Learning from Georges Perec

From The Companion Series

Georges Perec transforms the ordinary into an epistemological event. Trained by neither the social sciences nor philosophy, he approached the world through detail: the gesture, the object, the interval. His notion of the infraordinary—those unnoticed, repetitive, background aspects of daily life—proposed a radical inversion of ethnographic scale. “What speaks to us,” he asks, “is always the big event, the untoward, the extraordinary: but what of the rest?” (Perec, 1989 [1981]). Perec’s question remains a methodological provocation: what if description began not with crisis, but with persistence; not with the exceptional, but with the quietly continuous? For him, attention itself was an ethics—a way of caring for the unnoticed materials that compose life.

Perec’s practice of enumeration is often mistaken for mere formal play. Yet his lists—of objects, meals, street corners, apartment inventories—stage an act of care through accumulation. Each item, no matter how trivial, is recorded with equal dignity. Enumeration resists hierarchy: it treats things democratically, allowing the banal to coexist with the symbolic. This gesture recalls ethnography’s early impulses to catalogue, but Perec’s lists are never classificatory. They are tender rather than totalizing, deliberate rather than exhaustive. Enumeration becomes a tactile form of attention: the list as a surface where the world brushes against language, producing friction rather than closure. In this sense, Perec teaches that to describe is to preserve without fixing—to give form to the passing without trapping it.

Equally vital to Perec’s method are his literary experiments—constraints that discipline perception and expand possibility. As a member of Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), he wrote through self-imposed restrictions: La Disparition (1969) without the letter “e”; Les Revenentes (1972) using only “e.” Such constraints are not games for their own sake—they are epistemic devices. They force writing to find detours, substitutions, and inventive articulations. The disappearance of a letter becomes the appearance of a world. In this way, Perec transforms form into method: he makes language stumble, and in that stumble, new perceptions emerge. In ethnography, such constraint-based writing offers a parallel: by limiting how we can describe, we expand what we can notice. Formal boundaries become instruments of care.

Perec’s influence runs quietly but deeply through my own projects. Tarde: A Handbook of Minimal and Irrelevant Urban Entanglements was conceived as an ethnography of the unnoticed—of fleeting gestures, partial encounters, and minor urban frictions. Its pages echo Perec’s inventories, its tone his infraordinary patience. Tin Ethnography continues that lineage through miniature enclosures—metal containers that hold fragments of experience with the same obsessive tenderness as Perec’s lists. And fragmentography, as a broader ethos, extends his method into a curatorial register: each fragment, each specimen, is both an item and an act of enumeration, a micro-care for the ordinary world. Perec’s experiments showed me that attention is not simply observation—it is a practice of form. The fragment, like the list, is both method and ethics.

To learn from Perec is to inherit a method of quiet persistence. His practice is not merely literary; it is curatorial, observational, and profoundly anthropological. Enumeration becomes both archive and affection. Constraint becomes a condition for invention. Through him, I understand ethnographic writing as craft—where attention is sculpted, not given; where form, rather than content, trains the senses. Perec’s lesson is simple yet radical: writing is not about capturing reality but about composing the rhythms that sustain it. To count, to list, to record—is to care. To constrain—is to listen differently.

Hands-on exercise: The Infraordinary Log

Spend one hour in a place you know well. Write a log of everything you notice—not what happens, but what persists. List objects, sounds, intervals, colors, smells, or gestures. Then impose a constraint: rewrite your notes using only ten words per line, or only sentences without adjectives. Observe how the form alters perception. How does the constraint reconfigure care?