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

Perec cornplains that "formal mannerismd ...] are
relegated to the registers of asylums" wherein
" [c]onstraints are treated[ . . . ]as aberrations" ( 1986: 981,
even though the values of such a radical poetics depend not
upon the significance of its themes, but upon the
extravagance of its schema.
Like Futurism, which re jects
passgism, Oulipo argues that a poetry of the future must
absorb, not avoid, what is paradoxical and paralogical in
the science of the present, since to reject the sedition of
the new is simply to adopt the tradition of the old,
maintaining unconscious constraints without an appraisal of
constraint itself.
The distinction between poiesis and
mathema is a constraint that has outlived its potential, and
thus the 'pataphysician must disrupt this constraint by
adopting, as a new constraint, mathema itself. 8
~énabou suggests that to appeal to an aesthetics of
constraint is to reveal the hidden agenda, the secret power,
in the pragmatics cf al1 constraint:
"to the extent that
constraint goes beyond rules which seem natural only to
those people who have barely questioned language, it forces
the system out of its routine functioning, thereby
compelling it to reveal its hidden resources" (41). As
Queneau suggests:
"inspiration which consists in blind
obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery"