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<\/p>\nBy Richard Marshall.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Pataphysics: A Useless Guide<\/em><\/a>, Andrew Hugill, MIT Press 2012<\/p>\n We are biased towards usefulness. ‘Pataphysics resists this bias. It bombards us with samples of the inutilious. Rennes schoolboys invented the world \u2018pataphysics’ in 1888. Alfred Jarry<\/a> was the leader of that particular gang. Absurdism, Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, Situationism et al find roots in its soil. Hugill notes that the name works like the self-defeater lying at the heart of Groucho Marx’s joke that he wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would accept him. We seek out solutions to problems. ‘Pataphysicians seek out solutions to non-problems. They deny that if something isn’t lost it can’t be found and find ingenious laughter in the insinuating joke question, \u2018when did you stop beating your wife?’ Hughill says that ‘Pataphysics wasn’t a movement but more a collection of ideas. Marcel Duchamp thought it was meta-ironic. They all knew that it didn’t have to exist to exist.<\/p>\n Jarry<\/a> considered its subject matter \u2018the laws that govern exceptions.’ He defined it as \u2018the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their instruments.’ Jarry<\/a> was out to shock bourgeois poets. Raymond Queneau<\/a> thought it \u2018rests on the truth of contradictions and exceptions.’ Contradictions are assumed by classical logicians to explode consequence. From a contradiction, everything follows. The paraconsistent denies the explosion. Miro Quesada thought of paraconsistency in terms of a quasi-logic. Most think of it in terms of a beyond-logic. Queneau<\/a> is taking ‘Pataphysics further than paraconsistency and into the realm of true contradictions. Its common form is dialetheism. The philosopher of common sense Thomas Reid wrote: \u2018No proposition is both true and false.’ Queneau seeks to deny this and destroy common sense as the platform. Graham Priest<\/a> and Richard Sylvan were not ‘Pataphysicians but had an interest in claims that ordinary intuitions are controlled by dialatheistic deviant logic. This conflicts with ‘Pataphysicians counter-common-sense credentials. Rather than dialatheism Queneau might instead be understood as suggesting trivialism. This is the view that all contradictions are true and therefore, assuming that a conjunction entails its conjuncts, that everything is true. Priest and Sylvan want to resist this last entailment. If the ‘Pataphysicist recognises the usefulness of distinguishing truth from falsehood then they will be happy to embrace the conclusion that everything is true on the grounds that it is a stirringly useless conclusion.<\/p>\n Exceptionalism links the ‘Pataphysicians with historical debate involving the bias towards order. William Adams, in 1767, notes that a river must flow before it can be interrupted. Stable backgrounds are assumed to be needed for exceptions to make sense. Aquinas considered exceptionalism to be where something exceeds the powers of law governed nature. David Hume thought of exceptions in terms of \u2018a violation of laws of nature.’ But Earman and others argue that exceptions aren’t always clearly violations of laws of nature. He points out that there are no laws of nature saying that people when dead must stay dead. Natural laws work at levels of biochemical and thermodynamic processes. Exceptions are tricky even if we disregard the difficulty of knowing which laws were bring violated. An exception seems just proof that what had been taken to be a regular pattern wasn’t one after all. If the view that there are laws and patterns is thrown out then exceptions form an empty set. This might be conducive to the ‘Pataphysician who can see the uselessness of this position. But the bias against emptiness has historically generated a theological filler. This is the kind of theology that patrols explanatory gaps and fills them with super-natural material. Exceptions become miracles, importing the theological connotations into its heart.<\/p>\n There are deductive arguments for miracles. Victorians were partial to these. They depend on sympathy towards those reporting miracles, which is now rare. Criteriological arguments assert criteria for miracles that enable their claims to be scrutinised and assessed dispassionately. But critics argue that other considerations such as extreme antecedent improbability of an event outweighs whatever criteria is set. Explanatory arguments suggest that a miracle might be the best explanation for a given set of accepted facts. But expanding the original list of facts always makes the miracle less compelling than other alternative explanations. Claimed facts can always be denied as well. A non-miraculous explanation may be proposed that is superior to the miraculous one. Implications of a miraculous explanation may be less compelling that its denial. There are Bayesian arguments for miracles. Miracles become more probable when some given evidence is more likely if a miracle had taken place than if it hadn’t. Richard Swinburne has pioneered this kind of argument in recent times. But is the ‘Pataphysicist wanting to find itself as a species of the religious? Maybe. Jarry<\/a> saw ‘Pataphysics as the third stage of religion. The first stage was material religion that reached apotheosis in the Bronze Age. Then came metaphysical religion running from Zoroastrianism through Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the end of the sixteenth century. Jarry’s religion takes the form of religion as epistemic hoax. This joke runs deep. But Asker Jorn seems, according to Hugill, to have wanted a more serious take and reading Jorn straight would be certainly betraying ‘Pataphysics, were that possible. But given that ‘Pataphysics is something that doesn’t even have to exist to exist and doesn’t matter, it isn’t possible. So Jorn is to be read as being a very dry humourist.