# Oulipo (“Ouvroir de littérature potentielle potentielle”) ![[A1598A29-82AF-4F5D-B5AF-78F7B28D9CF8.0acc8f6dd69e43099db57c1284cff81a.jpg]] Raymond Queneau (second from left) in 1952 with his son, Jean-Marie, and his wife Janine (far right). In between them are Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. **Shift from 60s to start of the 70s, in crisis** [[Raymond Queneau|Queneau]] to [[Georges Perec|Perec]] From 60 to end of 60s, the group was Semi-secret, and by the late 1960s, literary structuralism, had already begun to evolve into something more mercurial, a shift. Start of the 70s, in crisis, started concerns in the public domain > Do you want the Oulipo to continue its activities? > If yes, why do you think we are asking you this question? > Do you think a regeneration is possible? > When Queneau completes his form he responds to the final ‘Any other comments’ question as follows: ‘The situation is not the same as it was ten years ago. A certain number of (para)Oulipian concerns are now in the public domain. (To be developed orally.)’ ^[Below from FO, MS-5 (‘Documents Queneau, relatifs à l’Oulipo, photocopiés au CIDRE, 1990’), f. 23. ] Quotes in (Duncan, 2019, Oulipo, 45) ## People ![[9FA10390-439D-4A55-87F0-6BBC78F3EF7A.ffd1d6bc459047c78c685cbf65f041bc.jpg]] **Co-founders Founded 1960** Nevertheless, while [[François Le Lionnais]] and [[Raymond Queneau]] will forever be identified as the group’s official founders, or co-fondateurs, it seems that the idea for the Oulipo might not have originated with Le Lionnais. ![[BB919A42-7535-4142-8857-8E796A8AE3DF.e9b00e7e0344434587f8ef8b2549c5aa.jpg]] Oulipo Meeting Log, Regular headings: Creation, Rumination, Erudition, Action **First Move** In September 1960, a décade—a ten-day colloquium—was held at Cerisy-la-Salle in northern France. The conference theme was [[Raymond Queneau|Queneau]] and the French language, and it was here that two of the attendees, André Blavier and Jacques Bens formed the notion of a *secret society* devoted to experimental writing. As Blavier tells it: > ‘one night, Jacques Bens and I were unable to sleep and had the idea of proposing to RQ and F. Le Lionnais a sort of secret society to promote the kind of literature we loved.’ ^[Quoted in Camille Bloomfield, ‘Histoire de l’Oulipo: Quelques jalons chronologique’, in Bloomfield and Lesage, pp. 29–38 (p. 31). The original appeared in the Belgian paper Les Wallons on 21 January 1995.] ### [[Raymond Queneau]] #Author New forms and structures that may be used by writers in any way they see fit. [\@elkin\_end\_2013, 7 of 241] One of his main work “Zazie in the Metro” 1959 #Work , he was already a famous writer before [[References/Authors/Oulipo]] was founded **Influenced from** - Surrealism #Group - Queneau가 초현실주의에게 던지는 공격, Surrealism -> Writing can be released by the access given to the unconscious in ‘automatic writing’ - [[Raymond Queneau|Queneau]] was a Active member of the surrealists but gradually moved away from Andre Breton (founder) - From Automatic writing -> to rules that facilitate the expression of self. - 즉 저런 자동 writing은 대체로 결과물이 비슷하다. "무의식을 제약과 구조로 대체함으로써 신고전주의로의 회귀를 제정함으로써, 퀴노는 진정한 개인의 자아 표현을 용이하게 하기 위해 규칙이 필요하다는 것을 제안했습니다." - Bourbaki (avant-garde group of mathematicians) #Group ### [[François Le Lionnais]] #Author Amateur mathematicians, has in mind the group of Bourbaki. Jacques Roubaud, ‘The Oulipo and Combinative Art’, transl. Harry Mathews, New Observations 99, Jan/Feb 1994, p. 6. > All literature is subject to ‘constraints’ and ‘procedures’, thus the goal of Oulipo as being to explore and discover new possibilities for writing in this domain with the aid of computers and mathematics ^[Oulipo, Francois Le Lionais, ‘First Manifesto’] What comes across clearly as Queneau lists the group’s members is that **this is not a writer’s group in the ordinary sense**. There are writers—Lescure, Duchateau, and Queval (not to mention Queneau himself )—but they are listed last, while Berge is introduced specifically as a mathematician, Schmidt as an academic historian, and Latis and Arnaud are identified by their role in the Collège de ’Pataphysique (in fact, Arnaud is a writer while Latis is a philosophy teacher). ### Main Authors - Georges Perec - Exhaustion/constrained writing - Conceptual exhaustion #Concept - Mathematical, solving riddles, game quality in literature - Film - <Un Homme Qui Dort, a 1974 film> - Italo Calvino - He joined Oulipo 1973, until then, he was a fellow traveller. More about the relationship → [\@duncan\_2019\_Oulipo, ch 4] - ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ 1967 - In The Uses of Literature: Essays. ‘Writing is purely and simply a process of combination among given elements.’ - Storyteller’s instinct to rearrange and imporvise on a given theme ## Main Concepts > Relentlessly experimental, excessively avant-garde. [@elkin_end_2013, p. 37 of 241] ### Constraints > ‘The aim of Oulipo is to invent (or reinvent) constraints of a formal nature (contraintes) and propose them to enthusiasts interested in composing literature.’ \@Roubaud Their shift changed from making constraint -> playing against own constraints - looking for the Potential - Structure/form/technique - The word “constraint” connots negative meaning, thus, Ian Monk, propose terms ‘structure, form, or technique’ → [Ian Monk’s interview](https://youtu.be/eQC5pp5wT9g) ^[Ian Monk, ‘My Life with the Oulipians’, The noulipian Analects (Lost Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2007), p. 141.] - Three principle → Three principal methods stand out (Terry, 2019, 32) - Strict constraints - Combinatorial literature - Techniques of transforming or ‘translating’ existing work - Lucretius’ [[clinamen]] (swerve) - Breaking the constraint to make a room for the movement. Spontaneous deviation, small changes in atomic structure ### Potentielle/Potential Constraints can potentially give rise to literature, even creating new possibilities for literature, whose real existence is virtual, in the future. ## Characteristics ### **Noncharacteristic struggle and Shift** Been around sixty years, globally bigger and more profitable than ever, yet their greatest hits are many years behind them → Rolling Stones paradox.^[ Read more in https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/february/at-the-bnf] Their immersion in the intellectual currents of their time related to: - Cybernetics - Structuralism - Psychoanalysis - Translation theory However, there are an anxious to position Oulipo ^[Bloomfield, Raconter l’Oulipo, p. 259] In fact, so embedded were the Oulipo within the ==broader intellectual scene that at times the group struggled==, even among themselves, to make the case for what was unique about their identity. [@Duncan_Oulipo_2019, 5] Arnaud in his ‘Prolegomena to a Fourth Manifesto’ makes a telling claim about the 60s: > ‘Academe, in the Oulipo’s first decade […] had just begun - in France at least - its infatuation with Surrealism and psychoanalysis. In the higher spheres, structuralism applied to analysis and literary creation had begun to consolidate its dogma’. (Arnaud, ‘Prolegomena’, p. xiv.) 1. **Structuralism, sobriety and ribaldry** 2. **Infatuation with Surrealism and psychoanalysis** > “Oulipian writing—from the 1960s and 70s, at least—as a creative participation in a variety of prominent intellectual debates.” [@Duncan_Oulipo_2019, 5] ==The difference between the Oulipo and the structuralists was more one of tone or attitude== than of method, concluding that ‘the [structuralists] enveloped themselves in a ponderous sobriety that rendered them impervious to Oulipian facetiae’. (Arnaud, ‘Prolegomena’, p. xiv). - Two cohorts of the Oulipo - unconscious-as-letter versus unconscious-as-meaning; - procedural versus constrained writing; - syntactic versus semantic Oulipo; - an autonomous language versus the authorial subject all with the intention of overlaying another opposition on top of them—that of two cohorts of the Oulipo: its first members and its second wave. It is important to stress that this is a loose mapping: […] ideologically, ‘second wavers’ (although Roubaud’s suggestion that the group’s second, Perecquian era began in 1969 is useful). [@Duncan_Oulipo_2019, 98] The shift is not confined to the Oulipo, but rather follows a wider intellectual pattern, loosely a movement from structuralism to post-structuralism. [@Duncan_Oulipo_2019, 99] - **First wave/[[Raymond Queneau|Queneau]]** - syntactic Oulipo (Le Lionnais) Creating a literature machine is not the same as authoring every work the machine may produce. Rather, an external, secondary agency is being conjured up by means of the interplay between the system of the flipbook and the syntax which determines that an utterance will be cogerent even if no-one has yet uttered it. [@Duncan_Oulipo_2019, 94] - Psychoanalytic (early Oulipo) - Lacanian psychoanalysis in the 1950s - Surrealism - Rejection of the Surrealist movement - Bourbaki ‘a sort of mathematical surrealism’ - ‘When the Oulipo was conceived, Bourbaki provided a counter-model to the Surrealist group.’ ^[Jacques Roubaud, ‘The Oulipo and Combinatorial Art’, trans. by Harry Mathews, in Mathews and Brotchie, Oulipo Compendium, pp. 37–44 (p. 38)] - This is despite Roubaud elsewhere calling Bourbaki ‘a sort of mathematical surrealism’.