Plan y Cronograma de Implantación

Working within a context of conscious constraint raises the question of what other factors might additionally affect the creative process. Though we can acknowledge that a given constraint can be a guiding principle for a generative process, we must also recognise that the generative process is also dependent on the architect of the constraint.

In addition to the conscious application of constraint to a project, the

director/actor/performer must also draw upon their innumerable existing skills in how they deal with the constraint. In Project 1, the openly playful form of the workshop allowed for instinctual undertakings by the workshop participants, who operated in a highly skilful way that was not consciously rationalised during the moment of

practice. The decision to take a constraint in a ludic, satirical, or autobiographical direction, for example, was ultimately down to the individual artists’ inclinations, perhaps how they became inspired during the activity of making sense of a constraint. This raises problems for this study. For the level of critical reflection necessary in this project, Schön’s explanation of reflection-in-action discussed previously, although logical, is ultimately superficial. The justification of instinctual inspiration as reflection-in-action is problematic because inspiration is not a satisfactory method within oulipian poetics, as I will now explain.

Founder member to the Oulipo Raymond Queneau wrote extensively on the

problems of inspiration and this highlights a principal difference between the Oulipo and the surrealists that preceded them. ‘The Surrealist Manifesto’ (1924) states that ‘[the mind] has seized nothing consciously’ (Breton, 2008: 37). The movement can

be positioned in direct opposition to the oulipian ideals of control and mastery. One can imagine how a technique like automatic writing, with the attempted removal of constraining structures, might enrage the Oulipian. The Oulipo’s perpetual

challenging of mystical terms forms a clear opposition to the surrealist’s Freudian and ‘modern’ obsession with accessing the unconscious mind and being inspired. Queneau positioned inspiration as an extension of technique mastery. Peter Consenstein in Literary Memory, Consciousness, and the Group Oulipo (2002), observed that Queneau believed:

A ‘true’ poet, an ‘inspired’ poet, is one who is skilled enough to shape an idea with technical mastery, since technique and inspiration are ‘the same thing’.

(2002: 125)

Queneau is dismissive of inspiration as an unconscious activity liberated from skills and conscious techniques. This challenge to the idolising of the unconscious mind as a resource to be tapped into presents a similar issue to Schön’s recognition of reflection-in-action – an account of the inaccessible, intricate workings of the brain that cannot be reached by conventional analysis. Queneau goes on to describe the ‘fausse idée’ (misconception) (Consenstein, 2002: 126) that inspiration means exploring the subconscious for self-liberation, stating that a poet is never inspired if inspiration is a function of ‘a state of mind, temperature, political circumstances, subjective encounter’ (2002: 126), all of which can be controlled and mastered. As may be the case with reflection-in-action, the misconception of legitimising the mystified, rather than the codified, is a way of defining action without real explanation. The rivalry between the surrealists and Queneau (of the Oulipo) is described by Oulipian Jacques Roubaud as an argument between the Ancients and the Moderns (2002:116), that roots firmly oulipian ethos within acceptance of, and most probably allegiance to, the literary canon. Consenstein comments that:

the Modern’s rejected poetic constraints to give free reign to the voice of inspiration, which they believed came from God. Breton [André Breton, Leader of the surrealists] agreed, yet he rejected God in the name of the subconscious.

In 1937 Queneau wrote a novel titled Odile (2009) placing a fictionalised version of himself and a fictionalised André Breton arguing within the narrative. The two characters persistently disagree on subjects of mathematics, reason and unconscious, and throw into relief Queneau’s position that the surrealists were ‘intent on annexing territory for the greater glory of his [their] name’ (Consenstein, 2002: 119). By placing so much emphasis on the unreasonable subconscious, the surrealists were, according to some Oulipians, self-aggrandising through the exclusion of writing’s established rules and techniques. Breton’s possible rebuttal can be found in the ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1930), he writes:

It is commonly said that it [inspiration] is either present or it is not, and if it is absent, nothing of what, by way of comparison, is suggested by the human cleverness that interest, discursive intelligence, and the talent acquired by dint of hard work obliterate, can make up for it.

(Breton, 2010:161)

This bloody-minded positioning of the author as a channel for metaphysical inspiration can be unpacked according to psychoanalysis, but that would be a conversation about why the unconscious is untouchably Godly. Rather, Project 2 of this study sought, in the spirit of oulipian poetics, to remove the need for inspired activity by becoming consciously aware of as many creative decisions as possible in order to master the design and delivery of constraint.

Queneau uses a succinct analogy that helps further illustrate the departure from reliance on unconscious inspiration, suggesting that a poet waiting for inspiration is like a meteorologist waiting for a storm – they are not experimenting, they’re

gathering data (Consenstein, 2002: 125-126). The suggestion is that relying on the opaqueness of tacit knowledge is not the maker’s task, instead they must analyse why they should/could make particular decisions. In reference to Project 2 this means that creative decisions were decided by their relationship to other creative decisions, whether they be constraint-driven or otherwise. Georges Perec did not only consider the absence of e when writing La Disparition (1969), indeed he had to engage in a careful consideration of the other tools in his arsenal during that

them. The constraint is not just a liberation, it is a training for one’s art, undertaken to become a better practitioner. Constraint enables the artist to understand their limitations and strengths and to carefully consider the work they are doing through consideration of the work of others. This conflation of generation and study, of poiseis and mathema, of the subtle channels between anoulipism and synthoulipism, is an approach unique to the Oulipo. It is an approach that attempts to leave as little as possible uncovered, to avoid the relegation of creative undertaking to the

workings of the unconscious.

Queneau’s detachment from the surrealists inevitably distances the Oulipo from a range of critical thinking that the surrealists inspired. In their article README.DOC (1988), Thomas and Hilliker note how Oulipian Jacques Roubaud is in opposition to thinkers such as Julia Kristeva and accepted notions of the conflation of the subject and the writing subject:

[H]e is particularly distraught by the fact that she comforts herself with the illusion that, in order to elude the rules of language and literature, it is possible to behave ‘as if they don’t exist’.

(Thomas and Hilliker, 1988: 21)

Oulipian philosophy dictates the need for the ‘distinction between psychological subject and subject of language’ (Thomas and Hilliker, 1988: 21). Situating the activity of writing as a conscious exercise, the Oulipo can fundamentally exemplify this distinction. By the application of granular constraints, the group bring to the foreground a conscious understanding of the constraints’ effects on the practice of writing and the implications for the surrounding activity. In terms of my study, this additionally pulls tacit knowledge to the foreground and consequently the activity of the artist under constraint, raising a conscious awareness of all creative tools and practices, or as we will come to discuss, all tendencies. Thomas and Hilliker describe these oulipian characteristics as essentially transformative, rather than descriptive because:

It is an enterprise based not on a classification of states of a language but on a repertoire of operations implied in the production of a text.

(1988: 23).

As discussed previously, oulipian poetics are generative and built on practice, ‘we try to prove motion by walking’ (Queneau in Bök, 2002: 66), which is why they are so entirely suitable to a practice-led study of this kind. Consenstein describes this transformative methodology as one that leaves the writer as ‘ultimately reconfigured’ (2002: 22), an effect I have experienced throughout this research. The un-

analysable generative decisions taken throughout Project 1 highlighted a need to further recognise and control the structures of generation during Project 2.