<\/p>\n \u2018Pataphysicism describes a universe supplementary to the natural one of science. Jarry sees second stage religion as too end-orientated. Jarry writes: \u2018Pataphysics is the end of ends.’ Is ‘Pataphysics science? Dr Iren n \u00e9e-<\/em> Louis Sandomire described ‘Pataphysics as \u2018the most serious of the sciences’. Rene Daumal called it \u2018the opposite of physics.’ Debuffet and Ionesco insisted that it was \u2018essentially explosive, implying a mixture of radically incompatible fluids’ and thought this implied it was best understood as a \u2018Permanent Detonation.’ Perhaps both religion and science are best understood through the lens of the ‘Pataphysicist, \u2018a machine for exploring the world’ as Fernando Arrabal of the 1962 Panic movement claimed ‘Pataphysicalism was. Perhaps Jesus was playing with us: Arrabal certainly discussed ‘Pataphysics in terms taken from a Christian religion. Stas writes of it in strikingly spiritualised, religious, Roman Christianised terms, \u2018\u2018Pataphysics is daily bread. Imperturbable \u2026 Mother of the infinite without reference to space (aerial or dead), and Mother of Ethernity without science of time (rotten weather or past glories’. It is compared by some to being like Zen. Brotchie thinks of it as a \u2018\u2026 huge and elaborately constructed hoax, just as Zen is an exercise in hoaxing.’ Confucius, the Buddha and Laozi become precursors \u2013 or early practitioners – on this account. The reach towards transcendence is often remarked on. Mystical spirals play with this, involving complicated hierarchies of colours and sizes, its prototype being the belly of Jarry’s Grande Gidouille Mistah Ubu.<\/p>\n If a hoax, then \u2018Pataphysics may be considered as a species of the fictionalist stance famously expressed by Voltaire: \u2018If god did not exist then we’d have to invent him.’ This fictionalist theism has precedents in Sextus Empiricus and his Pyrrhonianism as well as the two truths of Buddhism and Duhem’s thesis about pre-modern astronomy. Hartry Field, Mark Balaguer and Stephen Yablo defend fictionalist stances towards mathematics. Bas van Frassen takes scientific theories to be fictionalist. Peter van Inwagen thinks ordinary object talk is fictionalist. Anthony Everett, Fred Kroon, Mark Balaguer and Caroline West think morals are fictionalist. Alexis Burgess<\/a> thinks truth is. Necessity and possibility are fictions according to D.M. Armstrong, Gideon Rosen, John Nolt, Seahwa Kim and John Divers. I think its in terms of this fictionalist position that much of pataphysics is discussed, alongside Derridean postmodernity, but it shouldn’t have been and doesn’t have to continue to be. I prefer to see much of it in terms of epistemic paradox a la<\/em> Borges<\/a>.<\/p>\n Linguistic fictionalists say its utterances are best understood as being fictions rather than literal claims. Ontological fictionalists claim that things in a fictionalist discourse don’t actually exist, or only as fictions. Are \u2018Pataphysicians linguistic or ontological fictionalists? Given that ontological fictionalists prefer to abandon or reject fictionalist discourses we may decide this matter by considering whether the \u2018Pataphysician aims to dissolve such discourses or not. Are \u2018Pataphysicians hermeneutic or revolutionary fictionalists? The hermeneutic fictionalist doesn’t aim at literal truth but only appears to do so. The very spelling of \u2018Pataphysics nods in this direction, appending the appearance of a floating apostrophe at its start. Jarry used this apostrophe only once when discussing the definition of the Faustroll. The apostrophe is real, and is there to \u2018avoid the simple pun.’ But no one knows what pun Jarry can be referring to and this suggests that it’s a fictional pun, one whose non-appearance is no more a problem that the non-appearance of Dr Watson’s wives in a Sherlock Holmes story.<\/p>\n Hugill prefers to drop the apostrophe throughout his book. The revolutionary fictionalist takes a different stance from the hermeneutical, and insists that we ought only to make pretend assertions. This normative dimension is itself subjected to its own fictionalism. I shall take a less standard interpretation of Sandomir’s 1955 injunctions regarding the spelling of pataphysics and the use of the apostrophe, and use it only if I can be bothered to, with the proviso that no one read it as anything but a fiction.<\/p>\n The hermeneutic fictionalist may deny that a sentence can make sense unless taken as a fiction. Stephen Yablo takes this line when he thinks he couldn’t conceive of \u2018Chicago exists<\/a>‘ as meaning anything other than in the fictionalist sense. Jarry himself seems to support this view. Principles of induction for Jarry have the same coding as the names of cities do for Yablo. The particular and the unique are the reasons Jarry points to the intrinsic fictionalism of physics. A universe ordered by a series of unique events is one where imaginary solutions, including those of physics, are equal. \u2018A page of the telephone directory has the same VALUE for us as a page of the Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll<\/em>‘ according to Regent Marie-Louise Aulard. But we are still entitled to ask whether the pataphysicist makes a distinction between the fictionalism of the things represented and the props used in the fiction. Numbers, for example, can be conceived of as the things represented. But they can also be used as a prop in a fiction, such as, \u2018There was one grinning cat.’