Chapter   5
Pablo Picasso and his Pataphysical Pistol

With a brief history of Pataphysics and some interesting Modernist Art and Artists

Pablo Picasso studied Pataphysics, as did the Beatles (McCartney), James Joyce, and Artaud.   And they each developed related sets of important new styles, and similar new cultural perspectives 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).

Among the other serious students of Pataphysics were godfather of Dada and Surrealism, Marcel Duchamp, iconic composer John Cage, cultural-theorists Foucault and Baudrillard, the key Structuralist, 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 was a notorious roué.   He packed his writings with historical, literary, and scientific references; and often brandished a loaded Browning revolver about, to maintain his reputation as a nefarious intellectual.   This stuff of course very much excited the rogue intelligensia.   And (following the Avant Garde's disruptive motto) it also properly shocked the housebroken local burghers (épater les bourgeoisie⁴).   Jarry 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 pot-shot at an artist guest, at a haute avant-garde dinner party in Paris.   Later, Picasso would burnish his own maverick credentials, celebrating at fancy parties by shooting off Jarry's confiscated gun.   He would also pull out the Browning and ominously threaten to debrain viewers who might dare to insult and depreciate his ablated pataphysical paintings, by rudely asking him "what do they mean;" or who would carelessly speak badly of Cézanne, the man who according to Picasso, was "The father of us all" (due to his pioneering work with geometric redactions).

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 a blatant allegorical report, coded in pataphysics vernacular, boasting of how the Beatles and others were radically Revolutionizing (debraining) the new psychedelic post-war youth culture (John Lennon said "more popular than Jesus").

Reports that Jarry used his pistol to threaten debraining, for people who were slow to understand pataphysics, have not been confirmed.   Though, as mentioned above, it is documented that Picasso later used that Browning revolver for a similar purpose.   Alfred Jarry's Gun of course is the one object in the world with the best chance of successfully debraining a philistine who would question the meaning of Picasso's mind-bending, faux-primitive, pataphysical offences.   Picasso must have enjoyed that poetic synchronicity.   (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 Modernist (and strangely, also postmodern) deracinated way of understanding semiotics, and extremely low-bandwith symbolism (e.g. Structuralism's "generic signifiers"), with intersectional allegories and allergies.   And of decoding, 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 metaphorics.   Both works abandoned long cultural traditions and histories of careful isomorphic description; per Picasso in painting and Joyce in literature.   Then (as noticed by Clement Greenberg's Grand-Unification-Theory of Modernism) both artists began focusing mostly on just understanding the fundamental parameters of how their own medium itself communicates metaphors and other referentials, (painting and sculpture for Picasso, and language for Joyce.)

Modern-ism, as defined so precisely and well by Greenberg, is a detailed semiotic paradigm; and not at all the same thing as merely "modern" art.   Finnegan and Demoiselles both feigned allegiance to traditions of descriptive narrative scene painting and storytelling respectively.   But they were both using the traditional means and methods to convey a very different kind of information.   And they were both wildly successful at it - despite so many naive accusations of nonsense.

Aside from who-and-what-influenced-whom, and how:  Johnson calls Picasso the PosterBoy for Pataphics Number One - in terms of impressing on world culture what pataphysically-abstracted metaphors and allegories can accomplish in a new completely unique genre of art.   And in 1939, with his world-acclaimed Finnegan, James Joyce became PosterBoy of Pataphysics number two, with his reducting of an entire traditional narrative into an abstraction of data-memes, and non-targeted allegories - at times with an almost hieroglyphic focus on raw grammar and syntax, instead just on the face-value meaning of words.   And with respect to the face-value meanings of words - Joyce is a master of the cutting room floor.

Finnegan's Wake and Demoiselles - these works were still categorically similar to traditional painting and literature, but the kind of information being communicated is obviously unusual and extenuated.   Two groundmaking landmarks for the Great Modernist Debraining of western perspective, philosophies, arts and literatures, communication, and culture.

According to the explanations of critic Clement Greenberg, (grand poobah, New Yok Times' art czar, 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 linguisticly communicating culture - not about telling a story, or reciting some particular narrative, or novel.

The standard example here, according to Johnson, is how Picasso and Braque were studying the primary conceptions and most-primative painterly tools by which an artist can actually address the moment where painterly art begins.   That is, the moment where meaningless abstract markings begin to turn the corner; changing into metaphors, allegories, and visual memes with referential (semiotic) meanings.   And among the specific discoveries catalogued by Picasso and Braque was that it would take just one black disk, in the vicinity of one double-humped curved line, and three or four straight parallel line segments to sufficiently reference the idea of "guitar".  Picasso and Braque re-demonstrated permutations of that particular pataphysical result over and over again, across the years of doing their revolutionary guitar-reference paintings.

