: by allowing ourselves to be changed by what we read, we place value judgment on the subject of reading—one of no privilege. Perec’s “you” becomes “the master of the world” upon achieving maximum indifference, overcoming the systemically instilled prejudices that Flusser battles in reading. Such an ideal mind calls all things insignificant—both ceiling and painting stand on the same ground. “You” lists the titles in the newspaper systematically, deliberately, such that “all hierarchies and privileges must crumble and collapse.”64 This seems to be what the editors of Cause commune call for: the stripping of privilege of the extraordinary, especially in the media. Yet, “you” struggles with living in such indifference. At the climax of the movie adaptation, “you” is looking at the city, which he had so indifferently wandered and indiscriminately aimed to enumerate, and instead begins to

63 Ibid., 169–70. 64 Ibid., 169. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 27 •

judge with prejudice: “Putrid city, vile, without, but “in-“ as within: to dwell in When speaking of the infraordinary, repulsive city. Sad city, sad lights in the difference. To dwell in difference is not let alone the ordinary, a very apt ques- sad streets… Like a rat looking for a way only to read things simply as “irreducible tion would be to ask, “whose ordinary out of his maze. You pace the length and facts,” but also to allow the “oscillating life are we talking about?” It is often the breadth of Paris.”65 and undulating floor of our dwelling” “everyman,” a universal subject, an aver- Like the rat in Flusser’s “To Bed,” to move us, and encourage it to do so age man, increasingly seeing through an the rat here suddenly realizes that he by questioning the circumstances, the urban, mechanized lens driven by new is stuck, and must “gnaw that the irra- codes, the infra-structures on which it modes of production. This is a notion tional basis of our dwelling” to get out. lays. To dwell in difference is to practice that Cause commune aimed to challenge, Like Lady Macbeth, “you” relies on the the infraordinary. primarily through its “new anthropol- concreteness of everyday life to knock ogy of contemporary humankind.” your way out of sleepwalking. As Flusser Contemporeneity here, for Cause com- rightly assesses, there is no avoiding prej- ANNIE GUEDEZ, “THE mune, was an inclusive humankind: Jean udice. Indifference is no longer “in-“ as EVERYDAY BRICOLEUR” Duvignaud, who had just completed an ethnographic study of a Tunisian vil- 65 Ibid., 203. See also, Queysanne and Perec, Un Homme Qui Dort. Approximately one hour and six It is the “bricole” aspect lage, broke from Claude Levi-Strauss’ minutes into the movie, a crescendo of both the that captures their everyday structuralist mythologizing in search narrator’s voice and background music pair with an image increasing in contrast of the student struggling existence: from the acquisition of of a method to study societies without to move through a suddenly crowded city, when he had previously been completely deserted. Un Homme vocabulary to the arrangement of an assumed underlying framework that qui dort is filmed entirely in black and white, so the high contrast image begins to abstract the forms of their space, to the establishment these societies needed to fit into. Rather the crowd, such that they dissolve in the overexposed brightness into a blank screen. of new social relationships than the myth preceding the particu- to the development of their lar groups, each society can be seen in dreams, each of their behaviors its own structure in the same way the or their beliefs is preceded, like general line gives way to everyday real- bricolage, by juxtaposition and ism.67 Backgrounded by a decolonizing the assemblage of heterogeneous France, the revisionist Marxists that elements borrowed from different Cause commune associated with sided social frameworks.66 with movements for independence, but in a step further, Duvignaud was step- ping away from the French tradition

66 Annie Guedez, “Le quotidienneté bricolée,” 67 See Chapter 4 for the discussion on realism and Cause commune, no. 5 (February 1973): 27–30. La ligne générale. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 28 •

of anthropology towards a study of of our society are lesser than ourselves, enough money to “become someone,” “others” not as reinforcing a structural an attitude of the parachutiste. Levi- and own a farm of their own—that fact as does Levi-Strauss, but “as living Strauss, in his seminal text on struc- money being made by picking up odd organisms which have a right to a life of tural anthropology, draws a distinction jobs (bricoler) that required neither a their own within a new framework, and between the bricoleur and the engineer command of the French language nor a which have a contribution to make to in anthropological studies of other cul- proper work permit. But as they pieced the new society of which they form part tures; Jacques Derrida makes no such together (bricoler) their wealth, they through the re-discovery of their own distinction in his review of Levi-Strauss’ also pieced together a new dream, with authentic personality.”68 Cause commune work, instead determining that the engi- “‘real wood’ furniture (she is currently aided this aim, advocating for “endotic” neer is a myth created by the bricoleur, doomed to use laminate) as beautiful rather than “exotic” studies—empha- thus only bricoleurs exist.69 as those she shines for her employers.”70 sizing the differences that exist within How does the bricoleur fit into the The exchange of one dream for another what may appear to be, at first glance, infraordinary? Rather than leaving out could be seen as, in terms of Levi-Strauss’ one’s own society comprised solely of the these marginal social groups that are bricoleur, “making do with ‘whatever is “everyman.” deemed “other,” it was precisely those at hand’… which is always finite,” but The impetus to study within our same groups that would provide oblique would such a claim also not be true of own societies as a “new anthropology” access to the otherwise opaque social the employers that they try to emulate? debunks the thought that those outside “codes”—the labyrinthian cellars latent Again, as Derrida says, there are only in the arriere-plan—that surround “us.” bricoleurs. If the employers questioned 68 Cecil Hourani, “Foreword,” in Change at Shebika: Report from a North African Village, by Jean The margins are much better equipped their own wants (why wood furniture?) Duvignaud, trans. Frances Frenaye (1968; repr., New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), xiii. for a study of the infraordinary. they would discover they are no differ- In Cause commune No. 5, Annie ent from the migrant workers that they Guedez writes of a couple, under consider “other.” pseudonyms Trinidad and Paulo, who One could say, “they were progres- migrated from Portugal to enjoy a bet- sively mastering their desires: they knew ter life in France than they would have that they wanted; they had clear ideas. in their home country. They dream of They knew what their happiness, their someday returning to Portugal with freedom would be,” but one could also

69 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the say, “they were wrong all the same. They Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (1966; repr., Chicago: were beginning to lose their way… they The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 285. See also Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962; repr., London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 16–33. 70 Guedez, “Le quotidienneté bricolée,” 29. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 29 •

were wanting to live, they were waiting commodity-oriented milieu points for the everyday to be looked at with as for money.” 71 Such was Georges Perec’s toward Lefebvre’s idea of “mystified con- scrutinous of an eye as one looks out- description of Jérôme and Sylvie, the sciousness” or Barthes’ “mythologies.”72 ward to the fantastic and hyperbolized protagonists of his novel Things, who Though Duvignaud does not answer his fait divers in the newspaper headlines. moved away from Paris to Tunisia, in own question, the answer is a matter The anonymity of the codes by which order to find what it meant to “live,” of attitude—and in the “catastrophic” we live would continue to be unknown outside of their desirous Parisian soci- fashion of Cause commune, Lefebvre’s to us if we were to ignore them, as the ety. Though they were in a much less presaged pessimism overcomes Barthes’ “mystified consciousness” of wartime marginal position than laboring immi- structuralist splendor. A very early work politics exemplified. The simple question grants, the flagrant consumerist culture of Lefebvre’s, Mystified Consciousness (La of “how is it that I want to live?” and they were immersed called out similar conscience mystifiée) was published in then, “why do I want to live this way?” dissatisfactions with their current situa- 1936, a dangerous time for imagining would expose the commodity systems tions: whether it was the right or wrong a phenomenological politics that alien- that both couples—Trinidad and Paolo way to live, it was clearly a codified ated both the Communist Party and and Jérôme and Sylvie—are caught in, a system of thought that controlled their the incoming Nazi regime. “Mystified net that would remain invisible had they “desires” in the same way that Trinidad consciousness” critiqued the ability of not questioned it. and Paulo unknowingly found their institutions such as those to entice the But as we see in Things, Jérôme and dreams changed. public into following their codes without Sylvie did question their circumstances. Jean Duvignaud, writing on question—explaining why Hitler was They attempted to make a change, Perec’s Things, wonders whether the able to be elected into office by popular move away from Paris without all of 73 71 Perec, “Things: A Story of the Sixties,” 34. vote. Mystification is what covers up their things to a lifestyle that was fur- the infraordinary and erases its traces, ther away from what they dreamed of, leaving people with the semblance of a only to move back to their old lives and beautiful (or so they say) blank slate. resume the status quo, and accept their From the notion of the bricoleur, as indifference to the meaning behind their well as from Lefebvre’s “mystified con- dreams. Thus, we oscillate from a mys“ - sciousness,” the infraordinary is not tified consciousness” to “mythologies.” anything new—it is merely advocating The difference between a myth that

72 Duvignaud, Perec, Ou, La Cicatrice. remains unquestioned and a myth that is 73 This particular point is exceedingly relevant to today’s world. See Andy Merrifield, “Mystified perpetuated, knowingly, even after ques- Consciousness,” Monthly Review 71, no. 10 (March tioning, is an acceptance that the myth, 2020), https://monthlyreview.org/2020/03/01/ mystified-consciousness/. indeed, exists. It has imprinted into our • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 30 •

minds, rooted as prejudice, and its sig- we believe we have a personal stake in The process of immigration, in the nificance is removed from existence. In the answers. sense of the infraordinary, exposes— fact, it could be said that the myth—in The unconscious everyday choices of with the simple questions and automated the case of Things, that the best life is cultural adaptation, done in bricoleur judgements that immigration officers made by the things at the height of Pari- and paradoxically tied to consumerist ask incoming foreigners—a prejudicial sian fashion—now bears something we dreams, then comes in sharp contrast to structure that has locked in the myth of can call in-significance. Only the mate- Perec’s much later but overtly anthropo- the other, and can be held away from the rial signifier remains; just things. A myth logical work on American immigration city through the armature of the island, can only be perpetuated if a significance space. “Ellis Island,” originally a film shrouded by the mystified consciousness is locked in—one cannot question a project with his friend Robert Bober, of the foggy Atlantic coast. The island is myth beyond its first order signified. later made into a book that collected a spatialization of the myth of the other, Lefebvre’s “mystified consciousness” Perec’s writings on the method and of mystified consciousness. Floating follows these myths blindly; Barthes’ reasons for making such a project in the between Europe and America, allowing “mythologies” revels in the knowledge first place. According to Perec’s research, a view of Lady Liberty (figure) but not of these myths by remaining indifferent; the immigration process on Ellis Island access, the island signifies the prejudice Cause commune’s infraordinary wishes to consisted of twenty-nine questions: against the other at the turn of the cen- question myth by treating it endotically, What is your name? tury and into the postwar era, holding rather than as an “other”—we are much Where are you from? immigrants in “the ultimate place of less likely to give up on our questions if Why have you come to exile, that is, the place where place is the United States? How old are you? absent, the non-place, the nowhere…” How much money do you have? in the middle of the ocean.75 These Where did you get this money? questions, read from a script, are not the Show it to me. Who paid for your crossing? endotic questions of the infraordinary, Did you sign a contract in but questions of processing humans Europe for a job here? through a set of codified qualifiers that Do you have any friends here? Do you have any family here? deem them worthy of exiting the abyss Is there anyone who can they had entered on Ellis Island. Each vouch for you? threshold was, in essence, filtering a sur- What kind of work do you do? Are you an anarchist? face-deep good health and a pronounce- —and so forth.74 able name; upon further excavation,

74 Georges Perec and Robert Bober, Ellis Island, New York: The New Press, 1995), 16–17. trans. Harry Mathews and Jessica Blatt (1994; repr., 75 Ibid., 58. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 31 •

they operated as shibboleths, demand- “In some way I’m estranged practiced.78 “For the returning deportee, ing assimilation, as cultures that differed from myself; to speak, to write, is a need as strong and in some way I’m ‘different,’ not from the American one was also seen as different from others immediate as is his need for calcium, for a disease to be treated. Each threshold but from ‘my own people’: sugar, sunlight, meat, sleep and silence. was performed ritualistically as if on I don’t speak the language my parents It’s not the case that he can remain spoke, an assembly line, and the immigrant is I share none of the memories they silent and forget. He has first of all to reified in the process of capitalization.76 may have had, remember.”79 Yet this memory is hard to Even the alphabet was bastardized as something that was theirs and made achieve with so much placelessness—to them what they were a method of coding health issues in —their story, their culture, their be shoved into a truly blank space, one immigrants. This systematized differ- hope— that is marginal to other spaces, leaves 77 entiation feigns indifference—in fact, it was not handed down to me.” very little to excavate. Theinfraordi - holds difference with an iron fist, as an With his lack of connection to a nary addresses the plight of immigrants instrument against solidarity, emptying particular category, a people he was by demanding there be answers to the immigrants of identity. related to, Perec deemed the myth of questions of marginality, bringing the Perec’s infraordinary answer to this “Jewishness” as insignificant. None of invisible space of Ellis Island floating diaspora is to question the difference the usual signs were there to show his in the ocean out of the fog and to the that is ingrained in the immigration sys- Jewish heritage, nor was it Perec’s inter- fore, exposing the intricate “cellars” of tem and its space, especially by leaning est to spin his tale into one that fit into immigration to the public who had been into his autobiographical thoughts: the structure of Jewish diaspora. His floating along happily on the surface.

76 Flusser, “Du Lit”; Georg Lukacs, History and only prejudice was his lack of memo- Vilém Flusser’s conception of homeless- Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (1968; repr., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). ries. Thinking back to Perec’s review of ness requires immigrants to find a home Robert Antelme’s The Human Race, he within themselves:

avoids the trap of the Jewish myth and “The secret code of homes are not instead opts for a stripped down text, made of conscious rules, but rather which is exposes the experiences most spun of unconscious habits. What characterizes the habit is the fact in its “realist” conditions, conditions that one is not conscious of it. The that one cannot say is just a horrendous person without a home must first injustice to others, but a horrenous act consciously learn the secret codes and then forget them, to be able to by the very normalcy by which it was

78 See Chapter 4 for the discussion on Antelme’s The Human Race. 79 Perec, “Robert Antelme or the Truth of 77 Perec and Bober, Ellis Island, 61. Literature.” • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 32 •

immigrate into a home. However, in lieu of “pillaging from others” the The common appearance of everyday if the code becomes conscious, then mystification that allows the stablefloor life in comic strips is not necessarily for its rules turn out not to be sacred but banal. The immigrant becomes of our dwelling. the sake of putting the everyday on dis- even more unsettling to the native, play, but for the sake of the aiding the uncannier than the traveler out there, narrative, acting as a rhetorical device, because he reveals the banality of the sacred to the native. He is hateful; he PIERRE FRESNAULT- a shroud of reality, which allows readers is ugly, because he exposes the beauty DERUELLE, “THE to accept the goings-on of the comic of home as nothing more than pretty QUOTIDIAN IN STRIPS” as plausible and relatable. Whether it kitsch. His immigration causes a polemical dialogue between the ugly occurs in a domestic object or in speech stranger and the beautiful native.”80 If everyday life is “the bubble banter, ordinary things and unconsciousness (...) of occurrences exist in many comics as a The othering of theother is a defen- modernity”, the refusal of means of situating the reader in the fic- sive strategy employed by a “we” that current events, whether perceived tional world of the strip, within the lines would like to avoid conversation about as a news flash or a (repeatedly) on the page.83 In these cases, everyday our own habitual everyday lives—this historic moment, certain comic objects slip into the background. avoidance, or indifference, causesmys - strips clearly refer us to the image Thecomic strip also conversely depicts tified consciousness to take over. Paul of a sleepwalking society stuck in everyday life within its frames, as the Virilio’s concerns for the “plundering of entertainment.82 foreground. Creativity in the comic strip the anonymous”81 is most obvious here: is subservient to its audience and mate- 82 Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, “Le Quotidien En for many immigrants, rather than being Bandes,” Cause Commune, no. 5 (February 1973): riality: mass consumption and greyscale 30–34. The ellipsis in his Lefebvre quotation leaves able to create a life from the arrière-plan, out some interesting text: “It might be truer to say printing (save the color in Sunday week- they are instead considered to be under lies—by its very nature not an everyday the arrière-plan themselves, residing in that everyday life is a crust of earth over the tunnels cellars that remain invisible to an undis- and caves of the unconscious and against a skyline of uncertainty and illusion that we call Modernity...” cerning society. A study of the infraor- Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life and the Modern World, dinary, which can reach out directly to trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 109. This environmental metaphor the other through Flusser’s intersubjec- encapsulates the “infra” character of everyday life that Lefebvre, and later Cause Commune, begets; see tivity, can also reach the other indirectly Jean Duvignaud’s text opening the first issue of the journal, where he outlines the aims of the journal, through the “endotic” study of ourselves including “… to undertake an investigation of everyday life at all levels in its folds or caves generally 80 Vilem Flusser, Writings, ed. Andreas Strohl, disdained or repressed…” trans. Erik Eisel, Electronic Mediations 6 (University 83 See Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, La Bande Dessinée; of Minnesota Press, 2002), 95. l’univers et Les Techniques de Quelques “Comics” 81 Virilio, “La defaite des faits.” d’expression Française. (Paris: Hachette, 1972). • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 33 •

