Pablo Picasso studied pataphysics, as did the Beatles (McCartney), James Joyce, and Artaud.   And they each promoted related sets of important new styles and new cultural assumptions regarding their particular fields of art.

Pataphysics was a major influence on modern arts and literature across the Twentieth Century.   It was popularized around the turn of the century by polyglot French author, celebrated (and often-condemned) playwright and philosopher Alfred Jarry (1873-1907).

Also among the serious students of Pataphysics were Marcel Duchamp, composer John Cage, cultural-theorists Foucault and Baudrillard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and a crowd of other such influential artists, writers and academics.

Jarry assiduously succeeded in offending the mainstream; and there are still incomprehensible mainstream critics belittling Jarry, and telling people that he and his influential Pataphysics were nothing but a big joke.

Jarry kept up with the latest developments in math and sciences; and he was a notorious roué.   He often brandished a loaded Browning revolver about, to maintain his reputation as a nefarious intellectual; shocking the local burghers (épater les bourgeoisie),⁴ and exciting the rogue intelligensia.   He was proudly a definitive poète maudit.⁵

Picasso eventually acquired the famous pistol, after it was first confiscated by Apollinaire (the poet who coined the name Surrealism.)   This because Jarry took a shot at an artist guest, at a haute avant-garde dinner party in Paris.   Later, Picasso would celebrate at fancy parties by shooting off Jarry's confiscated gun.   He would also pull out the Browning to ominously threaten viewers who might dare to insult and depreciate his works by asking "what they mean;" or who would carelessly speak badly of Cézanne.

Beatle songwriter Paul McCartney studied pataphysics and was inspired to write a pataphysics parable:   the paradigmatic song Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, on the Beatles revolutionary Abbey Road album.   He wrote it essentially as allegorical pataphysics liturgy.

"Joan was quizzical;   Studied pataphysical;   Science In the home"... ⁷

Early pataphysicians used the term “de-braining” to describe how a person overcomes their old dysfunctional habits of conceptualization, and begins to understand their thoughts and communications with a new mind; in a new way.   McCartney modeled his unusual song after a French pataphysics anthem, simply titled: Chanson Decervelage (Debraining Song).   McCartney's verses allegorically describe Edison, a pataphysics intern, administering debraining therapy (decervelage) to a friend, a policeman and then a judge.   With his little silver brain hammer.

Maxwell's Silver Hammer is an obvious allegorical report, coded in pataphysics vernacular, boasting of how the Beatles and others were radically Revolutionizing (debraining) the new psychedelic post-war youth culture ("more popular than Jesus").   (For extensive documentation of Pataphysics, with its cultural influences and histories, see the excellent Pataphysics - A Useless Guide, Hugill 2015, MIT University Press.)

Pataphysics is a postmodern deracinated way of understanding semiotics, low-bandwith symbolism, and intersectional allegories.   And of detourning, manipulating and repurposing referential or metaphoric communications, and various artistic and literary epistemologies.

Picasso memorized occasional passages from Jarry’s plays, collected some of Jarry's original writings, and painted portraits of Jarry.   Picasso's gamechanging Demoiselles d’Avignon⁸ has been called the Finnegans Wake⁹ of modern painting.   These works both feature a paradigm shift in the direction of pataphysics and its unusual dimensional metaphors.   Both works abandoned long traditions of careful isomorphic description; Picasso in painting and Joyce in literature.   Then both began focusing mostly on just the fundamental parameters of how their own medium itself communicates referentials, (painting and sculpture for Picasso, and language for Joyce.)

These works feigned allegiance to traditions of descriptive narrative scene painting and storytelling respectively, but they were using the traditional means and methods to convey a very different kind of information. And they were wildly successful at it - despite so many naive accusations of nonsense.

Consider Picasso's unusual representations of the the ladies in Avignon, and Joyce's radical referencing the elementals of ordinary conversation in Finnegan.   This was still painting and literature, but the kind of information being communicated was very unusual.

According to the explanations of critic Clement Greenberg, (grand poobah and high-priest of Modernist art theory) Picasso’s painting was reflexive, self-signifying, Modernist work about the means and methods of painting itself - not about streetwalkers, guitars and candlesticks.   And Joyce’s work was about the means and methods of linguistic communications, not about reciting some particular narrative, or novel.

Groundbreaking communications theorist Marshall McLuhan took up the thread and famously summarized an important part of it as:   the "medium (itself) is (often) the (main) message".   And given his acclaimed demonstration of the "Kikki-Bouba effect", psychophysicist and professor of neural metaphorics and behavioral neurology, V. S. Ramachandran could probably be persuaded to call such praxes and practices metaphoric or, better yet, synesthesic onomatopoia.¹¹

Johnson points out Picasso’s radical graphic metaphors and unusual semiotics in Demoiselles; and his maximum-abbreviation of the cubist guitars for example: (a black circle, a double-humped line, and three straight parallel strings.)   And similarly how literary giganticus James Joyce used untethered and abridged verbal allegories to abstractly reference fuzzy snatches of human cultural intercourse in Finnegan.   Each a perfect example of applied pataphysics.   Each of these works contains a very small amount of precisely detailed information, compared to the normal painting of street ladies or a normal narrative novel.   And in perfect accord with Jarry they each require the observer to accept, and then personally participate in completing fuzzy representation, generic signifiers, and even full tranches of highly-filtered information.

