What Perec was looking for: notes on automation, the everyday, and ethical writing

This chapter considers Perec’s interest in the infra-ordinary, on the one hand, and questions of the machine and automation, on the other. Investigating different ways in which the micro-scale emerges in Perec’s work raises questions around life in relation to (computational) machines – particularly machines that are getting smaller (at once more discreet, and less discrete) – that are becoming ever more important today. This chapter examines the complex relationship between questions of life (the infra-ordinary life with its embedded habits) and questions concerning classification – here understood as a form of automation, as they are raised (and develop very differently) in Perec’s work on the self, the space, the object, and the language game.