<\/p>\n Do pataphysicists think they are asserting<\/em> their fictions? This might result in them saying that they assert their fiction, but what is asserted is not to be taken literally. But this hardly seems radical. \u2018Sherlock Holmes walked into the room’ asserts something that is not to be taken as literally true. Alternatively the pataphysicist may be denying that she is asserting anything. It is a different kind of speech act from assertion. Scientific instrumentalism such as Quine\/Duhem’s is like this. In that case, pataphysicism is wrong to claim a different scientific pedigree. Rather than being the meta-metaphysics of physics, it reduces to mere physics. Indeed the more we examine the claims of the pataphysicist’s claims for iconoclasm, the less plausible it looks so long as it is easily aligned with contemporary thinking about the nature of science, numbers and the art of fiction. The pataphysicist may be making the move of combining both these approaches: she does not assert the literal content of the sentence, but some non-literal content is asserted instead. But again, far from capturing an iconoclastic stance this rather captures a rather common and ordinary phenomenon of common speech. When we assert we may well not be literally asserting the sentence, but rather asserting something else. \u2018There are no more apples’, I may say. I don’t mean to assert the literal truth of the statement, rather maybe something like that here, in the bowl before me, the last apple has been eaten. Banal.<\/p>\n In Faustroll<\/em> Hugill explains how Jarry combined the name of the mage<\/a> who makes the fatal devil pact with the Nordic legendary creature found in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt<\/a><\/em> and concludes that pataphysicians have a complicated relationship with antinomies and doubleness. One of the Kantian antinomies is the conflict between freedom and physical necessity. Pataphysicians are beyond metaphysical solutions. Hugill explains how the fictionalist approach redacts the pataphysician from metaphysical strictures. In this explanation Hugill is denying that there is a literal truth anywhere being asserted in the pataphysical assertion. This makes a distinction between common practice and the pataphysicist possible; ordinarily we are indifferent to implications of kinds of truths in what we say, whereas the pataphysician is not. Even when engaged in pretense we are not actively engaged. Pataphysicians, in being actively engaged, are more awake in their concerns than ordinary folk. Their preoccupations, be they serious or humorous or, more commonly, both, give them their identity and differentiate them from their everyday appearances.<\/p>\n The pataphysicist is shown in this to be both halves of a coin, what becomes a theme of \u2018plus-minus’ running through everything. Borges, Calvino and Perec<\/a> are obvious cases. Hugill takes Duchamp’s \u2018Large Glass<\/a>‘ as the apotheosis of this. Here the antinomy was erotic, formally arranged as a hinge which was the symbol of the opposition. It was a pataphysical object which he repeated as the conceptual understanding of the endgame position of games of chess, described in the seminal book Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled<\/em> which Duchamp co-authored with Vitaly Halberstadt in 1932. The pataphysical implications for understanding Sam Beckett’s whole oeuvre cannot be overestimated. ‘Endon’s Affence’, the chess game in Murphy<\/a><\/em>, as well as Endgame<\/em> itself, of course, are cases of Beckett making pataphysical objects equivalent to Duchampean ready-mades with Fustrollian preciosity and wit. Contrariness is the subject of the pretense, where pretense is not the making of a fantasy world but more a manner of speaking.<\/p>\n The belly of Ubu Roi<\/a> is drawn as twin spirals. This symbol derives from Mallarme who wrote a poem that was an allegory of itself. Here the pataphysicist references the realisation that contradiction and self-reference are twin complications for truth. The deviant logicians attempt to understand truth in terms of contradiction was begun when contemplation of the liar paradox revealed problems with conventional understanding. \u2018This sentence is false<\/a>‘ provoked consternation for classical logicians. The sentence, if true, is false. If false, it is true. It spirals on and on. Each iteration leading to the next, round and round. Mallarme<\/a>, in writing his poem \u2018Ptyx’ in 1887 writes of this spiraling and paradoxical madness:<\/p>\n \u2018A window opened at night, two fastened shutters; a room with no one inside, in spite of the still appearance presented by the fastened shutters, and in a night made of absence and questioning, without furniture, if not for the likely outline of what might be sideboards, a quarrelsome and agonising frame, of a mirror hung up in the back, with its reflection, stellar and incomprehensible, of the Ursula Major, which connects to heaven alone this dwelling abandoned by the world.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Jakon Bournoulli, a Swiss mathematician, is famous for his study of spirals. His tombstone has on it: \u2018I arise the same though changed.’ Hugill notes that the carved spiral there is the wrong kind of spiral. It is an Archimedean spiral that has a constant distance between its turnings. Bernouilli’s is a logarithmic spiral that seems to continually increase. The fictionalism of the pataphysicist seems to both add nothing \u2013 and therefore revolve as a naught, and yet simultaneously grows. The pataphysicist can say that some things don’t exist and yet should not be abandoned because they expand in worthwhile ways. Arguments of mathematics adopt this kind of approach when questioned by eliminativist antirealists about numbers. Though numbers don’t exist, they are nonetheless useful. Similar defenses of moral discourse are also mounted: even if literally untrue, morals have value in bolstering self-control, says the contemporary philosopher Joyce. God may even be subject to such a defense. It is better to believe in a fictional God than not to, say some.