From the infraordinary to the extraordinary: Georges Perec and domesticity

Abstract

The design of domestic environments is fraught with decision-making, a process often dictated by fashion. The resulting inhabitation of domestic spaces blends the routine and the banal, with occasional forays into the extraordinary. The spaces of the domesticity range from single rooms to elaborate palaces. These can be functionally prescribed or open-ended, they support furniture, décor, behaviours, and narratives. The writer Georges Perec (1936–82) provides a way of looking at the domestic realm and ordinary life through his many inter-related writings on the subject. In his quest for an ‘anthropology of everyday life’, he explored notions of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘infraordinary’. In this text two important works by Perec are examined to explore how he framed and questioned notions of domesticity; can this reading be construed as a theory of domesticity? Perec’s text Species of Spaces describes a spatial continuity between city and dwelling that is characterised by spatial types, thresholds/boundaries, objects, and everyday practices often of an autobiographical nature. He begins with the page, ascends through the apartment building and the city, and ends with the world in a sequence of embedded spatial conditions. A close read of Species of Spaces uncovers a kind of sociological work, a critique or manifesto, and an evolution from Perec’s previous writings. In the text he asks the most fundamental questions, such as ‘What does it mean, to live in a room?’ In his monumental text Life A User’s Manual, Perec examines the lives of residents in a typical Parisian apartment building, it remains one of the most significant imaginings of how a building, or work of architecture, can be occupied. Through the vast scope of Perec’s project the book captures the intertwining lives of the occupants of the building at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, in Paris’s 17th arrondissement, at precisely 8:00 pm on 23 June 1975. To accomplish this Perec devised forty-two ‘preprogrammed’ factors to structure each of the ninety-nine chapters to ensure that he covered plot, actors, and setting in a systematic way. The apartment building ultimately provides an armature for the study of the very small to the very large. Life A User’s Manual describes a domestic world, how we organise our residences into compartments of space, how we furnish the rooms, how our stories create our realities, and how the lives of people in an ordinary apartment building intertwine in so many ways. Although frozen in a moment, the novel captures the vagaries and complexities of the everyday. It describes the routines of living, unexpected happenings, the connections between people living together at close quarters, the role of interiors in defining a particular period, the histories that can support and damage a life, the common aspirations and tragedies of urban dwellers, and so on. Perec's work does not constitute an actual theory of domesticity, although it precisely describes a domestic order that provides a sense of place by attending to both the minor and major aspects of an environment.