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

undermined by pretending that the rule does not exist.
Oulipo agrees with the surreal premise thst concepts of
the true can no longer provide a standard for the paradigm
of the real; however, Oulipo argues that to prove this point
by completely abandoning a rational axiology is to commit a
surreal mistake.
Roubaud suggests that, to avoid this
error, Oulipo proposes to envision a kind of "mathematical
surrealism" ( 80), in which mathema coincides perfectly with
poiesis (insofar as both domains refer to the surrealist
virtuality of an as if--the Traumwelt of our own suspended
disbelief).
Even a calculus textbook can speculate about a
set of alternate realities, each with its own rational
modality (be it a hyperbolic space or a transfinite curve).
For Oulipo, the speculative recreations of such mathematics
are no less surreal than the radical poetics of a
bureaucratized oneirocriticism.
Oulipo interprets such revisions of exception as a form
of paradoxical temporality that, like Futurism, reverses
causality through a simulacral precession,
Influence
becomes an act of "plagiarism by anticipation" (1986:31), in
which, by some swerve, a past style merely replicates what a
future style has already originated. What Lionnais calls
anoulipism (the analysis of a past constraint) may inspire