Perec’s purpose in inventorying these moments—infra-ordinaire, as he labeled them—was relayed some years later in a short essay entitled “Approches de quoi?” (“Approaches to What?”), in which he explains: “What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic any more, but the endotic.… We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?” For Perec, this search for a science of the quotidian appears through a cybernetic eye, a prosthetic vision that yearns to absorb every discernible “sight” into one undifferentiated depth of field. Like Paul Virilio’s “picnoleptic,” Perec’s narrative sutures together scraps of Saint-Sulpice’s space and time, breaks them down into their constituent micro-moments, and then reassembles a kind of pixiliated simulation of reality as an instantaneous, urban plenum where each and every oscillation evokes poetic and sometimes sublime significance.
