Everyday Life Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present EVERYDAY LIFE This page intentionally left blank Everyday Life Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present MICHAEL SHERINGHAM 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Michael Sheringham 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–927395–2 978–0–19–927395–9 13579108642 In memory of my mother Yvette Habib Sheringham (1912–1967) Acknowledgements I am grateful to the French department at Royal Holloway University of London for providing a stimulating and supportive environment during the composition of much of this book, and to the Warden and Fellows of all Souls College and my colleagues in the French sub-faculty at Oxford for their encouragement in the final stages. Many of the ideas were tested and enhanced in debate with students on my special subject course, ‘Exploring the Every- day’, at Royal Holloway, as well as at the universities of Paris VII-Jussieu in 1995–6, Bordeaux-III in 2000, Paris IV-Sorbonne in 2002, and the Institute of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College in July 2005. I proWted enormously from questions raised after talks in universities in the UK, France, and the US and would like to thank the various organisers for making this possible. For research leave and support I thank Royal Holloway University of London, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the British Academy, and the University of London Central Research Fund. I have much appreciated the contribution of colleagues at Oxford University Press, especially Tom Per- ridge, Jacqueline Baker, Andrew McNeillie, and Sophie Goldsworthy. I also thank the anonymous readers of my manuscript for their helpful suggestions. Earlier versions of some sections of this book have appeared in the following places: French Studies, Paragraph, Cross-Cultural Poetics, in Diana Knight (ed.), Critical Essays on Roland Barthes (New York: G. K. Hall, 2000), Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (eds.), The Art of the Project (Oxford: Berghahn, 2005), Charles Forsdick and Andy StaVord (eds.), The Modern Essay in French (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), Michel Murat and Gilles Leclerq (eds.), Le Romanesque (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004), Elisa- beth Cardonne-Arlick and Dominique Viart (eds.), EVractions de la poe´sie, E´critures contemporaines, no. 7 (Paris: Minard, 2003). I am grateful to the relevant editors and publishers for permission to reproduce this material. One of the pleasures of working on everyday life is that everyone has a view on the matter. It is not possible to thank them all personally, but I owe an immense debt to the numerous friends who have shared their ideas with me. Priscilla, with whom I share my own everyday life, has benevolently tolerated its disruption by this project: to her I express my loving gratitude. List of Illustrations FIG. 1. J.-A. BoiVard, ‘Je prendrai pour point de de´part l’hoˆtel des Grands Hommes’ (I will take the Hotel des Grands Hommes as my starting point), from Andre´ Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1928). Collection Lucien Treillard, Paris. 89 FIG. 2. J.-A. BoiVard, Sans titre (pour Nadja), 1928, Collection Lucien Treillard, Paris. 91 FIG. 3. J.-A. BoiVard, Gros orteil. Sujet masculin, 30 ans (Big toe. Male subject, age 30). Muse´e national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. 97 FIG. 4. J.-A. BoiVard, Gros orteil. Sujet masculin, 30 ans (Big toe. Male subject, age 30). Collection Lucien Treillard, Paris. 97 FIG. 5. J.-A. BoiVard, Gros orteil. Sujet fe´minin, 24 ans (Big toe. Female subject, age 24). Collection Lucien Treillard, Paris. 97 FIG. 6. J.-A. BoiVard, Sans titre (1929). Collection Lucien Treillard, Paris. 