The Infraordinary

Joan Miro The Flight of the dragonfly in Front of the Sun

From Saving Time by Jenny Odell

 In a 1973 essay alled "Approaches to What?" the French writer Georges Perec coined the term infraordinary.   Media and public perception of time, he wrote, focused on the extraordinary - things outside the ordinary, like cataclysmic events and upheavals. The infraordinary was, instead, that layer inside or just beneath the ordinary, and being able to see it involved the challenge of seeing through the habitual.  This was no small task, given that invisibility is part of the very nature of habit.  "This is no longer even conditioning, it's anaesthesia" Pere wies We lang through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?"

  Clearly a person intent on defamiliarizing the familiar, Perec once wrote a three-hundred-page novel without using the letter e. For finding the infraordinary, too, he had his particular methods. In An Attempt a Exhausting a Place in Paris, he chose the Place Saint Sulpice, a large public plaza near the center of the city, as a place of study. Visiting it from a series of cafés and one outdoor bench multiple times a day for a few days, he sat and listed everything he noticed. The list sounds incantatory. with shades of police blotter:

A postal van.

A child with dog

A man with a newspaper

A man with a large "A" on his sweater

A "Que sais-je?" truck: "La Collection 'Que sais-je' a réponse à tout [The 'Que sais-je' collection has an answer for everything]"

A spaniel?

A 70

A 96

Funeral wreaths are being brought out of the church.

It is two thirty.

A 63, an 87, an 86, another 86, and a 96 go by.

An old woman shades her eyes with her hand to make out the number of the bus that's coming (I can infer from her disappointed look that she's waiting for the 70)

They're bringing out the casket. The funeral chimes start ringing

again.

The hearse leaves, followed by a 204 and a green Mehari.

An 87

А 63

The funeral chimes stop

A 96

It is a quarter after three.

In the introduction to this piece, Perec briefly lists the normal points of interest in Place Saint Sulpice, like the district couneil building, a police station, and "a church on which Le Vau, Gittard, Oppenord, Servandoni and Chalgrin have all worked." By virtue of their identifiability, Perec was not interested in these. His intention, he wrote, "was to describe the rest instead: that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds."

   What happens when nothing happens. Perec was undoubtedly aware of the irony of this phrase, because it's never true that nothing happens.

  Weather, people, cars, and clouds are all things that move, Even if you were to stand on a vast, sterile concrete plaza in the middle of the desert, you would be surrounded by the swirling of air particles, the movement of the sun overhead, a drifting tectonic plate, and the aging of the mind and body you use to perceive these things. In the translator's afterword to a 2010 edition of An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Marc Lowenthal emphasizes the "attempt" in Perec's title, writing that "time, unarrestable, works against [Perec's] project... Every bus that passes, every person who walks by, every object, thing, and event- everything that happens and that does not happen ultimately serves no other function than that of so many chronometers, so many signals, methods, and clues for marking time, for eroding permanence."