<\/p>\n Is pataphysics a revolution that changes nothing? The anomalous nature of the pataphysicist is according to Hugill \u2018best embodied in the figure of Ubu, whose reign is certainly terrible, but who ultimately leaves the world unchanged.’ The pataphysician is the fictionalist who believes we would carry on speaking as if things were real even when we found out they were fictions. This shows that we are not committed to the reality of anything, even when supposing them non-fictions. The discovery of their actively engaged fictionalist project is that reality alone doesn’t cause anyone to change their minds about anything.<\/p>\n Here the great conspiracy theorist Charles Fort<\/a> can be seen as contributing to the pataphysical project. The commonly asserted scorn and derision for conspiracy theorists is a result of assuming not only that there is a clear distinction to be made between real and unreal but also that we know of it and further, that once known it makes a difference<\/em>. It is this last part that makes the pataphysicist project of interest. Even if the first two points are conceded, the third point remains to be proved. The philosopher Stephen Yablo has argued about the ontological commitments an assertion brings with it, and it is certainly not obvious how the relationship between our utterances and ontological commitments work. Yablo imagines an omniscient Oracle who tells you that abstract entities, such as \u2018prime numbers, don’t exist’ despite which, no one changes how they talk about prime numbers. The pataphysicist seizes on this common anomaly and looks for useless payoffs. These tend to be humourous. George Perec<\/a> writes: \u2018You don’t have a brother and he likes cheese.’ The syzygymous happenstance of all this is a hallmark, for Hugill, of artistic practice and helps make (non)sense of lives.<\/p>\n The pataphysicist seeks imaginary solutions to an anomalous universe, one where anomalies are normal and rules are exceptions. Yablo declares fictonalism a normal routine, whereby unobtrusive metaphors cover language like sand. Given that they do, he is comfortable declaring that fictionalism is something we take in our stride. Like the pataphysicist, he refuses to say that beneath the sand there is always (or even often) a realer beach. There are no literal truths being pointed to by the non-literal ones. To deny Yablo and the pataphysicist, anti-fictionalists may say language is idiomatic not metaphorical but Jarry writes, \u2018Faustroll defined the universe as that which is the exception to oneself’, and that’s not idiomatic but absurd. Hugill describes this as the representation of \u2018the will to disruption which is one of the principal sources of pataphysical energy.’<\/p>\n Hugill notes that Jarry depended on a notion of the Absolute and this is largely irrelevant to people outside of religion. The spiritual orientation of pataphysicians is due to this strand perpetuated by Jarry’s drinking and his ruined Catholicism. But it isn’t a necessary component. Hugill is investigating the humor that is more essential to pataphysics as a whole. Pataphysical humour has a range: Ionesco absurd, farcical Marx brothers, intellectual Duchamp, too-serious Jorn, inadvertent Brisset, knowing Borges, pointless Oulipo, pointed Cravan and so on.<\/p>\n Hugill suggests that pataphysics is a growing force. The college de Pataphysique<\/a> started after the Second World War. Hughill sees it as a humorous coda to Parisian existentialism, late surrealism, Marxist-Leninism and Jarry, surrealism and Dadaism were part of its ordering energy at that time. Hughill explains that time, being a spiral in the pataphysical universe, makes chronology different. Hugill records the creation in 1949 of the Perpetual ‘Pataphysical calendar, the influence of Deleuze, Foucault, Eco and Baudrillard on the digital presence of pataphysics, the web proliferation of sites and offshoot organisations and the activity of social networking sites in creating a sense of the haphazard and lively, a vortex of strange activity that claims you for longer than anyone initially desired.<\/p>\n Pataphysics has massive presence in digital culture. Peter Volkart made his film Terra Incognita<\/a><\/em> in 2005. Pataphysics is a by-word for experimental and left field work. German electronic band Farmer’s Manuel labels itself pataphysical. Tomoroh Hidari writes, \u2018Even though originating from times before the private pataphysical turn of Nemo von Nirgends, this was compiled and remastered at the Delusory \u2018Pataphysical Institute of Whateverism.’ DJ Spooky has a track called \u2018Variation Cybernetique: Rhythemic Pataphysic’. There’s an American musician called Faustroll. There’s an Australian-Sri-Lankan rapper called ‘Pataphysics. Paintlust in Seoul \u2018explore the possibilities of contemporary painting’ which \u2018reinterpreted the concept of antinomy.’ Pataphysical Longing productions are based in NYC. The Pataphysical Laboratory of Sharon Harris \u2018gives definitive answers to your unanswerable poetic questions and offers all the unsolicited writing advice you will never follow.’ There’s a Patafistic Studio in Florence. Patachromo was set up in Paris to achieve \u2018chromotherapy seen through the prism of Pataphysics.’ And so on. There’s a lot of it about.