or even so was not there; although like James Joyce, Duchamp, and Artaud, the Beatle songwriter Paul McCartney was a big fan of pataphysics. The word "pataphysics" was famously sung by McCartney at the start of his skull-busting pataphysics song: Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, on the gigantic Abbey Road album:
“Joan was quizzical - studied pata-physical science, in the home…”
("...bang bang Maxwell's silver hammer came down on her head...")
McCartney’s song is a deliberate allegory. The event of coming to understand the non-linear realities focused on by pataphysics has traditionally been referred to by acolytes as de-braining.
Pataphysics is about half-addressed allegories, augmenting adjectives, empty signifiers, and deliberately focusing on exaggerated advantages in the fact that all words, sentences, and other symbolic or referential communication can never amount to more than some significant degree of allegory or metaphor; i.e. it’s not theoretically possible for the subject of a word, a metaphor, or any other kind of referential symbol to ever conflate in a perfect linear way with its object. Never a perfect match, and sometimes (particularly in art) a relationship between the subject and object of a metaphor or other symbol may be so obscure as to not be initially obvious at all – or it might even be designed with a permanent vacancy in part of the meaning.
Paul McCartney modeled his song Maxwell's Silver Hammer after an anthem written by French pataphysic theorist Alfred Jarry, simply titled: Chanson Décervelage (De-braining Song). The protagonist of the Beatles' song (Maxwell Edison, majoring in medicine) with his little silver brain-hammer, is a pataphysics intern, allegorically administering debraining therapy to his plaque-brained, unenlightened friend Joan. With his little brain hammer, Edison turns on the light for Joan, busting up her dysfunctional habits of straight linear thinking. (And then McCartney’s song tells us, Maxwell Edison performs décervelage for the policeman and the judge as well.)
Words and all other referential symbols are by nature always different in some respects from whatever it is they represent or refer to. There’s no such thing as a perfect description, or flawless non-fuzzy representation of anything. Aside from some kind of direct mind-to-mind transfer of information (like a straight Vulcan linear mind-meld): all communication is therefore composed to some degree of art, of creativity, or of imagination on the part of both the sender and the receiver-observer. Very much resembling the problem of superposition in quantum physics.
Pataphysics is about focusing to a blatant awareness of this situation. Such as the state of mind, for example, that one must come to realize in attempting to parse out the exact intention of pataphysician James Joyce’s abstracted metaphors and mediated allegories in his masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake.
Consider for example the fuzzy meaning and the metaphor-ishnessi of the word quark in Finnegan’s Wake “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” The sentence stands alone, disregarding its minimally-relative context. The interested reader must participate in inventing some kind of suitable meaning or at least an abstract understanding for the word quark here; and then a passable meaning for the whole fuzzy sentence.
One might call Joyce’s quark a Rorschach metaphor. It’s like a metaphor, but deliberately to a higher degree. It’s a semantic metaphor with an indeterminate object. The use of that low contrast word by Joyce here incidentally became one of the best known tropes in modern literature; especially after Nobel physicist Murry Gell-Mann established a high-profile position for that Joycean word itself elsewhere.
Complementary to its focus on the friends and family of metaphors, and the indeterminate crooked links between subjects and objects, pataphysics is about thereby escaping conventional restrictive habits of linear thinking and conceptualizing. The French term décervelage or "de-braining" is an arguably-fitting metaphor of such escape, and that ugly term is often featured in early pataphysical literature.
French philosopher and writer, Alfred Jarry, is well known for being a main intellectual mentor of Surrealism and Dada. He was born in 1873 in the town of Laval, a century after Immanuel Kant established his enduring Surreasonist philosophy, by publishing the groundbreaking Critique of Pure Reason. Jarry is remembered for his influential critique of how, as Baudrillard might put it: we’re conceptually living in a virtual simulacrum that we construct through maladaptive reasonable reliance on linear assumptions about language and other referential symbols.
