PATAPHYSICS-THE-POETICS-OF-AN-IMAGINARY- SCIENCE_C_Bok

literature.
Like the Futurists, who explore the
molecularity of a machinic language, so also do the
Oulipians resort to a lingual atomism in order to imagine
their own anagrammatic radicalities.
Such an axiomatic
condition provides the basis for a 'pataphysical
mathematics, whose ludic rules oppose the royal science of
structural linguistics.
Such a nomad science suggests that
the mathesis of anagrams can subtend a cybernetic literature
of the future (the potential of which has already been
portended by such novelties as hypertexts and videogames).
Oulipo explores the epistemology of such potentialitv,
replacing the metaphysics of thetical cases with the
'pataphysics of hypothetical cases--the als ob, the "as if,"
of what might have been.
Like Futurism, Oulipo sees its
work in ternis of an, as yet, unrealized reality that exists
paradoxically before its time and ahead of its time, taking
place in the tense of the post modo.
Such an avant-garde
pseudo-science endesvours to create potential problems in
the present so that writers in the future might provide an
imaginary solution.
Such a discipline functions within a
ludic genre of speculative experiments:
"1s there any other
canonical way of viewing the future (whether one calls
oneself serious in the[. ..] ('Ipataphysical sense of the
word), than as a bouquet of Imaginary Solutions--that is, of