I learned about this after stumbling across the "Museum of Jurassic Technology" in Los Angeles, several years ago.
It was pretty clear from the outset that it wasn't a "real" museum, and one should not take the labels at face value, but as I worked through the collection, the random inconsistencies started to gel into a coherent sort of museum parody.
Searching around afterwards led me to the pataphysics movement.
Googling the museum again, I see it's now "by advance registration only", so I guess it's harder to stumble across, but I liked it.
I’ve never heard of this movement before but it makes a lot of sense in the context of the time. This is about the time that David Hilbert would push the world of mathematics to tie up its last loose ends. Physics was seeming “almost done” as well, since we hadn’t foreseen quantum mechanics. Modern architecture was well underway, creating perfectly reproducible, characterless buildings that would perfectly fit anywhere.
I can only imagine how self-important and insufferable academics must have been at the time, with the feeling in the air that all problems were just about to be solved and modernity had officially arrived.
The next generation would produce figures like Wittgenstein, Gödel, Turing, Einstein—all of whom in their own way contributed to “officially” putting academia in its place. Pataphysics seems to me like an informal attack to the same effect, an artistic intuition that there must be things uncomputable, undecidable, uncertain, and otherwise ineffable.
I also love the fact that Baudrillard was a “patapysician.” It fits nicely with his philosophical works, where he focuses on how the metaphors we create become our reality, and then we dump more metaphors on top of these in an endless cycle of “hyper realization”
That’s a really interesting perspective, I think it makes a lot of sense.
I was thinking about this alongside the emergence of magical realism in literature, but it looks like that took off a touch late (1920s per Wikipedia). It’s possible that earlier influences (e.g. Gogol) might have had a hand in both, but I find the reaction to scientific essentialism more compelling with respect to Pataphysics.
I find it weird that there's no mention of Terry Pratchett (RIP Pterry, nearly 10 years already :/) and his "narrative causality".
I mean, making an aerchery shot at a dragon more difficult by doing absurd thing because stuff that has a one-in-a-million probability always happens seems straight 'petaphysics for me.
His writing is full of petaphores also: "Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It's unreliable levers that are the problem.", " "The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.", "Death grinned because, as has so often been remarked, he didn’t have much option. ".
Seeing the title, I first thought that the leading apostrophe is an application of lisp's `quote` functionality, and after reading the article and particularly about pataphor concept, I'm still thinking that's the case.
I knew the word, but I hadn't realized that it was officially «'pataphysics» and not just «pataphysics». I don't know whether paying attention to this is, or is not, in the spirit of the whole enterprise.
It was pretty clear from the outset that it wasn't a "real" museum, and one should not take the labels at face value, but as I worked through the collection, the random inconsistencies started to gel into a coherent sort of museum parody.
Searching around afterwards led me to the pataphysics movement.
Googling the museum again, I see it's now "by advance registration only", so I guess it's harder to stumble across, but I liked it.
https://mjt.org/