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

Notes to Cha~ter 4
'Oulipo privileges ouvroir over oeuvre.
Rather
than refer to itself as une sgm'minaire de littgrature
expbrimentale, Oulipo refers to itself as a un ouvroir de
littgrature potentielle, doing so for two reasons:
first.
the word séminaire connotes the individual experience of
masculized eugenics, whereas the word ouvroir connotes the
collective experience of a femininized industry; second, the
word expkrimentale suggests the outcome of a practice in the
present, whereas the word potentielle emphasizes the promise
of an outcome for the future.
2~utler vrites thst Ünreason[ ...] is the
complement of reason, without whose existence reason itself
were non-existent," and for such an Erewhonian 'pataphysics,
irrationalism is the hyperbolic, not the antonymic, extreme
of rationalism itself:
"[e]xtremes are alone logical, but
they are always absurd" (187). Reason is an extreme species
of reciprocal opposition, whose logic is potentially more
threatening than the average s~z~nia and its conflation of
difference:
"the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean
is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme" (187).