comic). Thus the everyday must be the typological “everyday man” becomes Charles Schulz’s Peanuts series is used drawn with broad strokes, or “offer the critic’s imaginary audience, even here to demonstrate the everydayness the image of a world that… is always though the strip itself may have been of comics, as it is used in both Fres- necessarily schematic.”84 The schematic inspired by a particular person or set of nault-Deruelle’s comic theory work and is reflexive of each individual’s every- events. The “necessary schematics” of in Perec’s personal essays. Perec invokes day—while a headline in the newspaper the comic creates characters that readers Peanuts’ ability to insert pensive, sup- “reveals itself only by way of the spec- may all see themselves in—but because posedly universal questions in the daily tacular, as if what speaks, what is signif- of the broad strokes, the alignment with banter of the comic characters: “Let’s icant, is always abnormal,”85 the comic reality is never complete. keep tapping the topic: What Who? strip acts as a funhouse mirror, both When? Where? How?... Why? That’s a menées par les protagonistes: technique narrative et reflecting everyday life and distorting technique graphique s’associent pour combler toute good question, as Lucy Van Pelt would 86 solution de continuité entre un univers plausible et 87 it. From the sociological perspective, un monde impossible. Toutefois, la quotidienneté fait say.” “Everydayness” is far from a plus que représenter une situation historique précise crippling constraint and becomes an 84 Fresnault-Deruelle, “Le Quotidien En Bandes.” ou désigner l’actualité des fictions contées, elle est 85 Perec, “Approaches to What?,” 209. un facteur de dépaysement. Comme l’eau dort, elle opportunity to use banal repetition to a 86 Fresnault-Deruelle, La Bande Dessinée, 137. reflète notre monde, mais elle cache aussi derrière “Mais à l’instar de la technique graphique, permet- ce qu›elle prétend refléter, une réalité beaucoup plus strip’s advantage, creating easy-to-digest tant d’intégrer sur un même plan de représentation floue. L’expressionnisme de Jacobs, l’humour chez les êtres caricaturés et les choses chez Hergé, c’est Hergé, l’héroïque chez Martin gauchissent le réel. La formulae that keep readership coming surtout la peinture du quotidien qui réussit à parfaite- conformité au référent n’est qu’un repoussoir pour ces back for more of the same fictional ment faire « passer » les actions dites invraisemblables auteurs. ” world: “Illusion—for [Peanuts] characters are constantly trying to turn their dreams into reality—and habit—they keep behaving in the same way—guar- antee their survival.”88 The dailycomic strip must necessarily must be printed daily, the characters try each day to reach for their dreams, and each day they are prevented from doing so by the very nature of the medium, requiring both the substance of the comic and

87 Perec, “I Was Born.” 88 Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, “From Linear to Tabular,” in The French Comics Theory Reader, ed. Ann Miller and Bart Beaty (1976; repr., Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), 125. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 34 •

the literal page to repeat itself again and its very everydayness—the blank space for potential happenings, the schematic again. Despite this repetition, each day both between frames and between days. mirror from which we excavate the lab- must be different, and thedifference When brought into a chronological col- yrinths of the everyday. Unlike urban can only be perceptible insofar as it lection as many comics do, we immedi- space itself, though, the comic is neces- brings the reader back tomorrow: “there ately see the repetition when these strips sarily constrained by the page on which is no sense of narrative stagnation, but that should be spaced out are placed on it appears, and by the frames which frag- rather a renewal hard won against the a single page, and their narrative loses ment the narrative. Such a space must ever-present danger of going down the engagement. The everyday, here, does be placed into a certain medium as well, same old street: when the paradigm is not hold its own, requiring the context in order to be seen in both its schematic extended, the syntagm has to submit!”89 of the rest of the newspaper, and the and fragmentary natures. Fresnault-Deruelle pinpoints the con- spacing of each reader’s lived lives, to Here is where we return to Georges tradiction of the daily comic strip by make it interesting. Perec’s writing projects, namely his comparing it to urban space: its schema, Urban space works similarly to the 1974 book Life A User’s Manual (La vie myth, or paradigm, is broken down by initial instance of schematization of the mode d’emploi). His inspiration for the its very medium, spacing, or syntagm. comic—the space is universalized into a novel was a cartoon section cut through But this difference, as Fresnault-Der- single story that is representative of the an apartment building drawn by Saul uelle says, is “deferring, not differing.”90 multiple experiences of that “necessary Steinberg in his postwar publication, Here, by invoking an aspect of Derrid- schematic.” The experience of such a The Art of Living. What enamored Perec ian “différance” in relation to both the space replicates the schematic—but in the first place was Steinberg’s ability comic strip and the city, Fresnault-Der- adds back the particulars of its situation. to create depth from the two-dimen- uelle ties the semiological to the archi- Like the comic, urban space is the space sional page, “the mere inventory—and it tectural and social by way of spacing—it could never be exhaustive—of the items differs in space and identity and defers of furniture and the actions represented in temporality, “maintains” its par- has something truly vertiginous about adigm, but also “flirts” with its own it…” 92 Thinking back toAn Attempt redundancy.91 The schematism of the at Exhausting a Place in Paris, the nev- everyday comic strip is complexified by er-ending project of “exhaustion” is the excavation of the infraordinary. It neces- 89 Fresnault-Deruelle, “From Linear to Tabular.” See also Fresnault-Deruelle, “Le Quotidien En sitates that when the surface is seen, it Bandes.” 90 Fresnault-Deruelle, “From Linear to Tabular,” is not yet truly read—the Steinberg 128. 91 Fresnault-Deruelle, “From Linear to Tabular.”; See also Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play.” 92 Perec, “Species of Spaces.” • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 35 •

apartment building section cuts away the façade to expose the inner lives of the building, fragmentary in each contained room, everyday in the scenes that it depicts, and therefore materially similar to the comic strip. In preparation of this novel, Perec dedicates the majority of “The Apartment Building” chapter of “Species of Spaces” to an attempt at exhausting the Steinberg drawing. The list becomes an indiscriminate manifest of activities and objects in the drawing, jumping between what can be seen repeatedly but not discriminately call- ing out a larger or more obvious thing over another: “3 bathrooms… / 3 fire- places… / 6 candelabra and one Calder- style mobile / 5 telephones / 1 upright piano with stool / 10 adult individuals of the male sex…”93 Unlike “The Apartment Building,” in “The Apartment” chapter of “Spe- cies of Spaces,” the private apartment is enumerated in a procedural fashion, by circadian rhythm or other. While also simply a container for innumerable objects in the drawing, the Steinberg apartment inspires a non-linear narrative in Perec’s novel, allowing the space of the Apartment Building to rise above