Jarry’s critique addresses how our unwarranted direct linear assumptions regarding words and other symbolic referentials have traditionally prevented us from entertaining and sharing unusual sophisticated and nuanced ideas such as those expressed for example in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Joyce’s Finnegan, or Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.ii Exemplary works by three of the best-known acolytes of pataphysics.
One can imagine how a painting by Bouguereau or Watteau, for example, might have depicted or represented a group of prostitutes in Avignon. But in his crooked referential of oil-on-canvas, Picasso greatly exaggerates the distance of coherence between his crude subjective colored scratches and the distant objective evening ladies of Avignon which they refer to. And he thereby delivers a huge amount of unexpected information and ideas which could never have been accomplished with the contemporarily accepted linearly-isomorphic paradigms of representation.
Jarry was a youth prodigy and a knowledgeable amateur mathematician who hung out with the sophisticated and infamous fin de siècle Paris literati, as well as the Symbolists, and especially the avant-guard bohos and artists at Montmartre (the little hill where the patron of Paris, Saint Denis, was martyred).
Jarry generally kept up with the unusual contemporary discoveries in late century physics, notably the theories of Kelvin and Maxwell. He was very well-versed in various literatures, was infamously wild and louche; and he tended to pack his writing with both popular and obscure references to literature, science, and culture. He was a definitive poète maudit; who habitually brandished a pistol about, which his amigo Pablo Picasso purchased after his death.iii
Jarry’s gapped and non-linear paradigms of conceptualization and language, which he termed pataphysics, still even now after a century, continue to intrigue artists and intellectuals, and to gather interest and study.
As well as for Surrealism, Symbolism, Situationism, and Dada in general: Jarry’s pataphysics have been an important direct influence for many influential writers and artists, including Duchamp, Picasso, Joyce (Ulysses and especially Finnegan's Wake are so distinctly pataphysical), Miro, Tinguely, Apollinaire, Borges, Calvino, Artaud, Ionesco, Jacques Lacan, Julian Barnes; and not to mention the renowned tres moderne composer John Cage who famously noted that pataphysics "influenced everybody".iv
John Cage also said that in his opinion James Joyce, with his extremely creative and unconventional writing, makes better use of Jarry's pataphysics than any of the other creative luminaries within Jarry's wide contemporary circumference of influence. (Obviously though, in comparing a pair of “dissimilar texts”, one might argue whether Joyce's non-linear warpings of traditional literary structures in Finnegan, for example, are so much more profound than what Picasso similarly does to the structures of rational visual representation in his Demoiselles d’Avignon.)
Somewhat reflective of the singular Tristram Shandy, a century prior, Jarry’s writingv is an exhibition of how wide-angle metaphors, pataphors, augmenting adjectives, and other language used in non-linear and anti-rational ways can often actually be the most efficient manner of communication. It can also often better address important non-linear, fuzzy, and incomplete concepts which might be impossible to more than outline, with our delimited-but-misaligned labeling, categorizing, and linear grammars, e.g. consider again Finnegan's Wake in this regard.
Or consider Duchamp's RRose Selavy with her Eau De Voilette;vi or Duchamp's amazing artistic and mathematical "infra-mince" based on Isaac Newton's imaginary but infinitely-pragmatic (no pun intended) fundamental principle of Calculus (universally referred to in math classes as the vanishingly small "delta-h").
Now, over a century after Jarry’s time, there are still point-missing armchair-pundits who proclaim pataphysics to be satire, parody, or a joke. And there are as well many pataphysical organizations and institutes around the world; and pataphysical literature in several languages, specializing journals, and doctoral theses, etc. (Google it...) Dada icon Marcel Duchamp, like Jean Baudrillard (the studied contemporary writer, glittering postmodern cultural critic and simulacrum theorist) was long a member of Collège de 'Pataphysique in Paris, and both wrote directly about pataphysics, as did Umberto Eco, Breton, and Foucault, among many others.vii
Postmodern psychologist and philosopher of Structuralism and linguistics, Jacques Lacan, made good use of Jarry’s ideas and referred multiple times in his writing to Jarry, his non-linear linguistics, and his protagonist Ubu Roi.
