Control

In response to my last post on Oulipo, Derik Badman (MadInkBeard) has clarified his position a little further:

The more I think about this, the more it becomes about control. The oulipo are using constraint to have a hand in the control of their creations, not a all-encompassing control, but an obvious, conscious, and personal control over process. Instead of letting conventional constraints (genre, "normal" use of language, conventional structures, or the, for them, conventionalized unconscious) control them, the oulipians make their own personal fields to work within. The Surrealists also wanted to escape the conventional through unconscious and personal constraints disguised as unmitigated freedom (belied by the rather authoritarian organization of the group). Sadly, the Surrealists experiments have shown that either a) they were too much following each other and thus quickly falling into a new convention or b) the unconscious is all too similar across those writers (if you read a few automatic texts you start to see the similarity in them).

While I understand that the oulipians wanted to create a method that was as much as possible in contrast to that of the surrealists, I still wonder whether the "control" imposed by constraint isn't at least to some degree an illusion. Constraint can't escape contingency any more than "automatic writing"; it is at some point going to produce results the author could never have predicted beforehand, and is to that extent outside of his/her control. Desirably so.