^[Jacques Roubaud, ‘Mathematics in the Method of Raymond Queneau’, in Motte, Oulipo, pp. 79–96 (p. 80).] - **Second wave/[[Georges Perec|Perec]]** - Semantic (late) Oulipo - Rehabilitation of author-subject Finding authorial voice and coaxing it into expression, against the allure of the commonplace and the resistant force of psychoanalytic repression. Often in these writers’ work, the attacks against the Surrealists remain, but a distinction must now be drawn between an attack on inspiration itself and an attack on its supposed source in the unconscious. [@Duncan_Oulipo_2019, 95] - An approach was as an reversal of the Freudian - Unconscious ≠ interpolation made from ruptures or disturbances of ordinary [[discourse]] - Unconscious = ordinary [[discourse]] disturb the unconscious ### Two distinct roles: the inventor and the poet #### Playfullness As for [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], play = creation, Avant-garde tradition → Game-playing/playfulness → as Oulipo’s characteristic is playfulness. The playfullness echoed Second Manifesto by Le Lionnais, including the play of: - Reframing - Retelling - Translating stories Method examples are: - Jeux de Mots (wordplay) - Pun/Homophonic translation ^[the fondness of Oulipians for the method is (…) undeniable: Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Michèle Métail, and Georges Perec – not to mention founder François Le Lionnais and the illustrious advance plagiarist, Raymond Roussel – have all exploited homophony, some extensively. // Mathews and Brotchie, Oulipo Compedium, p. 154, quoted in [@duncan_oulipo_2019, ch 2]] - Plagiarisms - lipogram, Text is written without the use of certain predetermined letters - Kick-Starts - I remember - Ordering combination As O’Pray writes that > “[i]n the end, all of these nomenclatures – avant-garde, underground, experimental, modernist, independent – share some sense of outside-ness, of marginality, of independence”. [o’pray_avant-garde_2003, 7] **Pre-war [[avant-garde|Avant-garde]]** > O’Pray writes that “**[t]he film avant-gardes that emerged in the 1920s** remain a potent influence to this day. They form part of probably **the most creative period of twentieth-century avant-garde activity across the arts and are the indisputable models of avant-gardism.**” [o’pray_avant-garde_2003, 8] ^[More in, Europe avant-garde (1924-8) Collapsed in 1930s and moved to America, American avant-garde (1928-32)] > “[t]he collapse of the avant-gardes in the 1930s in Europe was due to a complexity of factors – internal exhaustion, lack of resource and money, state antagonism and the rise of social-realism in the response to burgeoning fascism and Marxists-socialist ideas.” [o’pray_avant-garde_2003, 48] **Post-war** 40s avant-garde departed from European of pre-wars. Artists found themselves compelled to leave their homes for the U.S. [@Curtis_ experimental_1971, 23–24]. - Postwar - situationist - Lettrists > “the early work of Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren made in the mid-1940s was crucially different to most European work, especially in its attempt to deal with the self by using mythical themes and images, and the film-maker as narrative protagonists, as was influentially the case in Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Anger’s Fireworks (1947).” [@o’pray_avant-garde_2003, 49] - Cinema -> experimental art ^[Renata Jackson, The Modernist Poetics and Experimental Film Practice of Maya Deren, (1917-1961), Studies in History and Criticism of Film, v. 5 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002)] - Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) - experimental art challenged Inevitable linearity, narrative > Grice writes that “[t]he inevitable linearity of the film is used to explore a symbolic space which is not resolved as a causal narrative.” [[[@grice_experimental_2001]], 318] #### laboratory than movement The most different character between [[avant-garde|Avant-garde]] and [[References/Authors/Oulipo]] is political detachment, especially from the early twentieth century avant-garde movements The idea of being a laboratory from which structures and forms emerge is more important to Oulipo than being a movement in the traditional sense. Peter Consenstein, Literary Memory, Consciousness, and the Group Oulipo, Faux Titre, no. 220 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 17. James writes that: > “[u]nlike other literary groups of the twentieth century [...], it avoids adopting positions in political debates and keeps a sceptical distance from contemporary intellectual trends.” [[[@James_constraining_2009]], 108] Albert-Marie Schmidt’s early description of the group in the Protestant weekly Réforme offers us some insight when he calls them ‘a secret laboratory of literary structures’. // Quoted in Arnaud ‘Prolegomena’, p. xiii. The original appeared Réforme on 2 February 1963. [[References/Authors/Oulipo]] focuse on the investigation than literary production. [[Raymond Queneau|Queneau]] even goes as far as to deny that his sections rimantes are literary works in themselves—they are merely the products