Half a century after Jarry was focusing pataphysics attention on the fuzziness and the inherent but mostly-unnoticed indefinite nature of words and language, Lacan’s friend and colleague, the postmodern thinker and theoretician of Post-Structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss, formalized some of the complexities and more nuanced elements of language and its conceptual structures. One of his more enduring ideas was the formalized concept of the Empty Signifier: a word, referential, or symbol which refers to some idea or object which is indefinite, fuzzy, or not fully defined. It’s hard not to see the reflections of pataphysics in that.
Joyce’s quark in Finnegan is an empty-signifier in spades. Lévi-Strauss’ real intention was more about half-empty-signifiers. Traditional examples are the words populism and justice. They’re half-empty because different people can attribute very different meanings to them. The objects of those signifying words are only partly defined.
Sometimes, as with Joyce’s quark, the signifier is ninety-nine or a hundred percent empty. But the observers or listeners that Lévi-Strauss’ is talking about each think they recognize and already know what empty-signifiers such as populism or justice mean, so the fuzziness of the word goes unnoticed – (except of course by linguistic technicians such as Lévi-Strauss).
Joyce’s quark on the other hand is in-your-face undefined. Joyce’s observer is forced to come to terms with the fact that the signifying word quark is so fuzzy or empty that any meaning at all must be personally provided by the observer’s own pataphysic imagining.viii
Jarry’s writing is a demonstration of how incompleteness, double-coded non-truths, absurd ironies, broken or soft-targeted allegories, elliptical or permissive metaphors, and parsed parody can sometimes offer the best approach to unusually complex or amorphous concepts and difficult descriptions.
Lévi-Strauss’ half-empty-signifiers have obviously existed probably from the very beginning of language; they’re inherent to normal language. But fully-empty-signifiers, like Joyce’s quark didn’t happen as far as we know until around the nineteenth century when people, for cultural reasons, started focusing on understanding the system fundamentals of such things as heat (Kelvin), electro-magnetism (Maxwell), color (the Impressionists), the fundamentals of referential drawingix (Picasso & Braque), semantics (Peirce), and linguistics etc. When people like Peirce and Jarry took a notion to study and test the fundamentals and limits of words, language, referential symbols, and meaning itself.
Due to their several conceptual similarities, pataphysics is naturally likened by some to quantum physics. Jarry’s pataphysics were promulgated by the posthumous publication of his Dr. Faustroll, six years after Einstein introduced quantum physics in 1905, with his paper on the photoelectric effect - proving that photons (wave/particles of light) are impossibly both waves and particles at the same time.
In their natural unobserved state, photons always remain as both waves and particles, as well as neither waves nor particles - at the same time. Physicists call that fuzzy semi-defined state superposition. And just as a single q-bit in a quantum computer can impossibly hold and not-hold a number of various different values all at the same time, so can a pataphysical word, sentence, image, or meme.
To borrow from the operation and curtilage of quantum physics: pataphysical words and texts will remain in superposition until they’re conceptually observed, in the particular (no pun intended), and thereby mentally “collapsed” around an assisted fungible meaning - exactly in the same way as that occurs when an inherently-fuzzy quon (quantum particle) collapses from superposition into distinct particular boundaries once it’s observed (“measured” is the technical term) by some observer.
It’s exactly the same way that a Lévi-Strauss observer reads a text sprinkled with empty-signifiers, automatically providing personal meaning to fill up the half-emptiness – and thus finding the text to be coherent and meaningful. (But they’re unaware of their own participation in the production of meaning.)
Given the isomorphic relationship and mirrored reflections between the basic structures of pataphysics and quantum physics, it’s easy to imagine an outline of coherence between these two very different enterprises. We can at least call that an interesting haptic synchronicity, or perhaps it’s the zeitgeist, or better yet: a covalent topological conceptualization of the tenor of the times; i.e. simply a result of both Alfred Jarry and Albert Einstein breathing in the same fresh new Twentieth Century, non-Euclidian airs.