93 Ibid., 41. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 36 •

the Apartment’s structure of the sche- the apartment building—the interior each highly articulated interior makes matic “elementary rightness” of a father, life of each frame is held together by the the in-between rooms more interesting mother, and child moving through construct of the building, or in the case than confusing—of course, also aided function-based spaces, which Perec dis- of the drawing, the blank page. Looking by Steinberg’s schematizing cartoon parages in an aside: “no one lives exactly at the Steinberg section as a humorous style, which cartoonishly implies depth like that, of course, but it is nevertheless drawing (a comic), and even further one without succumbing to the tyranny of like that, and not otherwise, that archi- that contains its narrative in multiple perspective, elasticizing the margin as tects and town planners see us as living frames (a strip), we can start to analyze the daily comic strip does. And it was or want us to live.”94 Thecomic artist the drawing as a comic strip containing Steinberg who chose, in the galaxy of of the daily strips operates in a similar everyday life, or vice versa. his imagined boardinghouse, where to mode of schematic thought, assuming The section takes the entire space of set the frames (or “arbitrary set of sig- that the masses for their mediums in the page, save a few urban buildings nifiers” in Fresnault-Deruelle’s terms) fact are a mass of the archetypal, uni- in the background above the roofline, of each inner life, with the page as his versal family, living in this archetypal, which only adds another layer of frag- constructed constraint. universal way. mentation from the building to urban With all this talk about constraints, Steinberg’s drawing argues the oppo- space, a bricolage of narratives. These it is hard to ignore the relationship that site: the schematic cartoon human is not narratives occur in blank spaces between Georges Perec had with the literary group the “everyman,” nor is it trying to be. the rooms—some walls have doorways Workshop of Potential Literature (Ouevre The singular façade of a boardinghouse which lead to other spaces fading back d’Litterature Potentiale, or Oulipo). Perec building already allows its multiple in perspective, rather than leading to uses constraints in some form or another characters show through the windows the room next door. The plausibility of in all of his writing, some strict (lipo- (a mother and daughter with a bird, or grams, anagrams), some as scaffolding a bearded fellow smoking a pipe with (latin bisquare), some undiscovered. his dog and plants), and in revisiting The Oulipo group found self-imposed the “work built from fragmentation and constraints in writing were the way to diversity… [we] overcome the disparity expose writing’s true potential.96 While of viewpoints and achieve a unified con- 96 See Warren F. Motte, ed., Oulipo: A Primer of 95 struction.” This “construction” is the Potential Literature, 1st Dalkey Archive ed, French Literature Series (1986; repr., Normal, Ill: Dalkey difference between the apartment and Archive Press, 1998). Perec’s relationship with the Oulipo group is often conceived of as more central to his biography than Cause commune was; Raymond 94 Perec, “Species of Spaces.”, p. 31. Queneau, who was the group’s leader during Perec’s 95 Fresnault-Deruelle, “From Linear to Tabular,” membership, was similar to Jean Duvignaud as an p. 130. almost-father figure to Perec. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 37 •

Perec himself had determined that the Aptly, Perec refers to this as a “cellar” through the history of a minor zone now “ludic” and the “sociological” aspects of space. abandoned by everyone.”97 The work of his writing were separate categories, his The beauty of the novel, however, is Perec and Cause commune was to bring conception of categories themselves was that one does not necessarily need to these minor histories to the fore. arbitrary and incomplete: the Oulipan is know Perec’s complex structures in order Even the narrative within the novel tied closely to the sociological, especially to enjoy the narrative of the book. This is one that confronts the insignificance when we look at Life A User’s Manual is not unlike how Perec liked to move of actions in everyday life that are made and the Steinberg section. The Ouli- through a city—unlike the Situationist by choice. Bartlebooth, one of the resi- pan dictum is to find creative potential dérive, which relied on the spontaneous dents in the apartment building of Life A through these constraints did not always aura of “situations” to direct their wan- User’s Manual, makes a lifelong activity manifest themselves overtly in their ders through the city, Perec imposed to paint watercolors in different loca- writings. arbitrary structures that would then tions, send it out to Gaspard Winkler The consequent design of Life, A User’s draw out the creative potential from (another resident) to cut them up into a Manual includes the non-linear surface the supposedly blank page in front of puzzle, ultimately to be sent back to the reading of Steinberg’s apartment, done him—which, of course, is no longer locations they were painted to be dipped in classic Oulipan style—the befuddled blank. The structure merely lends itself in detergent to “return to the blank image is in fact guided by several arbi- to be read as plurally in literary terms whiteness of their original non-being.”98 trary constraints. The translation from as it already does in sociological terms, Sent back to Bartlebooth in this blank page to narrative occurs in the form of which “foreshadows the brutal unveiling state, after having gone through all the a knight’s tour, emulating the knight’s of a dwelling place, the breaking of the insignificant motions, the blank sheet L-shaped movement around a chess ties that were formed here and there, and would still retain the lines of the puzzle, board, which must visit every square a nascent reminder of a history that need of a 10x10 grid, which Perec transposes not be remembered, yet can inform the over the façade of a Parisian apartment future life of the blank sheet of paper. building. Perec only writes ninety-nine This is exemplary of the form of ecriture chapters, however, with the last room blanche that is the infraordinary. left unvisited and unknowable; this We have now encountered this blank room was the bottom left square of the page in numerous occasions in Cause knight’s tour grid, or if projected onto commune issue No. 5: the parachutiste’s the elevation of Steinberg’s building, 97 Virilio, “A Walking Man,” 137. is the very location of the entry stairs. 98 Georges Perec, Life, a User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (1978; repr., Boston: Verba Mundi, 2009), 490. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 38 •

trust of the void, the journalist’s removed seconds. That same day, the front page of continued in his Sociological Art Col- enumeration to capture reality, the abyss the arts section of Le Monde contained, lective. In the Cause commune version, of the bed between sleeping and wak- in the bottom right corner, 150 square Forest states that the page is a color plate ing, the indifference of A Man Asleep, centimeters of blank space. The descrip- insert (which it is not), and that color the lack of identity in immigrants, the tion invited readers to send the clipping would be added via the contents of the placelessness of Ellis Island, the margins of this blank rectangle, populated with rectangle, which the reader was to pro- between comic strip frames, the space whatever they pleased to send, back to vide. In stating that it is already in color, between rooms in the apartment build- Fred Forest, who requested participants Forest implies that the reader is already ing. While not an exhaustive list of the to “Express Yourself! The entire page of in dialogue with the media, rather than subjects mentioned in Cause commune this newspaper will become a work of just receiving it. No. 5 nor in Georges Perec’s works, the art. Yours.”99 At the beginning of this discussion, manifestation of an ever-escaping void Forest republished this disruptive the comic strip was juxtaposed with its in these essays shows that this blankness rectangle in Cause commune No. 2 a few surroundings: the constant barrage of is irrevocably tied to the infraordinary. months later, along with an interview text and images, in line with the extraor- Blankness spans mediums of paper, and review of the exhibition where the dinary, sensational stories covered by information, human gestures, and 702 responses he received were placed professional journalists. A blank space urban space. To question what is under adjacent to one another. The “action,” on the radio, newspaper, and television, the ordinary, we must assume that the as he later calls it, is one of his earliest is the antithesis of its context. Vilém ordinary is above something. The blank- works of participatory art, which he Flusser, who began a collaborative ness of the background is, paradoxically, 99 Fred Forest, as translated by Michael F. Leruth, streak with Forest during these years in Fred Forest’s Utopia: Media Art and Activism, 2nd ed. not blank at all. (MIT Press, 2017), 3, muse.jhu.edu/book/55966. “sociological art,” including their work in Cause commune, wrote a passionate review of the Space-media project. With a single line, Forest “poked holes” and This is not the first time that blank pushed the marginality of white space pages make an appearance in Cause into an advertisement space, dulling the commune. We look to issue No. 2, in black text into the background.100 Here, an art action by Fred Forest, illustrator confronted with sudden agency, the of Cause commune, called Space-media. masses could mediate themselves.

On January 12, 1972, silence aired on 100 Vilem Flusser, “L’espace communicant: l’expé- French radio channel “Europe No. 1” rience de Fred Forest.,” Communication et langages, no. 18 (1973): 80–92, https://doi.org/10.3406/ for fourteen minutes and thirty-five colan.1973.4010. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 39 • • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 40 •

