Little Catalogue of 'Pataphysics

“SYZYGY: The Syzygy surprises and confuses. It originally comes from astronomy and denotes the alignment of three celestial bodies in a straight line. In a pataphysical context it is the pun, which Jarry called “the syzygy of words”. It usually describes a conjunction of things, something unexpected and surprising. Next to being intentionally funny, puns demonstrate a clever use (or abuse) of grammar, syntax, pronunciation and/or semantics, often taken to a quite scientific level, such that without understanding of what is said and what is the intended meaning, the humour of the pun might be lost. Serendipity is a simple chance encounter but the syzygy has a more scientific purpose. Bök mentions Jarry saying that “the fall of a body towards a centre is the same as the ascension of a vacuum towards a periphery”.

Combinational creativity: making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas (bisasociation, juxtapositioning of unrelated ideas, puns, etc.). We may map this onto the antinomial and syzygystic operations of pataphysics. “Panalogy”, or parallel analogy, is a concept developed by Push Singh and Marvin Minsky. The idea behind panalogy is that our understanding of any object or action cannot easily be explained in any single conceptualisation.”

“What Jarry points out is that utility shouldn’t be a judge of the value of things. He talks about not looking at a watch as a round thing, but as an ellipse, because you view it from the side. He says if you ask people what the shape of a watch is they will say it is round. The reason is that they only ever look at it to see what time it is. He wanted to divorce the utility from the thing to give another perspective. Pataphysicians call this “inutiliosness.” If you can get to something inutilious you are seeing something pataphysically.”

“One possible interpretation of the phrase ‘imaginary technology’ is therefore: an unreal, or imagined, solution to a real problem. We might call this ‘imaginary technology of the physical.’ Most technologies that have come into existence fall into this category. For the purposes of this paper, we are interested only in that stage of the process where these exist in the imagination, although this existence can often only be deduced from their subsequent physical realization.

    

A second interpretation of ‘imaginary technology’ reverses this idea and uses the imagination to extend the capabilities of a known or existing technology beyond the physically possible and into the imaginary. We might call this ‘imaginary technology of the metaphysical.’ A great deal of science fiction and futurology falls into this category, and current theories point to a ‘technological singularity’ when technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend

or predict.

The final interpretation, and one that is dear to us gathered here today, is the ‘imaginary technology of the pataphysical,’ that is to say: an imaginary solution “which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments” (Jarry). These technologies are ‘inutilious’ yet are standardized by virtue of their conformity to the laws governing exceptions. They tend to remain imaginary, although apparently real artifacts are sometimes created to provide evidence of their existence.”

(2 COOL; Pata-No UNLTD)

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