97 This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 1. The Indeterminacy of the Everyday 16 ‘The Hardest Thing to Uncover’: Blanchot with Lefebvre 16 The Ambiguity of the Everyday 22 Types of Ambiguity: Luka´cs, Heidegger, and Heller 31 Genre and the Everyday: Resisting the Novel 39 The Essay and the Everyday: Perec with Adorno 48 2. Surrealism and the Everyday 59 From Baudelaire to Dada 59 ‘Plutoˆt la vie’: Surrealist Vitalism 66 In the City Streets: Experience and Experiment 71 Everydayness and Self-Evidence 78 The Photograph as Trigger and as Trace 86 3. Dissident Surrealism: The Quotidian Sacred and Profane 95 BoiVard’s Big Toes: The Challenge of Documents 95 The BeneWcence of Desire 103 Michel Leiris and the Sacred in Everyday Life 108 Andre´ Breton and the ‘Magique-circonstancielle’ 115 Queneau and the quotidien 121 Coda: Walter Benjamin and the Everyday Legacies of Surrealism 131 4. Henri Lefebvre: Alienation and Appropriation in Everyday Life 134 The 1947 Critique de la vie quotidienne 134 The 1958 ‘Avant-propos’ 137 The 1961 Critique: Fondements pour une sociologie de la quotidiennete´ 143 The Freedom of the City: Lefebvre, Debord, and the Situationists 158 5. All that Falls: Barthes and the Everyday 175 Beyond Mythologies 175 Envisioning Fashion: Barthes, Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Others 178 x Contents Changing Scale, Resisting Function 193 Towards a new ‘art de vivre’ 197 ‘Comment vivre ensemble’ 201 ‘Chronique’ and Everyday Writing 207 6. Michel de Certeau: Reclaiming the Everyday 212 Consumption as Production 213 The Power of the Ruse 216 Practical Memory 219 The Logic of Everyday Practices: Walking, Talking, Reading 221 Narrativity, Historicity, Subjectivity: Certeau, Wittgenstein, and Cavell 227 The Conservatoire of Ritual: Certeau and MaVesoli 233 L’Invention du quotidien II: Habiter, Cuisiner 237 7. Georges Perec: Uncovering the Infra-Ordinary 248 Fables of Disconnection: Les Choses and Un Homme qui dort 250 The Matrix of Lieux 257 Three Days in the Place Saint-Sulpice 261 Dispersal: Places and Memories 271 The Everyday in La Vie mode d’emploi 279 8. After Perec: Dissemination and DiversiWcation 292 Proximate Ethnographies 293 Urban Trajectories: Auge´, Maspero, Ernaux, Re´da 305 The Proliferation of the Everyday: Mutation, Enunciation, and Genre 334 9. ConWguring the Everyday 360 The Space of the Day 364 Street Names 375 Projects of Attention 386 Bibliography 399 Index 415 Introduction Browsing in the Bibliothe`que Georges Perec, a wonderful archive hidden away at the back of the Arsenal library in Paris, I came across an oYcial-looking exhibition catalogue, dating from 1981. Sponsored by a government planning department, the exhibition was called Construire pour habiter (Building for Living), and the brief preface was by Paul Delouvrier, the civil servant commissioned by de Gaulle in 1961 to modernize the Paris area. The ‘Plan Delouvrier’ with its famous ‘Sche´ma directeur’ led to the construction of innumerable tower blocks and ‘grands ensembles’, changing the face of Paris and introducing the new RER railway to link the capital with its surrounding ‘Villes nouvelles’. Pilloried in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 Wlm about Paris, 2ou3 choses que je sais d’elle, Delouvrier had come to incarnate the functionalist urbanisme repeatedly attacked by more progressive architects and thinkers.1 It was therefore a surprise to see that, after Delouvrier, the Wrst author in the catalogue’s opening section—‘Habiter’—was Georges Perec. Perec’s contribu- tion was a two-page meditation on ways of telling someone where you live. Making characteristically subtle distinctions between cases where one would simply indicate the country or city, as opposed to specifying the street or giving precise details of one’s address, Perec paid close attention to the discourse of ‘saying where you live’, amusing his readers with oVbeat humour while at the same time prompting them to think about their everyday lives. As we shall have ample opportunity to observe in the course of this book, Perec’s piece, titled ‘De quelques emplois du verbe habiter’ (On some uses of the verb to inhabit)2 reXected a central concern of his work: to rescue the everyday from 1 On Delouvrier see Bernard Marchal, Paris: Histoire d’une ville, 19e–20e sie`cle (Paris: Seuil, 1993), and Eduard Welch ‘Experimenting with Identity: People, Place and Urban Change in Contemporary French Photography’, in Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (eds.), The Art of the Project (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005). 2 Georges Perec Penser/Classer (Paris: Hachette, 1981), 13–16. In all instances of citation in this volume, the page number belongs to the French edition and the translations are my own.