Additionally, and of equal significance: the unexpected discovery by physicists of surprisingly non-linear “quantum logic” does the same thing to the rational cause-and-effect logic of classical physics as pataphysics does in re-paradigming the classical rational structure of human language and perforce most of all other surliminal interpersonal communication and thought.
Schrodinger’s Cat is a famous and definitive pataphysical riddle. Superposition is a granted fact of quantum physics - proven absolutely over a century, both by irrefutable math and by extraordinarily extensive experimentation. But superposition is so strange and non-intuitive that nobody can think of an explicit description or even a decently-descriptive metaphor for how it works. Normal indicative language fails. We have neither the words nor the grammar for this. Nor any plausible idea.
Physicists and pataphysicists have tried to find some intuitive, common-sense metaphor or understanding of superposition; but the two best metaphors physics has come up with are a how a clock could actually be running both forward and backwards at the same time; or else the famous case of pioneering quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s Cat, which was virtually explained as absolutely being at one point both alive and dead at the same time. (Due to a tricky death machine with its trigger locked to an energetic particle temporarily in superposition.)x
A colleague of Schrodinger explained that this is not about a sick cat; this is about a normal healthy cat in a situation of quantum superposition; being both actually live and actually dead at the same time. The fundamentals of quantum physics require that this strange situation is in fact a normal part of the real world.xi This fact of nature cannot be well-addressed by any known sensible metaphors, let alone rationally indicative words. (Einstein thought it was crazy, but he’s been proven solidly wrong about that.) Though an extreme example, this obliquely illustrates the bailiwick of pataphysics.
It’s coincidentally interesting that the quantum particles getting the most press these days are the six-flavored, super-tiny, recently-discovered components of protons and neutrons, to which Murry Gell-Mann, a fan of Finnegan, gave the name quarks.
Pataphysics’ clear parallels in the evolution of both haut-theoretical and pedestrian philosophies are highlighted, not just by Kant’s un-reasonable groundwork, but also by Kurt Gödel’s decisive 1931 two-pronged attacks on the radix of Positivism, proving mathematically that no information system whatsoever can possibly be complete in itself; and thus that all possible indicative explanations are deficient and fuzzy to some degree.
Aside from its fundamental importance to pure math, high-level computing, and cryptography, one consequence of Gödel proving his Incompleteness Theorem is that words, and all combinations of words, therefore have ultimately-immeasurable fuzzy meanings, and always must. So aside from Vulcan mind melds (or the direct mind-to-mind method Tang Dynasty Zen masters used to pass the dharma between generations) – all other inter-personal communication is necessarily composed from the family and cousins of metaphor and allegory.
Similarly, only one year after Gödel published this proof that information must always be fuzzy and Incomplete, Werner Heisenberg received the 1932 Nobel Prize for proving that all energy and mass itself must always be fuzzy and uncertain. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle proves that even the physical world is at its base random, answerless and uncertain. Heisenberg proved that fundamental particles, which alone constitute the tangible world, do not even have exact locations or speeds as they exist in space-time.xii
Quarks, protons, electrons, etc., our fundamental particles: though they’re stochastically predictable, are random actors on the lowest level. And they shockingly do not play by the linear rules of cause and effect – at that level everything is simply, randomly, and decisively stochastic. Irrespective of our mediated perceptions, physical reality at its root is “Incomplete” and “Uncertain" and with any very-fine-grained precision it’s precisely indescribable.
It’s a similar paradigm of indeterminate imprecision that pataphysics energetically acknowledges, and promotes for the sake of expanding acknowledgement - in all referential communication. An acute awareness of that inherent fuzzy imprecision throws open whole new areas of creative conceptualization and communication; and according to pataphysics: breaks down (décervelage) limiting, overly-ridged, linear mental structures.
