'Pataphysics
[4] 'Pataphysics was a concept expressed by Jarry in a mock-scientific manner, with undertones of spoofing and quackery, as expounded in his novel Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician.
[5][6] Another attempt at a definition interprets 'pataphysics as an idea that "the virtual or imaginary nature of things as glimpsed by the heightened vision of poetry or science or love can be seized and lived as real".
[2] Jarry defines 'pataphysics in a number of statements and examples, including that it is "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments".
[6] 'Pataphysics is patient; 'Pataphysics is benign; 'Pataphysics envies nothing, is never distracted, never puffed up, it has neither aspirations nor seeks not its own, it is even-tempered, and thinks not evil; it mocks not iniquity: It is enraptured with scientific truth; it supports everything, believes everything, has faith in everything, and upholds everything that is.
Since the apostrophe in no way affects the meaning or pronunciation of pataphysics, this spelling of the term is a sly notation, to the reader, suggesting a variety of puns that listeners may hear, or be aware of.
The term first appeared in print in the text of Alfred Jarry's play Guignol in the 28 April 1893 issue of L'Écho de Paris littéraire illustré, but it has been suggested that the word has its origins in the same school pranks at the lycée in Rennes that led Jarry to write Ubu Roi.
[15] The Collège de 'Pataphysique, founded in 1948 in Paris, France,[16] is "a society committed to learned and inutilious research".
The permanent head of the college is the Inamovable Curator, Dr. Faustroll, assisted by Bosse-de-Nage (Starosta): both are fictional.
Publications of the college, generally called Latin: Viridis Candela ("green candle"),[28] include the Cahiers, Dossiers, the Subsidia Pataphysica and since september 2021, the Spéculations.
[29][30][31] Notable members have included Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Eugène Ionesco,[32] Noël Arnaud, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Christophe Averty, René Daumal, Luc Étienne, François Le Lionnais, Jean Lescure, Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian, Jacques Carelman, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Julien Torma, Roger Shattuck, Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx, Philippe de Chérisey, Rolando Villazón, Fernando Arrabal and Gavin Bryars.
In 1966 Juan Esteban Fassio was commissioned to draw the map of the Collège de 'Pataphysique and its institutes abroad.
[36][37] However through that time, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, The Netherlands, and many other countries showed that the internationalization of 'pataphysics was irreversible.
During the communist era, a small group of 'pataphysicists in Czechoslovakia started a journal called PAKO, or Pataphysical Collegium.
The museum is presented as a hybrid between an automaton theatre and a cabinet of curiosities and contains works representing the field of Patamechanics, an artistic practice and area of study chiefly inspired by 'pataphysics.
Examples of exhibits include a troupe of singing animatronic chipmunks, a time machine the museum says is the world's largest automated phenakistoscope, an olfactory clock, a chandelier of singing animatronic nightingales, an Undigestulator (a device that purportedly reconstitutes digested foods), a peanuts enlarger, a syzygistic oracle, the earolin (a 24-inch tall holographic ear that plays the violin), and a machine for capturing the dreams of bumble bees.
[60] In 1948 Raymond Queneau, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco founded Collège de pataphysique and published OULIPO,[a] which influenced the following writers: The pataphor (Spanish: patáfora, French: pataphore), is a term coined by writer and musician Pablo Lopez, for an unusually extended metaphor based on Alfred Jarry's "science" of 'pataphysics'.
[84] The pataphor has been subject to commercial interpretations,[85] usage in speculative computer applications,[86] applied to highly imaginative problem solving methods[87] and even politics on the international level.
Pataphors unsettle this mechanism; they use the facade of metaphorical similarity as a basis for establishing an entirely new range of references and outlandish articulations: a new world in the midst of the old, the novel taking to the streets.
Just as Kafka sought to forge a new form of life on the basis of absolute separation from historical progress, on cultural 'intransmissibility', and just as Blanchot pursued the 'pure novel' that exists in a relationship of absolute refusal of the established world, so the pataphysician seeks to initiate a new world on the grounds of a tenuous unreality.
