In the fall of 1960 in France, a small, diverse group of fiction writers, poets, mathematicians, university professors, and "pataphysicians" formed a collective that would soon after be known as the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (the Workshop for Potential Literature), the Oulipo. Their stated goals were to identify new forms of writing, unrecognized by tradition and convention, and to develop new methods of invention. They viewed themselves as a working group involved in inductive or experimental research for the benefit of all writers: “[the Oulipo] merely seeks to formulate problems and eventually to offer solutions that allow any and everybody to construct, letter by letter, word by word, a text” (Motte 46).

The Oulipo's approach to writing was based in part on their opposition to the conventional notion that creativity emerges from unfettered imagination and inspiration. For the members of this group, the assumption that a discursive rule serves to limit creativity is naïve—in fact, it is the limit, the rule, that makes creativity possible. As Oulipian Marcel Bènabou argues, “Even the most rabid critics of formalism are forced to admit that there are formal demands which a work [of writing] cannot elude” (Motte 41).

Members of the Oulipo were not aware of the bureoning field of composition studies in the 1970s, but I assume they would have been wary of “moderate expressivist” arguments that reinforce the conventional notion of creativity, such as Peter Elbow’s argument against the inhibiting forces of audience in “Closing My Eyes as I Speak,” (51), Donald Murray’s demand that students use their own language “in order to embark on a serious search for their own truth” (5) and Ken Macrorie’s calls for students to rely on their “natural language” as an antidote to writing Engfish (9). In all three cases, constraints are viewed as a hindrance in that they threaten to limit the individual’s freedom of expression.

The Oulipo endeavored to turn this equation on its head. For example, in the following passage, Queneau argues that unfettered “inspiration” is a kind of slavery, and that the observance of rules can be, in fact, liberating:

Inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery. 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. (41)

For the members of the Oulipo, writerly freedom is, paradoxically, based on an explicit understanding of and engagement with structure and constraint: “thus, it is not only the virtualities of language that are revealed by constraint but also the virtualities of him who accepts to submit himself to constraint” (Motte 43).

For the Oulipo, constraints are found at every level of the writer’s process. In the group’s first manifesto titled “Lipo,” Le Lionnais argues that any process of writing must “accommodate itself as well as possible to a series of constraints and procedures that fit inside each other like Chinese boxes” (Motte 26). He goes on to list several kinds that include constraints of grammar, diction, style, narrative, and genre. A writer is most free when s/he strategically uses the rules and constraints that define h/er methods and goals.

Based on their formalist assumptions about writing, the Oulipians argued that the process of writing could be innovated in two ways: 1) by pushing the conventional limits of ancient constraints in order to generate new forms of textuality, and 2) by developing new writing processes with the help of rules and procedures found in other disciplines. An example of the first method is the group’s experiments with the Ancient Greek lipagrammatos or lipogram—a text in which words that contain one or more pre-selected letters are omitted from the writer’s vocabulary. In his 300-page novel titled La Disparation (A Void), George Perec did not include a single word with the letter e. An example of the second method is the group’s application of formulas from various branches of mathematics to generate texts. Claude Berge writes about the group’s experiments with poetic forms including Boolean, Fibonaccian, and exponential poems like Raymond Queneau’s often-cited sonnet, Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Million Poems). Skewing, stretching, and otherwise transforming the structure by which a text is produced leads to new forms of textuality and inventional methods.

Mathematics became the basis for many of the Oulipo's experimental studies with the written word. Le Lionnais claims, “Mathematics—particularly the abstract structures of contemporary mathematics—proposes thousands of possibilities for exploration” (Motte 27). In fact, founding members Jacques Roubaud, Claude Berge, and Paul Braffort were trained mathematicians, and several other members were self-described amateurs or enthusiasts. According to Warren F. Motte, the Oulipo aspired to contribute to a lesser tradition in the West in which the languages of word and number are intertwined to form hybrid approaches to both math and writing. In the introduction to his collection of the Oulipo’s essays titled Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, Motte traces this tradition from Pythagoras through to Ezra Pound. While there were competing methods of integrating the two fields, they all endeavored to think in a way that Le Lionnais esteemed as a form of "double nationality":

Visited by a mathematical grace, a small minority of writers and artists (small, but weighty) have written intelligently and enthusiastically about the "queen of sciences." Infinitely rarer are those who—like Pascal and d'Alembert—possessed double nationality and distinguished themselves both as writers (or artists) and as mathematicians" (Motte 14-15).

Despite the novelty of this approach to writing, the Oulipo's cross-disciplinary experiments with textuality and invention have not been cited in either composition studies or computers and writing. Nevertheless, I argue that there are compelling reasons to study their work from within these disciplines—especially computers and writing. I focus specifically on two. The first is the way in which the Oulipo introduces an approach to writing with code, which is described in Part 1.ii of this essay. The second is the Oulipo’s promotion of a “double nationality” comprised of numerate and literate approaches to wriitng and language, which is described in Part 1.iii.