Pataphysics is about the pragmatics of “meaning” - which is even per se impossible to address properly. Buddha said: “Meaning is different from words. Deep meaning will not be made manifest by means of words.” He also said: “Meaning is entered into by words in just the same way that objects in a room are revealed by a lamp”. Plainly, those are both pataphysical statements. They’ve both have been learned and passed down as wisdom through around a hundred generations;xiii though they both do solidly resist explicit precision or a linear unpacking.
Jarry said that pataphysics is the science of sciences; that conceptually the way we approach each other and the world is all pataphysics. Our assumptions of perfect linearity and isomorphic definition are erroneous and harmfully misleading. It boils down to a recognition that it’s all fuzzy, indeterminate references and defective indicative definitions which must instead, to some extent, be interpreted creatively.
Jarry said pataphysics is about understanding the science of “imaginary solutions”. Imaginary solutions is a term Jarry appropriated from mathematics, and it means exactly what you think it does.xiv (In math it essentially means including the fourth dimension.)xv
Jarry’s “imaginary solutions” statement here is absolutely indicative, but it doesn’t automatically index to any unique meaning. It’s half-empty. It’s a linguistically perfect statement, and not meaningless - but some personal imagined particulars must be employed to solve for the meaning Jarry intends to convey. In the formal Structuralist words of Lévi-Strauss, what Jarry has here is an empty signifier (or at least half-empty).
Around the year 1450, Johannes Regiomontanus, a German mathematician, imagined that the solution to some previously insoluble equations would involve the square root of -1 (negative one). But obviously there is no number (given the normal meaning of that word) which will equal -1 when multiplied by itself. And for one to imagine that is completely unreasonable and not rational. (This odd putative “number” is un-measurable and therefore cannot be ratioed or rationalized).
This amazing imaginary number of Regiomontanus has now been solving difficult equations for over half a millennium. Modern math and science would be lost without it. In the world of mathematics and science, the universal symbol for this extraordinarily useful pata-number is Rene Descartes’ nomination: a lower case i, for “imaginary”.
It’s interesting that Steven Hawking could only find a mathematical solution for his famous model of the absolute beginning/non-beginning of time itself (at the Big Bang), by using equations with i, this imaginary number - which of course can never be counted or fractionated like an actual number. A notable success for imaginary solutions; Jarry would certainly be pleased.
The point of Lévi-Strauss’s empty-signifiers is that they each carry only a general or categorical definition or meaning. Everybody automatically assumes they know the meaning of the word justice (traditional example of a Lévi-Strauss [half-empty]-signifier); but everybody is automatically filling in the half-missing meaning with particulars from their own experience or imagination. Clever psychologists and political theoreticians have done a lot of speculating about how culture might be directed or controlled by some party that could control the half-definitions of a certain important group of a language’s empty-signifiers. Jarry had exactly the opposite idea.
Jarry’s idea was that people could be de-brained of their linear assumptions about fully-definite meanings - and freed up mentally upon being confronted with the fact that all language and all other referential communication is pataphysical in nature. Fundamentally it’s a lot of non-specific half-empty signifiers, - incomplete until filled in by the reader or observer’s particulars. That’s just the nature of communicating (or conceptualizing) with any language or other symbolic referentials.
Jarry employs a convoluted trope in explaining the nuances of this point. Rather than getting muddled up in the complex niceties of empty-signifiers and their significances, (like Lévi-Strauss does), Jarry goes directly to the opposite extreme and examines the situation from there. Jarry wants to talk about the absolutely-full-and-not-empty-signifier.
Obviously this perfect signifier of his is a virtual thing which could not exist. Such a referential would cease to be referential. Subject and object would collapse into an isomorphic conflation.
Jarry tells us that this non-existent virtual perfect referential is a definitive goal of pataphysics. Forget the other side of the equation for the moment. Forget the whole thing with fuzziness and imaginary solutions.
