Perec at Place Saint-Sulpice: Exhaust One Place in 20 Minutes
Georges Perec spent three days in October 1974 writing down Place Saint-Sulpice. Here is his infra-ordinary idea and a 20-minute exercise to try in your own town.
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Place Saint-Sulpice, Paris, October 1974: a man at a café window with a notebook, writing down buses. Georges Perec did this for three consecutive days, between three cafés and a bench, and called the result Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien.
He had named his target the year before. In “Approches de quoi?” (Cause commune, 1973) he used the term infra-ordinary (some sources credit Paul Virilio with it), the daily layer under the news. At Saint-Sulpice he set out to record what is, in the words quoted in the complete-review summary, “generally not taken note of.”
What did he write down?
Buses and their numbers, people, a cloud of pigeons dropping onto the square, a wedding, a funeral, yellowing trees. One review notes he logs his own meals and, at dusk, his reflection in the lit window.
How do you exhaust a place in 20 minutes?
- Pick a spot you pass weekly and sit where you can see it.
- Set a timer and put your phone face down.
- Write only what is ordinary. Skip the church; log the bus.
- Write down repeats. Perec did.
Why might this work? My reading, not a tested result: a list forces you to look at items one at a time, and a known place holds more of them than you predicted. That is the same move as Kierkegaard’s rotation of attention, cheaper than a trip, and a smaller cousin of an awe walk.
Do it right after waking, before the feed. DontSnooze gives you 30 seconds after the alarm to record video proof you are up, or a random camera-roll photo goes to friends you chose; the 20 minutes is my own add-on.
Watching can pull the body in, too: see spectators at a firewalk.
Questions about the exercise
What is Perec’s infra-ordinary?
It is Perec’s word for the daily background that news and conversation skip. He introduced it in “Approches de quoi?”, in the journal Cause commune, in 1973, and asked what we make of what happens every day and recurs every day. In the Saint-Sulpice text he applies it by describing what is “generally not taken note of.”
How long did Perec’s Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris take?
He worked over three consecutive days in October 1974, from three cafés and a bench on the square. The text first appeared in 1975 in Cause commune, and Marc Lowenthal’s English translation came out from Wakefield Press in 2010.
Does looking closely at a familiar place make it more interesting?
Perec’s text is a literary experiment, not a study, so it cannot show that. As a personal test it is cheap: do the 20 minutes on three different days and compare how many new items you find each time. If the count falls to zero, change the place.
A much older version of the same experiment was run indoors, over 42 days, by an officer under house arrest, and his account of it fits in a few paragraphs.