Forest’s call for the public to regain introductory page which contained Other maps are such shapes, control of media took a more physical, none other than a blank rectangle. The with their islands and capes! But we’ve got our brave urban form at the 1973 Sao Paulo Bien- context here, though, was his citation Captain to thank” nale, a few months after the publication at the bottom of the rectangle—could (So the crew would protest) “that of Cause commune No. 5. Here, Forest one cite a blank rectangle?—a children’s he’s bought us the best——— A perfect and absolute blank!”102 executed yet another “art action,” this poem by Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of time as a live performance, called The the Snark. The blank rectangle originally While the absurd map may be abso- City Invaded by Blank Space. During the appeared as one of nine illustrations in lutely useless as an instrument of nav- biennale, he marched through the streets the book, which depicted “a map of the igation, it is entirely “perfect” in its of Sao Paulo with signs that had nothing ocean”: rejection of “conventional signs” to rep- written on them, rendering them “more He had bought a large map resent the open sea in the Snark world. provocative than actual antigovernment representing the sea, The Bellman bought this map in which slogans would have been, since they Without the least vestige of land: directional words surrounding the rect- And the crew were much pleased simultaneously dramatized state censor- when they found it to be angle, though recognizable dyadic signs ship and represented the pure possibility A map they could all understand. to the ordinary reader, are not placed of free speech, while taunting leaving in their expected locations around “What’s the good of Mercator’s content up to each person’s imagina- North Poles and Equators, the box, or even placed in opposition tion.”101 The City Invaded by Blank Tropics, Zone, and Meridian Lines?” to their antipode—save the cardinal Space literalizes the connection between So the Bellman would cry: directions, though the map is missing and the crew would reply urban space and the comic strip, with “They are merely conventionalsigns! “SOUTH.” Though the meaning of the “necessary schematic” of blank these navigators is removed, the blank signs that could be read as whatever the map still has a “scale of miles,” though public needed it to read. Any passersby the numbers are replaced with dots are thus encouraged to encounter their (Could it represent Morse Code? If so, it everyday lives with more scrutiny as would still spell out a nonsensical “II ES the blank space becomes a medium of I”). The scale requires measurement to questioning rather than a medium of be relational, situational, and therefore communication. requiring no knowledge but the ability After Cause commune No. 5, Georges to correlate physical space to the space Perec published Species of Spaces—the of a page. The reductive map allows for

101 Leruth, Fred Forest’s Utopia: Media Art and 102 Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (New Activism, 4. York: Macmillan and Co., 1891). • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 41 •

an egalitarian understanding amongst the city of Paris down to a single egg.103 the entire crew, which would typically As in The Hunting of the Snark, both of be interpreted only by the Bellman’s these short tales show concrete, direct captainship. While situated within the relationships situating their audience in text of directionality, thus making it a the described spaces than the universally “map,” the arbitrary cartography placed codified signs. While we may have an upon the earth is no more accurate than abstract understanding of our cardinal the blankness of the ocean. directions, “next to the tent” is the lan- The foreword of Species of Spaces imme- guage of the everyday.104 diately following the pictorial epigraph Had Perec cited Forest’s Space-media concludes with one short playscript and instead, the reason would not be so dif- one poem—neither of which are The ferent—in fact, Perec’s encounter with Hunting of the Snark, but do describe Forest’s work in Cause commune must the same pleasure the Bellman’s crew have at least subconsciously informed his took to his blank map. The playscript, in choice of pictorial epigraph. Instead of three acts, repeats: “To the North, noth- codified, significant cartographic words ing. / To the South, nothing. / To the surrounding the blank space, Space-me- East, nothing. / To the West, nothing,” dia is surrounded by the clamor of mass reinforcing these codified conventions media, which gives the context to which as decidedly useless to the telling of the the reader may respond. The context, tale. However, in the last act, the script though, may not stop at the edges of the says what is in the center (a tent) and page, the screen, or the start and end of what is next to the center (shoe shine). 103 Perec, Species of Spaces, p. 7-8. The key here is the preposition, 104 Later, in The Scene of a Strategem, Perec notes, of his psychoanalyst’s office: “Yes of course, I was in describing relationships rather than Paris, in a neighborhood I knew well… and I could absolutes. The following poem operates have amused myself by working out my longitude, latitude, altitude and which way I wa facing (my similarly, relating two objects in each head west-north-west, my feet east-south-east). But the ritual protocol of the sessions extruded space and line, building up from a single egg to time from these landmarks.” Perec, “The Scene of a Strategem.” The concern for cardinal directions—and the city of Paris, and then mirroring the therefore for the semiological use of abstract words— repeatedly occurs in theories on everyday life: the relationships in the next stanza, reducing envoi of Lefebvre’s Production of Space is a poem by Octavio Paz describing the cardinal directions as four walls, to which “I wrote messages, but received no reply.” See Lefebvre, The Production of Space. • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 42 •

a radio segment—it may be expanded to metaphor for Forest’s dialogic work, that bubble would preclude mass media the readers’ lives, what was happening but also hearkens back to Flusser’s own “breaking the discursive barrier around (“’it is raining’”) or where they were (“a article in Cause commune No. 5, “To us.”108 That discursive barrier is that of drawing of a woman in a bath”) at the Bed,” where the bed also is an abyss, abbreviation, or tout court, where mass moment, which thus locates this blank between yourself and your “Other.”107 media is limited in its medium space, space for the reader—or, a captain hunt- By opening these dialogues up in “every and thus must truncate any possible ing a snark.105 These blanks urge their direction,” the abyss of mirrors or of the conversation to the point that there spectators to no longer passively receive bed allows the innumerable individual seems to be no space for public reflection mass media, but to actively participate reflections to replace the synthetic uni- at all. The mirror becomes opaque, no in dialogue with the medium by ask- versal “everyman,” and thus serves as a longer an obvious reflection but one that ing them to reflect their livedreality, tool for excavating the infraordinary. requires “endotic” excavation. which would otherwise be considered Space-media is a premonition of While the blank space begins its insignificant against the headlines of a Perec’s hope to find a way to invigorate work in the context of a public, Perec’s newspaper. The blank space becomes a the questioning of the habitual, a refo- choice of Carroll’s map opening Species mirror, and as such, becomes an image cusing “from discourse into dialogue” of Spaces, from which he removed the of everyone’s reality. Any universalized in the space where the infraordinary is surrounding text and scale and opposite statement is ultimately less intelligible, otherwise crowded out. However, the a page with a list of phrases containing less dialogic than the mirror of a blank emphasis on dialogue in Forest’s artistic “space,” situates the blankness in a pri- space. practice is performed within the utopian vate realm of extreme subjectivity, where In an analysis of Forest’s Space-media bubble of art, and its existence outside of “space” can act either as the modifier work, Flusser uses the mirror as a met- 107 Flusser, “Du Lit.” or the modified. What matters, in the aphor for the epistemological challenge classification of species, is the action that it poses for everyday life: “Just as of classifying; and rather than rely- there is no ‘supreme mirror’ to mirror ing on predetermined “conventional all of the other mirrors, there is no signs,” Perec thinks, “we ought to ask reality that is not mirrored… The abyss ourselves where exactly we are, to take of mirrored mirrors opens up in every our bearings… simply concerning our direction.’” 106 Themirror is a cogent topographical position, not so much

105 See Yann Pavie and Fred Forest, “Ça Veut Dire in relation to the axes cited above, but Quoi, Space-Media?,” Cause Commune, no. 2 (June in relation 1972): 29–33. rather to a place or a person 106 Flusser, “L’espace communicant.” As quoted in Leruth, Fred Forest’s Utopia: Media Art and Activism, 71–72. 108 See Flusser, “L’espace communicant.” • II • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 43 •

we are thinking about, or that we shall thus start thinking about.”109 Signs, then, are reduced to insignificance, and that which was considered insignificant is that which is used to describe relations and conditions. This relational method, intersubjectivity, or dwelling in-difference, is the method of the infraordinary.

109 Perec, “Species of Spaces,” p. 83. Emphasis added. III • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 44 • • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 45 •

works of its participants. And rightly in this thesis) and sensationalized news- so does this volume of Cause commune paper was flourishing, not just in France, end with a written dialogue between but around the world—we had already MARSHALL MCLUHAN, Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Schaef- seen in the “New Left” journals like “THE FUTURE OF THE fer on the role of the book in the early Arguments and (almost) La ligne générale BOOK” 1970s, with the prevalence of the Xerox arising out of critiques of the Algerian machine allowing anyone to become War and the “mass movement” in 1968.2 To write about the present of their own publisher, in theory. As is Cause commune was the product of the the book, with a keen eye on the my hypothesis, this portion’s inclusion disillusioned remaining “New Left” that changing ground (arrière-plan) must, regardless of intention, be of some continued to strive for anti-partisanship for the book as a figure, is to amount of importance in understanding in the post-1968 world. realize how many new forms the the infraordinary. “The Future of the For McLuhan, the printing press was book has assumed even in our Book” projects the prevalence of read- transformative to this “promised cul- time. In all patterns, when the ership in authorship in the early 1970s tural democratization,” beginning with ground changes, the figure, too, when Xerox democratized the means of the Gutenberg Press, which “made every is altered by the new interface.1 production of print. man a reader.”3 The process of repeated An apt place to start is the term that reproduction causes “the book world Looking at the last section of Cause McLuhan uses as the medium of the [to be] confronted with an image of commune No. 5, it is hard to know book, the “ground,” or background itself that is completely revolutionary… exactly where “Xerox, Simulacra, and the upon which the form of the book could 2 Mercer, “The Paperback Revolution,” 613–14. 3 Ibid., 615; McLuhan, “The Future of the Book,” Death of the Book” (Xérox, simulacre, be imprinted on—the arrière-plan, the 179. et mort du livre) fits in with the overall same term that Duvignaud uses in his theme of the infraordinary. The constel- definition of the infraordinary at the lation of seemingly disparate intellectual beginning of the journal. McLuhan voices and topics in Cause commune No. uses arrière-plan to describe both the 5 cohere a meaning for the infraordinary temporal context of the book-form, and and the consequent (and some prior) the page of the book itself, upon which forms of text are printed. The time that 1 Marshall McLuhan, “L’avenir du livre,” Cause commune, no. 5 (February 1973): 41 as translated McLuhan and Cause commune No. 5 in; Marshall McLuhan, “The Future of the Book,” in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, ed. was grappling with was 1973, where Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines (1972; repr., cheap paperback, artistic “little maga- Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 180. I use this English translation moving forward. zines” (which I have called journals here • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 46 •

