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In writing my book, it became apparent that, however informative it may be, it is useless on a number of levels. Firstly, it is useless to try to explain ‘pataphysics. To understand pataphysics is to misunderstand pataphysics. Second, a chronology of pataphysics, however pataphysically delivered, is at best a description only of some of the evidence, the lineaments of pataphysics in the world. Third, the overwhelmingly subjective nature of pataphysics, with its contradictions and exceptions, does not allow for what was conceived as a “user’s guide”. Furthermore, I state, very early on, that pataphysics is profoundly useless.

The subtitle has apparently made people laugh out loud. Yet it is the only possible subtitle, in my opinion.

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We should pause for a moment to consider �pataphysics itself. This is a talk about the publications of the College, and not a general introduction to pataphyiscs, which is just as well, because that would take more than one lecture! However, for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the concept, I should just give a brief summary.

The word was invented by schoolboys (including Alfred Jarry) at the Lycée de Rennes in the 1880s, as a way of taking the mickey out of their science teacher, an unfortunate man named Hébert. He became the butt of many jokes, including a collection of puppet plays in which he was transformed into the mostrous Ébé, who undergoes a series of Rabelaisian adventures and is baptised with �essence of pataphysics�. These skits became the basis of Jarry�s celebrated play Ubu Roi, first staged in 1896, which caused an enormous scandal and pretty much launched modern theatre. It�s opening word, merdre, which is shit with an extra �r�, was delivered by Ubu, a puppet-like figure, holding a loo-brush, with a spiral painted on his belly, who turns out to be a Professor of Pataphysics. He swears by his green candle, which in Latin is �Viridis Candela�, hence the general title of the College publications.

Jarry (pictured), who lived from 1873-1907, dying young partly from the effects of a lifestyle that involved poor nutrition and vast quantities of alcohol, developed the idea of pataphysics much further than just Ubu. In a series of novels and other speculative writings he elaborated what he was eventually to define as �the science of imaginary solutions�. These included instructions on how to build a time machine, a set of telepathic letters to Lord Kelvin challenging his materialistic view of the universe, and a mathematical definition of God that sets Him as a point on a line tangential between zero and infinity. Pataphysics, said Jarry, was the science of the laws governing exceptions and contradictions. Pataphysics is to metaphysics as metaphysics is to physics. You can tell from this that pataphysics persistently eludes definition, and is purposefully useless.

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The pataphysical symbol is the spiral, which is in fact two spirals: that which is drawn and that which is described by what is drawn. A common trope in pataphysics is the simultaneous existence of mutually exclusive opposites. The name Faustroll itself combines the supreme magus Faust with a dangerous creature from Norse mythology.

Another key idea is dervied from Epicurus – the clinamen – or accidental swerve of atoms that creates matter.

A third is the syzygy, the unexpected alignment. For Jarry, a pun was a syzygy of words.

The apostrophe before the word was only ever used once by Jarry, �to avoid an obvious pun�, he said, although it remains rather unclear exactly what that pun might be. Today it is used only with the noun, and to distinguish voluntary, or conscious, pataphysics from involuntary, or unconscious, pataphysics, as practised by everybody (for we are all pataphysicians).

The Collège de �Pataphysique came into existence to document and explore pataphysics, not just in Jarry�s work but in all its manifestations, including those �patacessors� who developed the science unawares.

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Each of the noted pataphysicians after Jarry understood these fundamental ideas. �Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions. There are solutions, but they are imaginary. So, for the Dadaists, such as Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vaché, inspired respectively by the intellectual scene in Paris and the First World War, pataphysics became an imaginary solution to the problems of the uselessness of life and death.

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Duchamp�s work, and life, is an exploration of the pataphysical theme of uselessness. Having established the uselessness of painting early on, he proceeded to remove art itself, preferring chess. His works, of which Fountain is one of the most celebrated, replace functionalism with an attempted un-aesthetic. It�s not that they are about anything in particular. They are something. It�s just that that thing has no apparent function, apart from the fact of its existence and the consequences of that fact for other things in the world. By being present (or even, in some cases, absent) they stand in contradistinction to the utilitarian world, yet without seeking to overthrow it. They are contradictions and exceptions. These are the by-products, the evidence, of Duchamp�s pataphysics.

The Marx Brothers, on the other hand, made themselves, as a three-in-one entity, an unholy trinity, inutilious. Let�s pause to watch their classic take on an old clown�s routine in �Duck Soup�. The visual gags here will say more than I can about their pataphysics.

