Georges Perec’s experimental fieldwork; Perecquian fieldwork

Abstract

This paper traces key themes in contemporary experimental fieldwork–explorations of ordinary places by artists, writers, activists, enthusiasts, students and researchers–to the works of Georges Perec. Preoccupations of this work–including playfulness, attention to the ordinary, and writing as a fieldwork practice–are all anticipated and elaborated in Perec’s oeuvre, where they converge around an ‘essayistic’ approach. Exhibiting these traits, some contemporary fieldwork is more convincingly Perecquian than psychogeographical or Situationist, despite the tendency to identify it with the latter. Through Perec, it is therefore possible to bring contemporary experimental fieldwork into focus, identifying a coherence and sense of project within it, while speaking to the question of what it means and could mean to conduct fieldwork experimentally. Particular attention is paid in this paper to Perec’s most accomplished and sustained field texts, both of which have been translated into English: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010, from 1975 original in French) and Species of Spaces (1999/1974).