<\/p>\n Hugill makes claims for pataphysics having problems with women. Some disputes its misogyny but Jarry’s relationship with women was at best complicated and at worst just nasty. For example, \u2018What I like in women \u2013 blight and dross which God extracted from the grid of their [men’s] ribs \u2013 is their servility, but I want them silent.’ Coupled with the archaic titles that seem to inflect a ceremonial priestly hierarchical desire, there’s something wrong here. Hugill notes that women are an increasing presence.<\/p>\n He also notes the museums. There’s a secret one in Bristol, Rhode Island, USA, the LIP in London which in 2002 staged an exhibition of the paintings and sculptures of Tony Hancock<\/a> and a good archive at MIT. He revels in the pataphysics presence in Academia. Dario Fo, Eduardo Sanguineti, Barry Flanagan, Barbara White, Roland Topor, Henri Bouche and Jean Baudrillard are given honorable mention. Baudrillard wrote two pataphysical papers. His first argued that \u2018at the heart of information one finds history haunted by its own disappearance. At the hub of hi-fi, music is haunted by its own disappearance. At the core of experimentation, science is haunted by the disappearance of its object. Pivotal to pornography is a sexuality haunted by its own disappearance. Everywhere it is the same stereophonic effect, the absolute proximity of the real: the same effect of simulation.’<\/p>\n In a pataphysical moment we may place besides this ghost story Yablo’s equally compelling list of fictions that haunt our very language: \u2018They put a lot of hurdles in your path, there’s a lot that could be said about that, there’s no precedent for that, something tells me you’re right, there are some things better left unsaid, there is something I forgot to tell you, viz. how to operate the lock, nothing gets my goat as much as chewing gum in class, a lot you can do for me, let’s roll out the red carpet, the last thing I want is to\u2026, their people have risen in my esteem, I took her into my confidence, my patience is nearly exhausted, I’ll take my chances, there’s a trace of sadness in your eyes, a growing number of these leaks can be traced to Starr’s office, she’s got a lot of smarts, let’s pull out all the stops, let’s proceed along the lines suggested above.’ The literal truth is impossible and yet the metaphors force us to engage in treating the fictions as if Ptolemaic and absolutist truths.<\/p>\n Baudrillard continues: \u2018This side of the vanishing-point \u2013 where there was still history, there was still music \u2013 remains irreparable. Where should one stop the perfecting of the stereo? Its bounds or limits are constantly pushed back or forced to retreat in the face of technological obsessions. Where should information stop? Confronted with such a fascination with \u2018real time’, with high-fidelity, one can only resort to moral objections, and that does not carry much meaning\/weight.<\/p>\n Once one has passed beyond this point, the process becomes irreversible. The possibility to move out of history in order to enter into simulation is but the consequence of the fact that, basically, history itself was none other than an immense model of simulation.’ He concludes that the year 2000 may well not take place.<\/p>\n Does the pataphysicist require paraphrase? Was Artaud making this move when after Jarry’s death he created his theatre of cruelty and visions of madness to put creation back into the world? Baudrillard thinks he was. He thinks this a mistake, echoing Duchamp’s \u2018there is no solution because there is no problem’ with a clumsy \u2018pataphysics is ex-sangue<\/em> and doesn’t get itself wet\u2026 such is the unique imaginary solution to the absence of problems.’ But perhaps Baudrillard is mistaken in this. Artaud may well be drilling into the absurd humour of the crazyist who declares \u2018I’m happy with the average women: now let me know her telephone number.’ Baudrillard resists the absurd by claiming that the fictionalist’s appeal to pretence can be overcome by denying the reality of anything other than fictions \u2018after passing the vanishing point.’ But Artaud, in order to protect the fiction, resists the idea that we can have access to the fictionalist attitude. His madness introduces a novel and drastic form of failure of first-person authority over one’s own mental states. From this perspective, the insane hallucinatory and bodily contortionist mental theatre of Artaud organises a greater pataphysical humor than Baudrillard. Seth Giddings and Damien P O’Doherty develop the dry approach of Baudrillard applying notions of the stuplime derived from Sianne Ngai’s analysis of postmodern conditions of boredom<\/a>, anxiety, stupefaction, envy and \u2018ugly feelings’ generally.<\/p>\n But perhaps the attempt to pinpoint a preference between these approaches is to approach the matter with the wrong attitude. A fictionalist may suggest preferences but ought to do so only to the same degree that she acknowledges her preference for the pataphysical fictionalist move itself. Anything stronger would either be a joke or a renunciation of the pataphysical. And of course, between the two, there are no signs to let us know which attitude is actually in play. This is a similar criticism to those who in metaphysical ontologies claim some variety of fictionalism but then insist on a preference between hypotheses rather than adopting a principled agnosticism.<\/p>\n But in 1975, on the day between the 19th and 20th April, the college of Pataphysics disappeared. This moment was labeled the start of the \u2018occultation.’ The deaths of Max Ernst, Man Ray, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Prevert, Pascal Pia, Rene Clair and Joan Miro were supposed to be a contribution to this, although they all died after 1975. The occultation lasted until 2000. Offshoots appeared. Artworks by Arman, Baj, Dubuffet, Duchamp, Ernst, Farfa, Fontana, Jorn, Miro, Picabia, Prevert, Man Ray and Spoerri appeared in the Galeria Schwarz in Milan in 1964. Other Institutes since proliferated. Stockholm, Oleyres, Liege, London, Berlin, Valencia, Santiago, Sao Paulo, River Plate, Lapland, Mongolia, Shanghai and elsewhere had \u2018pataphysic organisations.<\/p>\n Hugill sees pataphysics’s influence in the films of Tim Burton, citing a study by Alison McMahan. Hugill sees an influence on Donnie Darko<\/em> of 2001, thinking that the film makes \u2018a convincing case for how fundamentally useless ideas can be and have been applied in moviemaking.’ He sees the movement influential in literature. Hugill claims science fiction has pataphysical roots. Brian Aldiss’<\/a> classic ‘The Man With his Mule’ and his \u2018National Heritage’ are cited as important examples. Angela Carter’s<\/a> The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman<\/a><\/em> includes a quotation from Faustroll<\/em>. Flaubert’s Parrot<\/a><\/em> by Julian Barnes<\/a> hints at pataphysical aspects.<\/p>\n John Cage is a pataphysical music composer. He knew Duchamp and was a member of the Fluxus group. Cage didn’t like Jarry but acknowledged his influence: \u2018I myself think that Duchamp and Joyce having used Jarry is far more interesting than anything Jarry himself did.’ Gavin Bryars’ \u2018Sinking of the Titanic’ is explicit in its pataphysical commitment. But \u2018Jesus Love Never failed Me’ is his masterpiece: a Duchampean ready-made tape recording of a tramp singing a single phrase and then looped to build a hypnotic beauty that leaves one astonished and emptied. Its genesis is of interest. Bryars was playing the tape of the tramp and left the office to make a coffee. On returning everyone in the busy room was silent, transfixed by this found object. Sadly the tramp died before hearing the piece. Tom Waits involvement presses the claim that his gorgeous melodies are pataphysical constructions of subtle detournement. John White continues in this vein.<\/p>\n In jazz the Rv. Dr. Fred Lane alias Tim Reed put out the album \u2018Raudelunas \u2018Pataphysical Review’ in 2002. Boris Vian’s engagement with The Hot Club in Paris and his contact with Hoagie Carmichael, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis indicates a Black Atlantic pataphysical strand going deep and wide. Avant-garage band Pere Ubu was formed in 1975. The band Nurse with Wound put out Present the Sisters of Pataphysics<\/em> in 1988. Rusty Magee put out the musical Ubu Rock<\/em> in 1995. Frank Zappa, The Residents and Captain Beefheart were all part of the pataphysical hippie movement from the 1960s onwards, seeing Jarry as a precursor of Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. Ted Nelson, of \u2018hypertext’ coinage, Howard Rheingold and Mark Amerika<\/a> alongside Peter Schickele and Tex Avery all are indebted. Harry Nielson’s ‘Pandemonium Shadow Show’ and ‘Aerial Ballet’ are best listened to as pataphysics. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band was named after Bonzo the Dog, a cartoon character created by George Studdy in the 1920s that was rooted in Dada and the pataphysical. The band was very successful initially as a band that sold beer in its pub gigs. \u2018The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse’ is their pataphysical classic. Billy Childish’s<\/a> Buff Medways<\/a> constructs a sound garden that pays homage to Zappa and Beefheart: \u2018Vanessa Does Favours<\/a>‘ and \u2018Archive from 1959<\/a>‘ are examples of this pataphysical rawness. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion turns in a grinding pataphysical blues rock and things like ‘Flavor Part 2′ and \u2018Dub narcotic’ are sure to bomb the Pataphysical vibe into your well-being. Ditto the more nimble<\/a> and hilarious<\/a> Zodiak Mindwarp<\/a>.<\/p>\n In art Martin Creed and Simon Starling have pataphysical presences haunting them. Thomas Chimes is a key figure for this connection. He read the Evergreen Review<\/em> and Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years<\/a><\/em> where the pataphysical was introduced to the West Coast freaks. Apollinaire, Jarry, Rousseau. Joan Miro, Max Ernst and, of course, Duchamp were influenced by Jarry and pataphysical humour pervades their works, none least than the famous \u2018Fountain’ urinal of Duchamp. Much of the influence of pataphysics has been unobtrusive according to Hugill. More obvious has been the cult of Jarry and the development of an occult route to the public.<\/p>\n The 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail<\/a><\/em>, a source for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code<\/em> of 2003, claimed that a guy called Pierre Plantard was in a direct line of descent from Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The joke still fools many. Oulipean writers abound, famously Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. Hugill sketches all this and ends noting the pataphysical influence on the reversed tape voice of the dwarf in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n The pataphysicist insists that nothing is serious, including pataphysics. The riddling nature of this injunction reminds us that the goad and guide of paradox requires agnosticism that can take more than one form. Harold Bloom thought that the study of poetics was indebted to this stance: \u2018the study of poetic influence is necessarily a branch of \u2018Pataphysics, and gladly confesses its indebtedness to it.’ Poets Kenneth Koch and John Ashbury were deeply influenced. Ashbury’s surreal and self-defeating poetic images can be traced to the influence of Raymond Roussel. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep<\/em> has a pataphysical figure in Mercer, the messianic figure of the religion of Mercerism, a sham. Mercer turns out to be a B-movie actor paid to play the role, called Al Jarry from Indiana. Stanislav Lem’s Solaris<\/a> imagines a pataphysical ocean providing solutions without problems. Steve Aylett<\/a> does the same throughout a maniacally brilliant sequence of novelistic<\/a> meconium.<\/p>\n J.G. Ballard’s<\/a> science fiction is pataphysical throughout: he declares this explicitly in his 1967 \u2018The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as a Downhill Motor Race’, reconstructing Jarry’s 1903 religious blasphemous text \u2018The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’ as a secular blasphemy. Stewart Home shows Claude Pelieu, an associate of Burroughs, was doing pataphysical stuff in the novel Kali Yug Express<\/a><\/em>. Stewart Home’s<\/a> whole prankster stand is pataphysicalism updated. He plays with the occult versions in some outings, gets rough with it in others. His novels<\/a> are formulations that go further than any of our contemporaries and it’s probably because he is a successful pataphysicalist that he doesn’t get the airtime<\/a> his work deserves. The criticism of the way countercultures get to be recalled and recounted is that the offensiveness of the originals is largely skipped and ignored. There is a sense that even Hugill’s book tames its creatures through a kind of deviant intellectualisation. Home’s deviations<\/a> are more fluid-directed<\/a>.<\/p>\n Prog Rock picked up the same vibe: Soft Machine’s Volume Two<\/em> album contains \u2018Pataphysical Introduction Parts 1 and 2.’ Hawkwind, with Michael Moorcock and Robert Calvert were in on pataphysics. Paul McCartney showed an interest, and \u2018Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ shows the influence, modeled on \u2018Chanson du decervelage’ (the debraining song). Hugill claims that Sergeant Pepper<\/em> was a pataphysical solution to fame.<\/p>\n As an aside, I recall Scott Esposito<\/a> also noting the enormous importance of Perec in bringing an optimism to the 60s via a ‘pataphysical joke inversion of negation. He writes,<\/p>\n \u2018One important thing Perec helped commodify was negation. Negation was a huge thing in the 1960s, when Perec began to write. It informed and empowered the groups then fighting against capitalistic culture. \u2026 \u2026 Reading Perec, one senses an artist self-consciously working on a grand scale to generalise this quality of negation to as many forms as possible \u2014 an effort to exhaust negation. Such ambitions are of a piece with the Oulipo manifestos, despite the fact that the manifestos are written with a clear sense of optimism. \u2026 Perec’s optimism in the face of negation is due in large part to how he fought to make negation itself an engine for innovation.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Situationists, the second magistrality of Jean Mollet, Art Brut, and Gilles Deleuze<\/a> are efficiently dealt with by Hugill. Deleuze saw Jarry as an unrecognised precursor to Heidegger, saying that Jarry’s bicycle was the equivalent to Heidegger’s \u2018fourfold.’ Hugill is especially useful in reproducing huge chunks of the writings of seminal players in the movement. Sadomir’s pataphysical cry \u2018the world is a gigantic aberrance’ helps introduce us to the Dadaist, Surrealist Pataphysicism of Julien Torma who sees pataphysics as what is left after underpinnings have been assaulted. Tinctures of the Spiritual, Absolute and Religious epistemic hoaxing is apparent in much of this. Artaud<\/a> becomes a crucial figure, injecting a much-needed visceral violence to what at times can seem mystical eye-wash. Stephen Barber’s<\/a> essential writings on Artaud<\/a> are an obvious port of call after Hugill’s introduction here. Barber’s work on the Dirty Avant-Garde<\/a> and the Japanese Butoh<\/a> work of Tatsumi Hijikata<\/a> is equally crucial as counterpoint when we read of the instantaneist ballet Relache created by Francis Picabia, choreographed by Jean Borlin with music by Erik Satie.<\/p>\n Hugill notes how the French find depths in American and English mainstreams of comedy and drama missed in their original setting. Iain Sinclair<\/a> noted recently how The Midsummer Murders<\/em> TV show, considered decidedly middlebrow in the UK and USA is received as an existential tract in France. The Marx Brothers, Woody Allen and Jerry Lewis receive the same transition. Hugill embraces this. Beckett’s choice of Buster Keaton for the role in Film<\/em> may be explained in these terms, although accounts of the filming suggests Keaton himself resisted the pataphysical depths being attributed to his performances.<\/p>\n Hugill is particularly good at summation of pataphysical lives. His section on Arthur Cravan<\/a>, a pataphysical saint who disappeared mysteriously in 1918 on his way to Argentina is compelling. Roger Conover wrote of him: \u2018Dancing, fucking, boxing, walking, running, eating, swimming. He loved the taste and smell of the body’s first issues \u2013 urine, shit, sweat \u2013 and regarded these fundamental utterances as proto-texts. \u201cJe mangerais ma merde”, he proudly proclaimed. His poems and essays were secondary spirations \u2013 but in their gestural sweep and postural fix they can also be read as bodily manifestations, lines delivered or speech executed like ring exercises, by-products of a body always in motion \u2013 crossing borders, slicing sensibilities, murdering reputations, knocking heads.’ Cravan is seeking a dirty astonishment.