Jarry, while overlooking obvious similarities to quantum theory, resuscitated the concept of the clinamen, from ancient Epicurean Greek philosophy.   Pataphysics literature and commentary has often referenced the clinamen and made various metaphoric references to its “infinitesimal swerve”.   More than one article has been written, for example, about its influence on Joyce’s writing.   Duchamp used a term from French calculus class to describe it: "infra-mince" (i.e. "delta-h" = infintesimally small).   Duchamp explicitly describes "a gap, thinner than thin".   "The warmth left on a chair after someone stands up."   "The smell of cigarette smoke mingling with the smoker’s breath."

Joyce's writings, especially Finnegan, strongly reflect the study of pataphysics.   A study similarly deliberate and blatant in many of the works of Duchamp and Artaud.   Other outstanding students of pataphysics include Miro, Tinguely, Apollinaire, Borges, Calvino, Ionesco, Jacques Lacan, Baudrillard, and Julian Barnes.   Also renowned tres-moderne composer John Cage, who famously noted that Pataphysics "influenced everybody". 

Pataphysics as a movement might be narrowly described as a very influential, century-long, set of unexpected postmodern literary and artistic works which are especially focused on fungible referentials - words and various other passages of metaphoric and allegorical representation.   This includes Beaudrillard-type intangible conceptuals facilitated by his symbolics, structuralities, and ambulatory tropes.   To quote McLuhan, the Medium is the Message here, and the tertiary too.

James Joyce, Irish drinker and wordsmith, was known as a pataphysics alcolyte.   Consider how readers, professors, academic poseurs, criterati, and the glitterati, through the years, have studied Joyce's unusual intentions and innovative conceptualization - which for example are so obvious in his famous minimally-contextualized, and specifically non-fungible, yet ever-quoted line from Finnegans Wake "Three Quarks for Muster Mark".

Pataphysics introduced precise prototypes for Structuralism's critical "generic signifier", and coded memes in various media - including music, sculpture, and playwriting   (e.g. pataphysicians Cage, Duchamp, and Artaud).   It's been reasonably argued that pataphysics was the impetus of the main psycho-cultural theories of Structuralism as professed by Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and the other Structuralists, Post-Structuralists, and Deconstructionists, etc.

In discussing this, Johnson explains how Structuralism, like Pataphysics, finally requires personal augmentation from any and all perceivers of symbols, or semiotic information.   Structualism is just built around the inherent Uncertainty of all symbols, she says.   The unavoidable random wilderness between subject and object.   Timorously suggesting a Heisenbergian Semiotics Uncertainty Principle?   Any and all “signifiers” must be to some degree “generic”.   When we attach these generic signifiers to culturally-recognized conceptual “structures”, while augmenting them with personal prejudices and preceptions, - then we’re finally able to communicate complex ideas with other people, and even to finally conceptualize complex proprietary thoughts, - all founded and shaped, of course, on our particular culture's shared, but fuzzy, conceptual Structures.

Jarry was well-known to Structuralism’s Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, who wrote about his work – half a century after he began leading representational artists and students of semiotics to the study of Signifier Uncertanties.

The prolific and much-studied pataphysician John Cage, was an experimenter, and a theorist of music and sound itself.   And he composed such avant-garde compositions as a symphony for percussionist with thirteen found objects, and a symphony of Random Radio Sounds.   It's been noted that pataphysics is demonstrated in how some of these works refer secondarily to all the traditional modes of human music, and the means and methods of making of it.

Overlooking his own accomplishments and those of Picasso, Duchamp and many others, Cage asserted that James Joyce, with his extremely creative and unconventional writing, makes better use of Jarry's pataphysics than any of the other creative luminaries within Jarry's wide circumference of influence.

F. T. Marinetti (author of The Futurist Manifesto and founder of the Futurist movement) called Jarry “the unquestionable literary genius of the underworld.”

Apex Surrealist writer, and a definitive philosopher of Surrealism, André Breton said Jarry was “the master of us all”.

Marcel Duchamp, patriarch of Dada and Surrealism, postmodern painter, avant-garde performance artist, and instigator of absurd “readymade” (store-bought) sculpture, implied that the influence of Jarry's pataphysics was plainly evident in his own writings and art.   He proclaimed that “Rabelais and Jarry are my gods - evidently.”

'Pataphysics is about the pragmatics of “meaning” per se.   It’s about half-addressed allegories, augmenting adjectives, generic signifiers, and deliberate focus on the exaggerated advantages of understanding that all words, sentences, and other symbolic or referential communication can, at best, be only fuzzy representations.   They can never amount to more than some significant degree of allegory or metaphor.   All referentials are only representations, and all representations are just some credible variety of generic signifier.

In at least reflective accord with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Postmodernism’s incomplete succotash, and the tenor of Collège de ’Pataphysique, in Paris: pataphysical documents may have no formal beginnings or endings, elliptical or second degree logic, and meanings often transmitted mostly or only in overtones, structuralities, or subtexts.

subtexts - and per Jarry’s Dictum: reader/user input is often required of the 'Pataphysics practioner to imagine more precise definitions for superpositional, or otherwise inherently inexplicit nomnatives, vocabulary, structurality, and syntax.

As Structuralism explains, all users of language constantly encounter these semi-abstract generic signifiers; and they are thus engaged (usually without knowing it) in at least some significant degree of practical pataphysics; although as Johnson explains they often never find a

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