The Digital Avant-garde - Digital Culture - page 73

said is that his ideas lived on, albeit in attenuated form, in the work
of the more famous Situationist group, some of whose members
were originally Lettristes. Perhaps more to the point, Isou was
part of a more general French interest in signs and systems, which
manifested itself in intellectual movements such as Structuralism.
The Lettriste concentration on the letter also anticipated the post-
structuralist and deconstructionist focus on the materiality of the
sign, as articulated by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques
Derrida, which itself can be understood, in part at least, as a
response to the dramatic developments in information and commu-
nication technologies. Perhaps Isou can be seen as somebody whose
ideas were developed too soon, before either the technologies or
culture existed with which to understand or legitimate them. In
the light of his prescience it is time that Isou's work was reassessed.
Isou's work is as much about the visual as the literary, and as
such anticipates many issues concerning digital media. Along with
that of Fluxworkers such as Ben Vautier, the Spatialisme of the
French poet Pierre Garnier, the Konkrete Poesie of the Swiss Eugen
Gomringer and the work of Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ian Hamilton
Finlay and Bob Cobbing among others, such work has sometimes
been considered under the general term 'Concrete Poetry'. This
denotes a shared interest in the graphic and visual potential of
letters, words and texts. More recently work by Tom Phillips, Jake
Tilson, Jenny Holzer and others have continued this interest, albeit
in very different ways. Similar ideas were explored by the Ouvrior
pour Littérature Potentielle or the 'Workshop for Potential Literature',
otherwise known as OuLiPo, founded in the ex-Surrealist

Raymond Queneau and François le Lionnais. Many of those at
the original meeting of the group were already members of the
College of Pataphysics, a group founded in

1960

, inspired by the
work of Alfred Jarry to develop a 'science of exceptions, of imaginary
solutions, equivalence, and imperturbality'. 14 The aim of OuLiPo
was to develop methods of applying constraints to the production

1949