The New York Times art critiques had high praise for Greenberg's explanations of how this new Modernist genre of art is a singular separation from the previous history of art; all the way back to the very beginning.   On the other hand, a common theme in the pedestrian public's response to work such as Demoiselles and Finnegan was along the lines that any idiot with half a brain could do better work.   Johnson's opinion is that all of this influential work demonstrates a perfect conflation of Greenberg's Modernist "means and methods" theory with a properly-isomorphic semiotic debraining of the artists and their viewers.

Clement Greenberg's apotheosis was basically due to his clear and erudite propounding that Modernist artists are "artist's artists".   They are researchers, investigating the "means and methods" of communication, rather than storytellers and producers of decoration.   Their work is meant not so much for the public (as in previous times) - their work is self-referential, and is meant to be appreciated mostly by other artists, and the art community ("Tout le Monde" per Tom Wolfe).   Critic Greenberg's afforistic explanation, now known as Greenberg's Haiku says it all in three lines:

The best Modernist sculptors are sculptors' sculptors;
The best Modernist painters are painters' painters;
The best poets, poets' poets.

In 1975 Tom Wolfe’s little book, The Painted Word, quickly became a must-read for artists and art critics – explaining how the new Modernist arts had been co-opted by art theorists.   Painting, Wolfe explained, had become a completely new enterprise, no longer about telling stories, or decorating homes and public spaces.   Modernist painting is about what the theorists and critics write about what it should be.   Wolfe wrote that Modernist painting was the handmaiden of those who write about about the practice and goals of art.

The way Johnson tells the story, this all began when artists like Picasso and Duchamp promulgated their new impossible-to-know-what-it-means genre of art.   Then the engaged, curious viewers begin asking Picasso to explain the meaning of his unusual Modernist paintings.   So Picasso threatens to debrain them with Jarry's gun, and otherwise refuses to give any sensible explanations.   Then Apollinaire or Breton, or somebody like that writes down a theory to explain why Picasso seems so obstinate about meaning, why his painting is cubistic like Cezanne's; and why his iconography and semiotics seem so prehistoric; or whatever.   And then - insecure and uncertain artists began to study the critics' theories before they would paint - so their work would be part of the new movement.   Greenberg and Wolfe both point out that this trend is an amazing cultural change of tide.  

Jackson Pollock, is a prime example of how all this worked. Sometimes, before painting, he would meet and collaborate with Greenberg on how to make purely and true non-referential art.   The final goal was to solve the problem by completely getting rid of all semiotics, metaphors, allegories, and referentials of any kind.   Modernist painting should be genuine, non-referential, non-metaphoric, non-allegoric art.   Art which would be only about the stretched canvas itself, the self-nature of paint as it is flung and dripped onto canvas, and how the inner emotions of the artist are automatically “Expressioned” in the energies of splashing, as the paint attaches itself to the canvas.   Art became non-referential, anti-metaphoric, self-signifying, and reflexive.

Groundbreaking communications theorist Marshall McLuhan generalized on a related thread with his famous pronouncement:   the "Medium is the Message", (or at least it's often the most important part of what gets communicated).  In other words, in perfect accord with Jarry and Greenberg, the "medium" (means and methods) of a writing, painting, or other communication often communicates more of the intended message than the face-value meaning.   And Johnson has suggested that, given his acclaimed demonstration of the "Kikki-Bouba effect", psychophysicist and professor of neural metaphorics and behavioral neurology, V. S. Ramachandran could likely be convinced to explain how such praxes and practices are second-degree metaphoric, or better yet, instances of synesthesic onomatopoia.¹¹

Johnson opines that whether or not Jarry's pataphysics can be traced as the major driving force behind Modernism, it's impossible to overstate how much world culture changed as it accepted these new semiotically-irrational, ablative, Modernist genres in the various arts.

James Joyce, Irish drinker and wordsmith, was known as a pataphysics alcolyte.   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".

As mentioned previously, Johnson says that one can easily understand what Joyce is doing in many parts of Finnegan just by deconstructing them into Joyce’s ablated pataphysical memes.  For example, he says the face-value meaning is obviously indeterminate in the phrase “three quarks for Muster Mark”.