Pataphysics purposes a focus on the inextricably particular, rather than the general and the categorical. We’re now considering the opposite of all that fuzzy empty-signifier stuff. In this regard Jarry significantly said that Pataphysics involves grasping “the law that governs exceptions.” (Any singular, particular object is absolutely exceptional, and cannot be sufficiently addressed generally, or as a member of some category.)
Jarry's definitive words and grammar here are inerroneous, as in the case for example of Zen’s “Sound Of One-Hand Clapping.”xvi But logistically the concept is seemingly a circular conundrum, an oxymoron - since all exceptions are obviously by definition contrapositive in a situation where any governing law is applicable. To the putative contrary though, in the 1970s, the Collège de 'Pataphysique in Paris published an explanatory corollary; isomorphic to Jarry’s riddle:
“A law is fundamentally just the exception to an exception!”xvii (5)
Despite their significant differences, like Zen, pataphysics is a conceptualizing and communications practice not detrimentally restricted by unjustifiably-assumed structural linearities and the liabilities of traditional paradigms; and yet if one would assiduously cobble together the surfeit of unrestricted elementary conceptuals made manifest in many of the other such
- Veritas in Lorem Ipsum -
i Joyce’s word quark here is what Structuralism theorist Lévi-Strauss would call an empty-signifier. It references some indistinct or indefinite object. It’s an odd type of metaphor which requires what Jarry terms the “science of imaginary solutions” to determine what that referred-to object might be.
ii …often derogatorily referred to as Explosion in a Shingle Factory.
iii …but Apollinaire said that he disarmed Jarry at a wild party where Jarry fired off a few shots at one of the fellows attending. And another report has it that Picasso was given Jarry’s pistol by Apollinaire.
iv Hugill, Pataphysics, A Useless Guide, 2015 MIT Press, Cambridge MA (a 266 page history of pataphysics its influences, and followers. This is an exceptionally well-researched scholarly book about Jarry and his writing; with an interesting biography, and specific details regarding his influences on art, culture, and a variety of well-known, writers, artists and theorists. It includes many passages from other pataphysic writers and little stories about Jarry’s crowd at Montmartre.)
v Ubu Roi and Faustrol, etc.
vi Note the reversal of the diphthong: Duchamp’s perfume is referencing a little veil, not a violet.
vii Hugill, Pataphysics, A Useless Guide,
viii …unless of course homonyms or onomatopoeia might provide some useful direction.
ix In paint-on-canvas they investigated such fundamentals as whether one could reference a violin with just an S-curve, a black circle (sound hole), and a few parallel lines (violin strings): what are the minimal requirements of recognizable representation?
x Many much-more detailed descriptions of Schrodinger’s Cat and the paradoxical nature of superposition can be easily found on the net.
xi …but usually hidden from our macro-world’s notice due to the stochastics of our massive size (our bodies contain about 10^30 quantum particles each). (A million trillion trillion).
xii Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is actually that no particle can have an exact location, and an exact momentum (speed*mass@direction) at the same time. Their total uncertainty is limited by Plank’s Constant. (About 6 and a fraction times a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth.)
xiii …if we figure that an average parent’s age at the birth of their middle child is about 26 years.
xiv …according to both Claude Lévi-Strauss and pataphysics.
xv It’s an extra dimension, orthogonal to our standard three in Cartesian space.
xvi The Sound Of One Hand Clapping is obviously a pataphysic riddle, as it employs an in-your-face blatantly-Empty Signifier. The point of the riddle is to stun the listener’s rational mind with a metaphor (one hand clapping) which makes perfect sense but refers to an absolutely impossible object.
xvii Op. Cit., pp.85
xviii In accord with Heisenberg, Gödel, Postmodernism’s “Incompleteness”, and the tenor of Collège de ’Pataphysique in Paris: pataphysical documents may have no formal beginnings or endings, elliptical or second degree logic, meanings transmitted only in subtexts or overtones - and per Jarry’s Dictum, reader/user input is often required to imagine more precise definitions for superpositional or otherwise inherently inexplicit vocabulary and syntax.