concerned with process rather than life” ultimately is placed into a utopian was proclaimed by Roland Barthes in product, with effects rather than con- situation where the participation of the the late 60s,7 Cause commune instead tent.”4 The “ground” is transformed and public is choreographed and constrained embraced a viewpoint where the read- distributed widely to a larger public and by the artists’ intentions. A blank er’s and writer’s selfhoods are equally thus expands, while the “form” remains a page is not provided to all; Forest had important in creating the necessary soli- repeated element, bound in its figuration to pay for the advertisement space to darity of infraordinary “text.” Assuming to be simulacra. The wide net of reader- print nothing. In the 1970s present in Duvignaud’s editorial article “Code ship extends beyond the medium of the which Cause commune was written, the and Hysteria” was written after having cloth-bound or paperback-bound book: Xerox machine was the transformative assembled the other essays including Fred Forest’s Sociological Art already technology, which made “every man a McLuhan’s, Duvignaud’s response to demonstrated the media of radio, tele- publisher” to McLuhan.6 Recalling the McLuhan’s arrière-plan is the missing vision, and urban space can similarly be mirror world of Fred Forest and the “infra-” component—the cellars. While democratized such that readers become intersubjective abyss of Vilém Flusser, not everyone will fill out theblank space authors, given the arrière-plan can be the xerographic copying of text provides in Space-media to send back to Forest presented without a “form.” yet another analogue of the reflexive for exhibition, everyone does sleep. The difficultly, though, is bringing nature of the arrière-plan, which was Vilém Flusser’s abyss of sleep, the “floor these “art actions” into everyday life, both literal in the materiality of paper of [his] dwelling”—also known as the rather than just within the artist’s oeu- and metaphorical in the cultural “back- arrière-plan—causes him to “read in vre. TheSociological Art Collective, ground” upon which these copies were 7 See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text. Trans- whose first manifesto was written in printed. McLuhan places the future of lated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1974—just as Cause commune’s first run the book in the hands of the public, 1977. came to a close—claimed “‘sociological where the democratized “book” can be art’ is not art. Nor is it the sociology produced by anyone provided with the of art. It is an ethical and practical “miracle” of a Xerox machine. approach to life that bases its method- Mass readership alone could not ology on the empirical development of bring the cultural revolution that the sociological praxis operating under the “New Left” journals expected out of pretense of art, of if one prefers, under 1968—that mass readership needed to the cover of art.”5 Such an “approach to become implemented into mass author-

4 McLuhan, “The Future of the Book,” 178. ship. While “the death of the author” 5 Sociological Art Collective Manifesto 1974, as quoted and translated in Leruth, Fred Forest’s Utopia: Media Art and Activism, 49. 6 McLuhan, “The Future of the Book,” 179. • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 47 •

order to be changed… but not without Book, A Spiritual Instrument” as the takes a decidedly more prosaic approach, resistance.”8 The intersubjectivedialogue newspaper was reaching maturation, in a “post-objective epistemology,” to created between the self and the “other,” questioning whether the newspaper borrow a phrase describing Forest’s mediated by the arrière-plan, achieves could contain a similar poetic reverence Sociological Art. Georges Perec’s call for a democratic outlook—provided that that the bound book affords us as they us to look deeper into our everyday lives readers are willing to be changed by what hit a critical point of drifting apart in than the surface of the newspaper, to they read, and seek out “others” to read. two different definitions of “Press.” Sim- excavate the infraordinary from under The “resistance” is real: ridding oneself ilar to Perec, Mallarmé concludes that the seemingly blank arrière-plan, is at of learned codes and prejudices—a the newspaper could not. It is missing, once all of his cateogorical imperatives: demystification process—is not easy nor in its “unbearable columns,” the neces- sociological, autobiographical, ludic, always right, but the optimistic call-to- sary “divine” nature of the flipping of and novelistic. action of Flusser’s abyss accepts this real- the page: “in vain does this extraordi- ism as a product of the intersubjective nary, gathered in like a wing about to net. The depiction of a specificrealism unfold, intervention of the folding or of the “other,” as we have seen in the the rhythm concur, initial cause for a As Perec says, “Let’s keep tapping comic strip, feeds into the “schematic” closed sheet to contain a secret, where the topic: What? Who? When? Where? nature of comics through its specificity dwells the silence, precious, in pursuit of How? Why?”12 in everyday conditions. Thus, this read“ - evocative signs, quite literally abolished ing,” in the “future of the book,” spans for the spirit.”10 The consideration of the mediums—the book is not necessarily a “extraordinary” effects of unfolding a bound book, but, in its most schematic page, as a form of excavating the mirac- 12 Perec, “I Was Born,” 100. sense, an arrière-plan ripe for excavating ulous book, gives too much weight to the the cellars of the infraordinary. precious objecthood of the book for the For Cause commune No. 5, the news- aims of Cause commune; Mallarmé does, paper provided no such intersubjective however, aptly question “whose vision?” text, since, according to Perec, it would when reading the “daily” (journal, or describe “everything except the daily.”9 newspaper), is the concern of the poetic Nearly eighty years earlier, Stéphane license of the author.11 Cause commune Mallarmé wrote the seminal essay “The 10 Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book, A Spiritual Instrument,” in The Book, Spiritual Instrument, ed. Jerome Rothenberg, trans. Michael Gibbs (New York: 8 Flusser, “Du Lit.” Granary Books, 1982), 17. 9 Perec, “Approaches to What?,” 209. 11 Ibid., 15. • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 48 •

“Journalists and Their Languages” is action in one direction or the other; this is precisely the transformation (and a two-fold essay, dealing with Perec’s the infraordinary requires this con- reversion) that his protagonists undergo. biographical “journal” involvement stant oscillation, a constant practice of among the French intellectual left cir- approaching the unknowable everyday cles of the 60s and 70s on one hand, and life. The bed is a notable feature in sev- with the journalistic style of his infraor- eral of Perec’s works, especially as the “The Everyday in Strips” shows the dinary writing on another, which is oth- psychoanalyst’s couch where he began spaces in between comic strips, the spac- erwise referred to as “realism.” Perec’s his objective, journalistic recordings in ing between frames, between daily or concerns with “realism” stretch from the face of having to talk about his most weekly issues, in which information is La ligne générale into Cause commune subjective, journaling ones. hidden, but assumed to exist—“where” through the method of recording that he the infraordinary takes place, which is developed in his “sociological” writings. often in a non-place. Infraordinary is Journalism is the method of “how” the already prefixed by its spatial modifier, infraordinary is revealed—but rather “The Everyday Bricoleur” shows being “under” the ordinary, and what than the mass media parachutiste “jour- “who” makes everyday life most appar- is under all this writing about ordinary nalism” that Cause commune is critical ent—those whose identities and sit- life? Theblank page. Amidst the per- of, it is enquête journalism in Perec’s uations are unaccounted for in social petual barrage of everydayness that we “realism” sense of the term, which places forms. Though everyday life is typically experience, well, every day, the insurgent all items, all news, big or small, on the banal enough to escape our purview, moment is when the blankness surfaces, same playing field, not allowing the it becomes a stark borrowed and col- when the infraordinary becomes appar- headlines to crowd out the anecdotal. laged feature in the lives of those who ent. It often requires this moment to be approach society from the outside, such as marginalized migrant workers. The infraordinary, unlike a typical anthro- “To Bed” considers the psychoanalyt- pological method, is a look at societies ical interior world of the infraordinary we are most familiar with as if we were and of Georges Perec—describing the approaching it from the outside, so the “when” of the infraordinary. Thebed marginal experiences bring to light the could be just a concrete ordinary object, marginal conditions that arise under the but here it is the moment in between code of society itself (read, the “infra” of sleep and wake, the “abyss.” In such a the ordinary)—in Perec’s novel Things, state of limbo, all one can do is take • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 49 •