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The Collège de ’Pataphysique was founded in a postwar Paris that was understandably grim and desperately seeking to rediscover its artistic, literary, and philosophical soul. This fervor resulted in a proliferation of variously earnest groupings. There were many right-wing groups, including Gaullist factions, ranging from anti-Communists such as the �Rally of the French People� (led by de Gaulle himself) through to �left-wing� Gaullists such as André Malraux. The former surrealists had split, with Louis Aragon, now political head of the National Committee of Writers, leaning ever more toward Stalin, and André Breton, still rather loyal to Trotsky, leading a surrealist group in condemning the French Communist Party�s support for colonialism. Sartre and his colleagues meanwhile pioneered the role of public intellectual, espousing a kind of radical individualism that tended to pull people away from the French Communist Party. Many of these groups based themselves in rival cafés on the Left Bank: Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and the Dôme in Montparnasse, for example. For the curious visitor, it was possible to make a tour of intellectual Paris by visiting the cafés.

Adrienne Monnier had opened her celebrated bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres in the rue de l’Odéon in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1915. When Sylvia Beach decided to open her own bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, in 1919, Monnier provided advice and support, and the two stores rapidly became important meeting places for the literary avant-garde, attracting French, British, and American writers. Unlike Shakespeare and Company, La Maison des Amis des Livres managed to remain open during the German occupation and continued for a further decade after the end of World War II. The idea of a Collège de ’Pataphysique was first discussed there, on May 11, 1948, by Oktav Votka and Maurice Saillet, witnessed by Mélanie Le Plumet and Jean-Hugues Sainmont.

The Collège de �Pataphysique was formally founded in the winter of 1948, and right from the

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start set out its organizational structures. The head of the Collège, its �Inamovable Curator,�was to be a fictional character: Dr. Faustroll, from Alfred Jarry�s novel The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, pataphysician, published posthumnously in 1911. Faustroll is assisted by his �Starosta� Bosse-de-Nage, the dog-faced baboon who accompanies him on his travels from Paris to Paris by sea, and who only ever says �ha ha.� The first and most senior apparently living entity in the hierarchy is therefore the Vice-Curator, who, at the foundation of the College, was His Magnificence Irénée Louis Sandomir (1864‒1957). The present-day Vice-Curator is a crocodile, Lutembi.

Another version of the same story concerns a Professor of Letters and Philosophy, who taught at the Lycée in Reims (Baudrillard, among others, was a pupil) and then at the Lycées Michelet in Vanves and Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He was a man of many identities, including P. Lié, Lathis, Jean-Hugues Sainmont, Dr. Sandomir, Mélanie Le Plumet (who turns out to have been a cat), Oktav Votka, and certain other luminaries of the Collège de �Pataphysique.

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This is the complete listing of the trimestrial reviews.

The first three series, the Cahiers, Dossiers and Subsidia, map onto the Magistrailities of the first three Vice-Curators of the Collège: Sandomir, Baron Mollet, and Opach, and tend to reflect the visions of those individuals. The Cahiers set out the character, mission and organisational structures of the Collège. The Dossiers focus on administering the science to the world. The Subsidia show a gradual withdrawal from public manifestations. A subsidium is defined as a help, support or relief.

This withdrawal culminated in the Occultation of 1975, from which point the reviews, and indeed the visible activities of the Collège itself, were run by a caretaker organisation, the Cymbalum Pataphysicum. Issue 41 of the subsequent Monitoires began a retrograde new series – L�Expectateur – which counted down from 16-1 in anticipation of the disoccultation in 2000.

The Carnets Trimestriels reinstated the 28 issue formula, and the Correspondanciers are going strong at 18 issues and counting…

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The pataphysical conception of Time does not necessarily recognize a conventional succession of events. As Jarry clarified:The Explorer in his [Time] Machine beholds Time as a curve, or better as a closed curved surface analogous to Aristotle’s Ether. For much these same reasons in another text (Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Book VIII) we make the use of the term Ethernity. (Jarry 1965, 121)Pataphysical time is made up of a collection of unique moments that extend, in much the same way as Space extends, in three dimensions. Thus, said Jarry, �if we could remain immobile in absolute Space while Time elapses, […] all future and past instances could be explored successively� (ibid., 115).The Collège de �Pataphysique, inspired by Jarry himself, created in 1949 a Perpetual �Pataphysical Calendar which dates the Ère �Pataphysique (�Pataphysical Era) from the birth of Jarry, rather than the birth of Christ, so �E.P.� replaces �A.D.� The appendage (vulg.) clarifies when the vulgate is being used. The Pataphysical Era therefore commenced on September 8, 1873 vulg., which is the 1st of the month of Absolu, Year I E.P. The pataphysical year is divided into thirteen months, twelve of 28 days and one, Gidouille, of 29, as follows (the full significance of these names will emerge later in this book):• Absolu (Absolute)• Ha-ha (Ha-ha)• As (Skiff)• Sable (Sand (sandglass), heraldic black, time)• Décervelage (Debraining)• Gueules (Heraldic red, gob)• Pédale (Bicycle pedal, also slang for homosexual)• Clinamen (Swerve)• Palotin (Ubu’s henchmen)• Merdre (Pshit)• Gidouille (Spiral)• Tatane (Slang for shoe, or being worn out)• Phalle (Phallus)