Three Quarks   (an ablative structural syntax)
Somebody; we don’t know who; speaks out a request; an order, or maybe just an observation.   This mention involves a specified number of copies, i.e. a quantity of three, of some noun-referenced object; or service; called a quark; which we don’t recognize.   Maybe this means that I, or somebody else, wants, needs, or has, three quarks.   Or it could mean just that there were, or there might be, three quarks.   It could be part of a reference to how it takes three quarks of fuel to get your vehicle to its destination.

for Muster Mark   (an ablative structural syntax)
For whatever reason, these three unidentified quarks are to benefit; or to go to; or be added to; or be delivered to; or were somehow required by; Muster Mark – whatever; or whoever; or whomever; that might be.   Perhaps Mark is the name of an officer with the position of "Muster".   Or perhaps Muster Mark is a holiday ritual that requires three quarks to be recited or maybe to be sacrificed.   Muster Mark could be the name of a local god, somewhere.   Or the name of the town your vehicle can reach if you had three quarks of fuel.

Once deconstructed this way, it’s easy to see that unless Jarry is responsible for all this, Joyce has invented the main theory of Structuralism, decades early.   Joyce has completely stripped away all direct semiotics, and all face-value meaning, thus dissolving any possible narrative purpose.   He’s left only the Structure, the anchorless allegory; the syntax; the means and methods, of his craft.   In perfect accord with Jarry's pataphysics, as well as the details of Greenberg’s Theory of Modernism.

Jarry, while overlooking obvious similarities to quantum theory, resuscitated the concept of the clinamen, from ancient Epicurean Greek philosophy.   As all atoms deterministically travel straight down through space-time, the clinamen is an "infintesimal swerve" of direction which causes all free-will, disruption, and change, whatsoever.   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 about its influence on Joyce’s writing.   How, for example, the difference between Finnegan and all regular novels is just the casual, but stunning, way Joyce weaves the tiniest of clinamenic swerves into his ablated narrative(s).   Duchamp used a term from French calculus class to describe it: "infra-mince" ("delta-h" in English) i.e. 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."

A lot of Modernism's most important movers and shakers have praised pataphysics or acknowledged Jarry and pataphysics in writing.   Maybe Jarry was a main instigator of the ideas behind all this, or maybe not.   Maybe Jarry was just a collector and disseminator of ideas which percolated through the fin-de-siècle French avant garde.   But in any case, he was at least a very significant figurehead, nexus, or posterboy for the movement and the ideas behind it.

The influence of pataphysics is well-known regarding the works of Picasso, Duchamp, and Joyce.   Other noteable influencees 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 Modernist and 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 it's the tertiary too.

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.”

André Breton defined Surrealism, wrote the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, and is generally recognized as Surrealism's most important writer.   Breton said Jarry was “the master of us all”.

Pataphysics is about denying the accuracy of all categories in general.   Categories are inherently fuzzy and inexact.   Jarry at least pretended to search for semiotic perfection, before concluding the concept to be a mirage.   He claimed to be hoping that each thing could be perceived, referred to, and understood in its own perfect uniqueness.   But then he recognized the nasty paradox at the heart of Structuralism, which arrived half a century later:   that even though things are unique and exceptional in themselves, we can only understand them in the context of Structured Categories that we're already familiar with.

Jarry said pataphysics is about grasping the law that governs exceptions.   All the unique things which are not properly categorizeable.   (That is paradoxically:   the law that governs all things which are exceptional, and thus not subject either to that particular law, nor to any other such laws of categoric governing.)

The College de ‘Pataphysique later explained the beautifully double-symmetric obverse to Jarry's paradoxical law: “there are only exceptions in the world, and a law is just the "exception to an exception.”

Pataphysician and professor Andrew Hugill famously said “to understand pataphysics is failing to understand pataphysics”.   What Hugill means by this, according to Johnson, is just that everything is properly understood as unique, and “exceptional” - and therefore one cannot really understand any thing by understanding some other thing - categorically categorically.   Pataphysics is about remembering that dilemma, and keeping it in mind.   Wanting or expecting clarity in conceptualizing or communicating categorically is a fool's errand.   When it's examined, it's absurd.

Ordinary hidebound rational thinking often can’t get beyond this apparent difficulty with paradoxes.   Antonin Artaud, on the other hand, along with several other avant guarde artists, understood the usefulness of conceptualizing absurdity and the paradoxical.   He was an important precursor to Theater of the Absurd.   When he opened a physical venue for this radically different kind of theater he named it Theatre Alfred Jarry.

Regardless of its value in redefining the direction of Modern painting, Demoiselles, and Picasso's other work of that genre, like Finnegan, is absurd.   Picasso, Johnson says, thought it was a perfect lesson he was teaching occasional lunkhead viewers by pulling out Jarry’s gun and threatening to shoot/debrain them with it – when they would stupidly dare to ask him about the “meaning" of a painting.

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, rather than the face-value meaning of the thing.

or 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 (or other semiotics) 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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