framed as a moment, as in the blank Then, what is the “why” of theinfraor - map epigraph of Perec’s Species of Spaces, dinary? From the words of Perec himself: or the Sociological Art actions of Fred “I feel confusedly that the books I Forest, illustrator of Cause commune. have written are inscribed and find their meaning in the overall image that I have of literature, but it seems to me that I shall never quite grasp that image entirely, that it belongs “The Future of the Book” shows the for me to a region beyond writing, to the question of “why I write,” mass produced book as the medium which I can never answer except by representative of the infraordinary, the writing, and thus deferring forever medium by which the particularities of the very moment when, by ceasing to write, that image would visibly everyday life is recorded, and multiplied cohere, like a jigsaw puzzle inexorably by a Xerox machine to its simulacra— brought to its completion.”13 the same way that Cause commune No. 5 was issued itself. The inclusion of the Indeed, Blanchot’s assessment of the Marshall McLuhan essay, especially everyday still holds, and holds even more under its own heading, brings to the true for the infraordinary: “it escapes.” It forefront the role that mass media plays is defined primarily by its adjacencies, by in the infraordinary: it is both the object what it is under, what it is between, what of its critique and the object of its own is not written about, but around. It is, dissemination. The future of the book above all, a humbling practice, requiring is in the act of the book: through the the elliptical act of questioning both act of collecting these essays in Cause one’s own personal circumstances and commune No. 5, and now, through my the general circumstance of the world, own collection of essays, the infraordi- and using these answers (better yet, nary is brought into slight focus, hover- more questions) to excavate the infraor- ing within the pages of the journal, or dinary from blank space, or to attempt between the columns on the broadsheet. to approach the void.

13 Perec, “Statement of Intent.” • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 50 •

Maillet, Georges Perec, and Paul Sciences.” In Writing and Difference, “À propos de ‘cause commune.’” Le Virilio, eds. “Cause Commune.” Cause translated by Alan Bass, 278–93. 1966. Monde, May 31, 1974. https:// Commune, no. 1 (May 1972): 1. Reprint, Chicago: The University of www.lemonde.fr/archives/arti- Bulson, Eric. “Introduction.” In Little Chicago Press, 1978. cle/1974/05/31/a-propos-de-cause- Magazine, World Form, 1–32. Mod- Desanti, Jean T., Boris Rybak, and Jean commune_2523267_1819218.html. ernist Latitudes. New York: Columbia Duvignaud. “La Structure Dechiree.” Adair, Gilbert. “The Eleventh Day: Perec University Press, 2017. https://doi. Cause Commune 1, no. 5 (February 2, and the Infra-Ordinary.” Review of org/10.7312/buls17976. 1973). Contemporary Fiction 29, no. 1 (Spring Carroll, Lewis. The Hunting of the Snark. Duvignaud, Jean. “France: The Neo-Marx- 2009): 176–88. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1891. ists.” In Revisionism: Essays on the His- Antelme, Robert. The Human Race. Trans- tory of Marxist Ideas, edited by Leopold lated by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Labedz, 313–23. New York: Frederick Mahler. 1957. Reprint, Marlboro: The A. Praeger, 1962. Marlboro Press, 1992. ———. “Le Code et l’hysterie.” Cause Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Commune 1, no. 5 (February 2, 1973). Translated by Annette Lavers and ———. Perec, Ou, La Cicatrice. Arles: Colin Smith. 1957. Reprint, New York: Actes Sud, 1993. https://hdl.handle. Hill and Wang, 1968. net/2027/uc1.b3924182. Barthes, Roland, and Claude Coste. Album: Finger, Anke K., Rainer Guldin, and Gus- Unpublished Correspondence and Texts. tavo Bernardo. Vilém Flusser: An Intro- Edited by Éric Marty. Translated by duction. Electronic Mediations, v. 34. Jody Gladding. European Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota New York: Columbia University Press, Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Every- Press, 2011. 2018. day Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Flusser, Vilém. “Beds,” 1973. http://flusser- Bellos, David. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, brasil.com/arte27.pdf. London: The Harvill Press, 1999. 1984. ———. “Du Lit.” Cause Commune, no. 5 Blanchot, Maurice. “Everyday Speech.” De Quincey, Thomas. “On the Knocking at (1973): 21–27. Translated by Susan Hanson. Yale the Gate in Macbeth.” In De Quincey’s Flusser, Vilem. “L’espace communicant: French Studies, no. 73: Everyday Life Literary Criticism, 144–50. 1823. l’expérience de Fred Forest.” Com- (1987): 12–20. Reprint, London: H. Frowde, 1909. munication et langages, no. 18 (1973): Bourdin, Alain, Christine Brunet, Jean Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and 80–92. https://doi.org/10.3406/ Duvignaud, Pascal Lainé, Francois Play in the Discourse of the Human colan.1973.4010. • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 51 •

Flusser, Vilém. “On Edmund Husserl.” Phi- - Time, Space and the City.” In Writ- Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. losophy of Photography 2, no. 2 (2012): ing on Cities, by Henri Lefebvre, 3–60. 1962. Reprint, London: Weidenfeld 234–38. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. and Nicolson, 1966. Flusser, Vilem. Writings. Edited by Andreas Kuhn, Raymond. The Media in France. Lon- Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Conscious- Strohl. Translated by Erik Eisel. Elec- don: Routledge, 1995. ness. Translated by Rodney Living- tronic Mediations 6. University of Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life II: stone. 1968. Reprint, Cambridge: MIT Minnesota Press, 2002. Foundations for a Sociology of the Every- Press, 1971. Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. “From Linear to day. Translated by John Moore. 1961. Mallarmé, Stéphane. “The Book, A Spiri- Tabular.” In The French Comics Theory Reprint, London ; New York: Verso, tual Instrument.” In The Book, Spiritual Reader, edited by Ann Miller and Bart 2002. Instrument, edited by Jerome Rothen- Beaty, 121–38. 1976. Reprint, Leuven: berg, translated by Michael Gibbs, Leuven University Press, 2014. 14–20. New York: Granary Books, ———. La Bande Dessinée; l’univers et 1982. Les Techniques de Quelques “Comics” McKenzie, D.F. Bibliography and the Sociol- d’expression Française. Paris: Hachette, ogy of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge 1972. University Press, 2004. ———. “Le Quotidien En Bandes.” Cause McLuhan, Marshall. “L’avenir du livre.” Commune, no. 5 (February 1973): Cause commune, no. 5 (February 1973): 30–34. 38–44. Guedez, Annie. “Le quotidienneté bricolée.” ———. “The Future of the Book.” In Cause commune, no. 5 (February 1973): Understanding Me: Lectures and Inter- 27–30. views, edited by Stephanie McLuhan Hourani, Cecil. “Foreword.” In Change at ———. Everyday Life and the Modern and David Staines, 173–86. 1972. Shebika: Report from a North African World. Translated by Sacha Rabino- Reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Village, by Jean Duvignaud, translated vitch. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Mercer, Ben. “The Paperback Revolution: by Frances Frenaye. 1968. Reprint, ———. The Production of Space. Translated Mass-Circulation Books and the New York: Pantheon Books, 1970. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. 1974. Cultural Origins of 1968 in Western James, Alison. Constrainting Chance: Georges Reprint, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. Europe.” Journal of the History of Ideas Perec and the Oulipo. Evanston: North- Leruth, Michael F. Fred Forest’s Utopia: 72, no. 4 (October 2011): 613–36. western University Press, 2009. Media Art and Activism. 2nd ed. MIT Merrifield, Andy. “Mystified Con- Kofman, Eleonore, and Elizabeth Lebas. Press, 2017. muse.jhu.edu/book/55966. sciousness.” Monthly Review 71, “Introduction: Lost in Transposition no. 10 (March 2020). https:// • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 52 •