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Each month contains an imaginary day, or hunyadi (named after a Hungarian laxative water), which may be freely inserted anywhere, and the 13th day of each month falls on a Friday. Every day of the calendar is associated with the feast of a particular pataphysical saint, in the manner of the Catholic Church. The preface to the fourth edition of the calendar notes: �For those who might still consider the futility of the vulgar Calendar to be of some import to themselves, a Concordance has been drawn up giving quick reference to every possible Calendar: Roman, Aztec, Revolutionary, Positivist, Chinese, Ponukelean, etc. … etc. …�A typical pataphysical date might look like this: 22 Palotin 75 (May 11, 1948 vulg.). During the occultation of the Collège de �Pataphysique the calendar itself was hidden from public view, so the dates adopted the following format: . . . .. . . .. . . .. . . (May 11, 1948 vulg.). Today, the use of the standard pataphysical dating system has been revived. To calculate the current pataphysical year, the following conversion table is helpful:• Year 99 E.P. = 8.9.1971• Year 100 = 8.9.1972• Year 101 = 8.9.1973• Year 102 = 8.9.1974• Year 103 = 8.9.1975• Year 123 = 8.9.1995• Year 128 = 8.9.2000.

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The second Vice-Curator was the self-styled �Baron�Mollet (pictured here with Luc Étienne, François Caradec, Boris Vian, le Baron Mollet, Jean Ferry), who was neither a Baron nor, as he repeatedly claimed, a private secretary to Guillaume Apollinaire.

However, let it be quickly stated, Mollet did have many qualities which made him admirably suited to become the Vice-Curator of the Collège de �Pataphysique. He had known Alfred Jarry personally, which none of the other members of the Collège at the time could claim. He had also been close friends with Apollinaire and many other artists in his circle, so had real insights into the fin-de-siècle culture of Montparnasse in particular. It also suited the Collège very well that he was by nature a bon vivant dedicated to the café culture, since the various pataphysical doctrines were by now well established, and the time was ripe for fruitfulness and expansiveness. Most photographs of Mollet show him in restaurants surrounded by the leading �pataphysicans of the period (Ernst, Queneau, Vian, Prévert, Leiris, Ferry, Clair, Ionesco, etc.), and as many bottles of wine. It was somewhat in this spirit, therefore, that Mollet�s Magistrality began with a �Message to the World, Civilized or Not�:

Let the Collège of ’Pataphysics continue. Its world task is hardly begun. Faithful to its already decennial tradition, with Members as far as the antipodes and under every latitude, let it accomplish its learning labors for the delectation of all. In expressing our gratitude to all those who have participated in the election of a Vice-Curator in the way they have, it is through Them that we give thanks for Universal and Total ’Pataphysics. (Mollet 1995 [1959], 91)

Under Mollet, the science was to become predominantly a question of administration. A first step was to reform the Rogation (administrative organization). The Pro-Administration which had existed up to this point was transformed into an Organon Exécutif (Executive Organon) with responsibility for �autonomous administration and operational initiative.� The Aristotelian echoes of the word �Organon�were in due course to provoke a Baconian reaction1 with the creation of a Novum Organum following the disoccultation in 2000 AD.

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I have been working on these problems with this man, Jim Hendler, who unfortunately cannot be here today.

Jim is the author, with Tim-Berners Lee, of the original paper which envisaged a ‘semantic web’. This refers to a way of harnessing the artificial intelligence of all the machines connected to the network in order to create a web that understands us. It can distinguish between the meanings of words that are spelt the same, or identify our hidden motives in searching for whatever we may seek.

As the lead scientist of this development, Jim is very concerned that what he calls “the forces of neatness” are taking over the development of the semantic web. Thereis a crying need for pataphysics in this world, which he has recognised, hence his discussions with myself.

Together, Jim and I came up with the idea of introducing pataphysics into the semantic web, and I want today to show you something of our work, which is still very much in progress. Working on the project with us is a team of software engineers at De Montfort University and Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute led by Professor Hongji Yang, and two PhD students, Fania Raczinski and Lee Scott. We have called the project the ‘Syzygy Surfer’.