<\/p>\n This connects him to the metaphysicians of Tlon in Borges’ short story. In this Borges is writing about pataphysicians who, in Hugill’s pregnant phrase, \u2018enjoyed playing with their erudition.’ Borges wrote of a pataphysical machine in 1937. \u2018If [the machine] does not work, but that, to my mind, is a secondary matter. Nor do the machines that attempt to produce perpetual motion, whose plans add mystery to the pages of the most effusive encyclopedia; metaphysical or theological theories do not work \u2026 but their well known and famous uselessness does not reduce their interest.’ Zeno’s paradox of movement, Thompson’s lamp and other supertasks may be familiar and linked to supposed impossibility, but since Cantor the twentieth century has seen several supposed impossibilities defeated. This suggests the pataphysicians are not error free, even if nothing matters.<\/p>\n Jean-Michel Rabate<\/a> links James Joyce with Jarry and enjoyed the jouissance of Jarry’s name. Ulysses<\/em> becomes a pataphysical novel. Flann O’Brien’s de Selby character is a pataphysical Faustrollian. Everything in Beckett<\/a>, as noted earlier, is a pataphysical twilight out of Duchampian chess. Roussel’s Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique<\/em> was illustrated by Henri-Achille Zo who was give a description of what to draw and not the actual pieces to be illustrated. As Hugill comments, \u2018the drawings were inserted under the uncut pages of the eventual publication, and were therefore visible only if the reader was prepared to make the necessary cutting. The dissociation between illustrator and subject, and indeed between poet and artist, which Zo found extremely uncomfortable, results in images that are powerful in their banality and mysteriousness. It is an illustration of the depth of Roussel’s pataphysical understanding that he deployed a method so unique yet so simple, to an end that was so original yet lacking any trace of aesthetic novelty.’ Jean-Pierre Brisset was influenced by frogs in the marshes of La Sauvagere. Foucault placed him at \u2018an extreme point of linguistic delirium.’ Beckett’s Watt<\/a><\/em> uses the frog call in the \u2018Krek, Krek, Krek’ passage. Hugill gives Jarry a whole chapter at the end of the book.<\/p>\n Hugill has written an essential, sharp book on this vital subject. He has a brisk style that gives the book pace and punch. It is authoritative and full of wonders. He gives the geography of the movement and maps out the exhilaration of uselessness. There are many aspects of the movement that now seem outdated, offensive or tame. Philosophically, its fictionalist stance is less daringly iconoclastic now than it once was but this is because many of its discoveries have been incorporated into our contemporary culture. The epistemic paradoxes of counterprivate sentences such as, ‘I read Hughill’s book on Friday but I don’t think I did’, and other Sorensenian Blindspots will revitalise the territory. The gigantic guffaw of ‘pataphysics can still be impressive, especially when experienced through the prism of its many outstanding practitioners. There is an important corrosiveness in this uselessness. A bureaucratic mentality is scandalised by any denial of graspable and orderable purpose. Refusing to present opposition and resistance to such a mentality in terms and forms that coopt the bureaucratic, ‘pataphysics embodies its resistance in a lunatic beauty. The deadly seriousness of resistance too often fades out into merely an alternative bureaucracy. The imperative to ask ‘But what are their policies? What do they want?’ dogged the Occupy Movement<\/a>, the Arab Spring, even the Pussy Rioters. There were suggestions that articulate experts should go to the Occupy movement to formulate crisp agendas and policy briefs. The sub-text<\/a> of all this was that what the people were doing was useless. But in the initial moments the gorgeousness of these movements was precisely their uselessness. These spontaneous big giggles of uselessness were alien, confusing and frightening to minds addicted to means\/ends go-getting calculation. Being so, ‘pataphysics draws attention to the distinction between uselessness and futility. Though useless, a pataphysical excercise is not futilitarian. For this reason we can understand Beckett in terms of useless optimism rather than futiltarian pessimism, imagine. These movements will die out and stop being ‘pataphysical once they start thinking about wanting<\/a> something. Pataphysics refuses to fight fire with fire. It is Stewart Home<\/a> novelising ‘this is not a sentence’ and Sam Beckett describing a game of chess as a ‘Bachelor Stripped Bare’<\/a> erotic hinge, even.<\/p>\n As a coda, the errors of the pataphysicians strike me as important if it is to accumulate further cultural ground. For instance, they are confused about non-material concrete objects and nothingness. Take silence as an example of this. The legendary Maurice Blanchot<\/a> claims that silence cannot exist saying, \u2018Silence is impossible. That is why we desire it.’ Bataille<\/a> calls silence \u2018among all words it is the most perverse, or the most poetic: it is the token of its own death.’ According to Cage, his four minutes and thirty-three seconds prove Blanchot and Bataille right. He accused the original audience of making a mistake in thinking that the coughing and the sounds extraneous to the piece were not to count as part of the performance. \u2018There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and in the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.’<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/alfredjarry.jpg\" "\\"alfredjarry\\"")
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