monthlyreview.org/2020/03/01/ ———. “Approaches to What?” In Species ———. L’infra-Ordinaire. La Librairie Du mystified-consciousness/. of Spaces and Other Pieces, translated by XXe Siècle. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Morin, Edgar. The Cinema, or The Imag- John Sturrock, 207–49. Penguin Clas- ———. “Robert Antelme or the Truth inary Man. Translated by Lorraine sics. 1973. Reprint, London: Penguin of Literature.” In Species of Spaces and Mortimer. 1956. Reprint, Minneapolis: Books, 2008. Other Pieces, translated by John Stur- University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ———. “Autoportrait: Les Gnocchis de rock, 254–66. Penguin Classics. 1962. Motte, Warren F., ed. Oulipo: A Primer of l’automne Ou Réponse à Quelques Reprint, London: Penguin Books, Potential Literature. 1st Dalkey Archive Questions Me Concernant.” Cause 2008. ed. French Literature Series. 1986. Commune, no. 1 (May 1972): 19–20. ———. “Species of Spaces.” In Species of Reprint, Normal, Ill: Dalkey Archive ———. “Backtracking.” Translated by Spaces and Other Pieces, translated by Press, 1998. John Sturrock, 1–96. Penguin Clas- Paillet, Marc. Le journalisme: fonctions et sics. 1974. Reprint, London: Penguin langages du quatrieme pouvoir. Paris: Books, 2008. Denoël, 1974. https://hdl.handle. ———. “Statement of Intent.” Translated net/2027/mdp.39015014449105. by David Bellos. Review of Contempo- ———. “Le journaliste et ses langages.” rary Fiction 29, no. 1 (2009): 31–32. Cause commune, no. 5 (February 1973): ———. “The Gnocchi of Autumn, or an 15–20. Answer to a Few Questions Concern- Pavie, Yann, and Fred Forest. “Ça Veut Dire ing Myself.” In Species of Spaces and Quoi, Space-Media?” Cause Commune, Other Pieces, translated by John Stur- no. 2 (June 1972): 29–33. rock, 119–23. Penguin Classics. 1972. Perec, Georges. “A Man Asleep.” In Things: Reprint, London: Penguin Books, A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep, David Bellos. Grand Street, no. 44 2008. translated by Andrew Leak. Boston: (1993): 194–202. ———. “The Parachute Jump.” InSpecies Verba Mundi, 2004. ———. “I Was Born.” In Species of Spaces of Spaces and Other Pieces, translated by ———. A Void. Translated by Gilbert and Other Pieces, translated by John John Sturrock, 113–18. Penguin Clas- Adair. 1969. Reprint, Boston: Verba Sturrock, 99–102. Penguin Classics. sics. 1959. Reprint, London: Penguin Mundi, 2005. 1988. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2008. ———. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Books, 2008. ———. “The Rue Vilin.” InSpecies of Paris. Translated by Marc Lowenthal. ———. Life, a User’s Manual. Translated Spaces and Other Pieces, translated Cambridge: Wakefield Press, 2010. by David Bellos. 1978. Reprint, Bos- by John Sturrock, 212–21. Penguin ton: Verba Mundi, 2009. • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 53 •

Classics. 1981. Reprint, London: Pen- Queysanne, Bernard, and Georges Perec. J.B. Pontalis and G. Perec.” The Psy- guin Books, 2008. Un Homme Qui Dort. DVD. 1974. choanalytic Quarterly 85, no. 1 (2016): ———. “The Scene of a Strategem.” In Reprint, La vie est felle editions, 2007. 125–54. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans- Robbe-Grillet, Alain. “Realism to Reality.” Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by lated by John Sturrock, 165–73. Pen- In For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, A. R. Braunmuller. New Cambridge guin Classics. London: Penguin Books, translated by Richard Howard, 157– Shakespeare. Cambridge ; New York, 2008. 68. 1955. Reprint, New York: Grove NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, ———. “Things: A Story of the Sixties.” Press, Inc., 1965. 1997. In Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Sheringham, Michael. “Georges Perec: Asleep, translated by David Bellos. Bos- London: University of Chicago Press, Uncovering the Infra-Ordinary.” In ton: Verba Mundi, 2004. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices ———. W, or a Memory of Childhood. from Surrealism to the Present, 248–91. Translated by David Bellos. Boston: Oxford ; New York: Oxford University David R. Godine, Publisher, 1988. Press, 2006. Perec, Georges, and Robert Bober. Ellis Talbott, John. The War Without a Name: Island. Translated by Harry Mathews France in Algeria, 1954-1962. New and Jessica Blatt. 1994. Reprint, New York: Knopf, 1980. https://hdl.handle. York: The New Press, 1995. net/2027/mdp.39015035309023. Pontalis, J.B. “Boundaries or Confines?” In Virilio, Paul. “A Walking Man.” In AA Files Frontiers in Psychoanalysis: Between the No. 45/46, edited by Mark Rappolt, Dream and Psychic Pain, translated by translated by Clare Barrett, 136–37. Catherine Cullen and Philip Cullen, London: Architectural Association, 155–66. London: Hogarth, 1981. 2002. 2001. ———. Windows = Fenêtres. Translated Scalbert, Irenee, and Mohsen Mostafavi. ———. “La defaite des faits.” Cause com- by Anne Quinney. 2000. Reprint, “Interview with Claude Parent.” In The mune, no. 5 (February 1973): 4. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Function of the Oblique: The Architec- ———. The Art of the Motor. Translated by 2003. ture of Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, Julie Rose. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Uni- Price, Roger. In One Head and Out the 1963-1969, edited by Pamela Johnston, versity of Minnesota Press, 1996. Other. New York: Simon and Schuster, 49–57. AA Documents 3. London, Virilio, Paul, Georges Perec, J.M. Palmier, 1951. 1996. and Jean Duvignaud, eds. Le pourrisse- Schwartz, Henry P. “On the Analysts Iden- ment des sociétés. Vol. 1. Union générale tification with the Patient: The Case of d’éditions. Paris: 10/18, 1975. • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 54 •

CAUSE COM MU N E PUBLICATIONS

OTHER TITLES PUBLISHED DENOEL/GONTHIER TEXTS BY GEORGES PEREC UNDER “CAUSE COMMUNE”

Editorial board: Alain Bourdin, Christine Brunet, Jean Duvignaud, Pas- cale Lainé, Francoise Maillet, Georges Perec, Paul Virilio. Cause commune journal – 9 issues (1972-1974) Cause commune 1 (May 1972)* Georges Perec, Auto-portrait (Gnocchi of Autumn, or an Answer to a Few Ques- tions Concerning Myself) Cause commune 2 (June 1972)* Georges Perec, Sox rêves (Six Dreams, excerpt from La boutique obscure: 124 Dreams) Cause commune 3 (October 1972)* Georges Perec, l’Orange est proche (The Orange is Near); Foctionnement du sys- tème nerveux dans la tête (A Function of the Nervous System of the Head) Cause commune 4 (November 1972)* Georges Perec, Le Grabuge (Violence, or The Scraps) in conversation with Georges Balandier, Paul Virilio, and Jean Duvignaud) Cause commune 5 (February 1973)* Georges Perec, Approches de quoi ? La boutique obscure : 124 reves, (Approaches to What?) Georges Perec (1973) • III • • AN ATTEMPT TO APPROACH A VOID • 55 •

Cause commune 6 (April 1973) Georges Perec, Chalands et nonchalants Cause commune 7 (October 1973)* Cause commune 8 (November 1973) Cause commune 9 (February 1974)

10/18

Le pourrissement des sociétés (1975)* Georges Perec, Tentative d’épuise- ment d’un lieu parisien (An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, excerpt) ; l’Orange est proche (reprint) ; Approches de quoi ? (reprint) Nomades et vagabonds (1975) Les imaginaires (1976) La Ruse (1977)* Georges Perec, Les Lieux d’une ruse La Chambre a bulles : essai sur l’im- (The Place of a Ruse, or The Scene of a age du quotidien dans la bande dessinee, Stratagem) Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle (1977) Art sociologique, Fred Forest (1977) Qui a peur de l’autogestion? (1978) Les imaginaires 2 (1979) • A N AT T E M P T • TO A P P ROAC H • A VO I D •

• G E O R G E S P E R E C • C AU S E C O M M U N E • I N F R AO R D I N A RY •