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However, ‘pataphysics is also a literary and poetical phenomenon. It is not simply about negation. Rather it is amatter of what Jarry called “the syzygy of words”. A syzygy is an alignment, usually of three astral bodies, such as in an eclipse. A syzygy of words is best summed up in the pun, although it goes rather further than that. To this may be added the clinamen, derived from Epicurus, the unexplained swerve that takes us away from where we expect to be. The apostrophe in front of the word ‘pataphysics is an example of this. Also, antinomy, the mutual existence of opposites. And anomaly, the thing that does not fit. I could go on.

I want to focus on this example from Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’. It is well known, having been used by Michel Foucault as a premise for his Order of Things. However, Foucault’s account is so unpataphysical that I think there is more that may be gleaned. [READ IT]

As we can see, as an encyclopedia this is certainly useless. On the other hand, it does have a certain value, a pleasure or jouissance, and plenty of pataphysical resonances.

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We are building some software we are calling the ‘Syzygy Surfer’. The idea is to use the capabilities of the semantic web to deliver results that are the very opposite of Google, with its increasing sense of ‘steer’ towards a goal it thinks we want. This will be a non-search engine that delivers pataphysical results using operations such as syzygy, clinamen and antinomy.

This of course presents enormous technical challenges that strike at the heart of the underlying problem of reconciling subjective ambiguities with objective precisions. Our work may only ever be a partial success in this direction.

One thing is clear, however, the results must not be merely random. They must have the same sense of poetic unity that characterises the Borges. We need something that can permute knowledge about the regularities in the world, but in a not-totally-random fashion -we must exploit connections among concepts in a new way so as to generate relations that seem interesting, but unusual.

Here we expand Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia looking at some examples of the evocative relations that the categories depend on. Stating that these relationships exist is non-problematic, but defining the features of them unambiguously would be arbitrarily hard. This leads us to the essential contradiction that the obviously creative categorization of Borges is difficult, if not impossible, to directly build in such a way that a Web system, reasoning using these, could do its job.

It is our contention, however, that this dichotomy can be used to enable the sort of creative encounter on the Web that we are looking for. The trick is to find precise, unambiguous algorithms that the computer can apply to the growing metadata-based knowledge on the

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Web, but which when realized can enable a human to envision the existence of relationships that the machine would not be to represent or use directly.

We call this data overlaid on metadata: patadata. Patadata is to metadata as metadata is to data,

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Search engines traditionally have a similar architecture, irrelevant of the Information Retrieval model they are based on. At their heart is an inverted-index, which breaks down the contents of a document into various different combinations or terms and stores a link to the original document with each. This means that when searching for a keyword, instead of having to look at every document and its contents, the system just looks for all terms that match the request and returns the various links that match.

Semantic web search engines use something called Resource Description Framework to identify the relationships between these elements, expressed as metadata, and then searches on these, thereby introducing meaning as an active component in the search.

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If metadata helps us organise information semantically then patadata is for organisinginformation pataphysically. If metadata is objective then patadata is subjective.

The slide shows how we may pataphysicalise the query itself, the ranking, or the index.

To achieve this, we have to create a patametric index (rather than parametric index) or a patasaurus (pataphysical thesauraus or ontology).

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Here is an example of how such a patasaurus may be built. Our patadata is represented by a list of keywords that each stands for a pataphysicalisation of the original query term. This list is added to each item in the index.

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We made some early implementations. Here is a syzygy on ‘Fabulous’.

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A Clinamen on ‘mermaid’.

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And an anomaly on ‘trained’.

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We may start to apply these in actual web browsing. Here is one possible interface, showing a green candle option to launch the syzygy surfer. The idea is that users may assemble ‘breadcrumb trails’ of their navigations.

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Here is another, more graphical, interface design. Each of the grains represents a ‘hit’, with associated syzygies etc. alongside. The spiral may unravel forever, and within each grain may be another spiral.

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And here is a first prototype,created by Fania Raczinski, and searching only in Jarry’s Dr Faustroll. These are early days, but this will give you a flavour of the approach. Of course, we will be including images and sounds in due course. We are currently creating a digital opera using this technology that will premiere next June.

So, to sum up, the application of the subjectively ambiguities to the objectively precise world of software offers an opportunity to appreciate uselessness. One may argue that this software looks as though it might be useful, at least in a creative way, and so contradict its original purpose. However, as I explained at the start, the purpose here is not to set oneself against usefulness, but rather to advance pataphysical science.

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