of investigations: > ‘No. No. Oh no no! For example, when I treat one of Mallarmé’s poems in this way, I don’t suppose I have made a literary creation. I produce an example of potential literature but not a literary work in the proper sense. No, no, no. I don’t think it is at all creative. It is much more modest, what we’re doing’ > ‘Non. Non. Ah non! Par exemple, quand je traite un poème de Mallarmé de cette façon-là, je n’estime pas que j’ai fait une création littéraire. Je fais une expérience de littérature potentielle, mais non une uvre littéraire à propre parler. Non, non, non. Je ne pense pas qu’il s’agisse du tout là de création. C’est beaucoup plus modeste, ce que nous faisons’. (Charbonnier, Entretiens, pp. 146–7.) Systemic writing or generating is: > “the classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant.” (Raymond Queneau) ^[Raymond Queneau, Le Voyage en Grèce, 94, quoted in Jacques Roubaud, ‘Mathematics in the Method of Raymond Queneau’, in Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, ed. and trans. Warren F. Motte Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 87.] Systemic writing follows: - Scientific - Collective work -> sestina - [[@andrews_chance_2020]](https://www.zotero.org/users/4469685/items/Y7M9Q5F6) #toread ## Sub-group ### anoulipo - Analytical tendency in Oulipo, analysing past to discover already-existing constraints > “research into the literature of the past to find the constraints governing them” [@elkin_end_2013, p. 15 of 241] ### synthoulipo - ‘Essential vocation’ of Ouliopo, invention of new constraints - Invent or discover new potential instead of constraints - Well known poetic form, ‘elementary morality’ ### Noulipo (Now-Oulipo) English Speaker, a series of ripples emanating from a conference held in Los Angeles at CalArts’ REDCAT theatre in the autumn of 2005. > “we were [ . . . ] interested in the way formalist practice can be used to investigate questions of politics, including issues of race, class and gender. From this perspective, the n in n/Oulipo stands for now, the new, and the not-only-formal.”^[Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim, ‘ “Séance”, “n/Oulipo”, “Impunities”, “Feminaissance”, & “Untitled” ’, Jacket 2: https://jacket2.org/commentary/seance-noulipo-impunities-feminaissance-untitled] Researchers who examine the legacy of Oulipian constraint-based writing among Anglophone writers emphasis on the political would generate a considerable amount of friction. ### Ouvipo ![[B4C9368A-317C-40E4-A098-1F37B3C3FE34.jpg]] Katja Waschneck notes similarities between Ouvipo and Dogma 95 film, both of them uses certain constraints in filmmaking. Examples of Dogma 95 films are The King is Alive (2000) by Kristian Levring, Outside of any group examples are Tangerine (Baker 2015), and Victoria (Schipper 2015). - [Victoria](https://youtu.be/6QzAA4qEGqs): visual-technical constraint -> one shot, hand-held camera, liberated visual field. - Tangerine: structure-technical constraint -> iphone cinema The Five Obstructions (Leth and von Trier 2003) has a complicated relationship with constraints being a documentary that both records the process of working with constraints as well as its outcomes. Examples: - [Ouvipo: ErrE (2012) by Julien Saves](https://vimeo.com/70316192): Using a time frame of 3:33 for ErrE - [Ressasser (2012) by Julien Beaunay](https://vimeo.com/70875478) > CONSTRAINTS:
1/ The work produced shall loop between the first and last images of the film.
2/ The duration of the work shall not exceed 5 minutes.
3/ Prohibition of the selection of more than 3 actors for lead roles. However, they can play several roles in the same work.
4/ Prohibition of exceeding the number of 30 rotated planes.
5/ The idea of chaos, breakdown or any reference to something "broken" must appear in the work to remind the Broken entity. This must also be fully justified in a narrative manner.
 > OPTIONAL PALINDROMIC CONSTRAINTS:
1/ The duration of the work shall have a palindromic structure. (Ex: 2 min12 / 3 min33 / 4 min54...))
2/ The number of planes mounted in the video shall be in the form of a palindrome of figures. (Ex: 11/22...)
3/ If there is a title to the work in question, it shall be in the form of a palindrome of letters. The same shall apply to any textual and/or nominal indication.
4/ Any dialogue in the film shall have been written in the form of a palindrome.
5/ Any sound, music and/or sound atmosphere shall also be thought of in a palindromic form.
 > More information on this exercise: the <lab-brokenprod.blogspot.fr/2011/03/3rd> round.html > What is OuViPo?: lab-broken <product.blogspot.fr/2010/04/luvipo-registration.html> ### Outside of Oulipo [[Christian Bök]] With a polemic tone, against ‘artistic innovation that has been co-opted by capitalism, ‘new’. - Crystallography #Concept