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Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies
'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science
'Pataphysics, the pseudoscience imagined by Alfred Jarry, has so far, because of its academic frivolity and hermetic perversity, attracted very little scholarly or critical inquiry, and yet it has inspired a century of experimentation. Tracing the place of 'pataphysics in the relationship between science and poetry, Christian Bök shows it is fundamental to the nature of the postmodern, and considers the work of Alfred Jarry and its influence on others.
A long overdue critical look at a significant strain of the twentieth-century avant-garde, ' The Poetics of Imaginary Science raises important historical, cultural, and theoretical issues germane to the production and reception of poetry, the ways we think about, write, and read it, and the sorts of claims it makes upon our understanding.
A long overdue critical look at a significant strain of the twentieth-century avant-garde, ' The Poetics of Imaginary Science raises important historical, cultural, and theoretical issues germane to the production and reception of poetry, the ways we think about, write, and read it, and the sorts of claims it makes upon our understanding.
133 pages, Paperback
First published December 26, 2001
5 people are currently reading
225 people want to read
About the author
Christian Bök
12 books85 followersChristian Bök (born Christian Book) is a Canadian experimental poet. He began writing seriously in his early twenties, while earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Carleton University in Ottawa. He returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to study for a Ph.D. in English literature at York University, where he encountered a burgeoning literary community that included Steve McCaffery, Christopher Dewdney, and Darren Wershler-Henry.
In addtion to his poetry, Bök has created conceptual art, making artist's books from Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks. He has also worked in science-fiction television by designing artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.
As of 2005, he teaches at the University of Calgary.
In addtion to his poetry, Bök has created conceptual art, making artist's books from Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks. He has also worked in science-fiction television by designing artificial languages for Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.
As of 2005, he teaches at the University of Calgary.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 31, 2017
This turned out to actually be a really interesting read. Though short it is full of insight relevent not just to some obscure poetical form but for aesthetics as a whole. I have always loved Jarry but despite the ubiquity of his name throughout avant-garde literature this is the first peice that I have been able to find that takes a critical and philosophical look at what it was he was actually doing (important for the fact that Jarry never outright explained it, rather he acted upon it, in life as well as in wiriting).
The elegance of Bok's writing makes the erudite concepts easy to follow despite ones not always being familiar with particular postmodern philosophies concerning language and knowledge. Definitely serves as a jumping off point into some really great stuff. I couldn't agree more with Bok in his description of Jarry's paralogy as not being against logic or rationality, but as serving to reconcile math and science with poetry. Where "in the world of possibilities, reality is the exception," Jarry offers a pataphysical universe where poetic exploration serves as a liberation from paradigmatic constraints on actual existence, not as a type of metaphysical transcendence that fills the new age isles in every bookstore but as a pataphysical reality in which meaning is liberated from objectivity and epistemelogical anarchy serves as the impetus to an infinite amount of permutations for creativity. "To explore the rule is to be emancipated from it by becoming the master of its potential for surprise, whereas to ignore the rule is to be imprisoned in it by becoming the slave to the reprise of its intention." Rule is not puerily caste aside for some sort of petulant rebellion, rather it is apperceptively used and superextended in a hyperbolic Umour that creates its own world replete with charicatured contradictions and personified irony, getting one over on metaphysics by getting one over on itself.
The historical mapping of Jarry's ideas was also very enjoyable to read. I had never considered the futurists as being so intimately related to Jarry before, never really knew what the hell Oulipo was doing (l'OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle, who knew?), and never even heard of the Canadian Jarryites before. Overall Bok's breakdown of the structure and nature of Pataphysics (though not being exhaustive) and his extensive knowledge of those who do and have experimented within 'Pataphysics (both poets and philosophers alike) make this well worth the time and reinvigorates the individual creative process, not by offering some new form or fad, but by looking into the nature of the poetic experience itself(be it writing or reading) as being just as fantastical as that of the logical and thus instilling the poetic back into the scientific, the scientific with the poetic, and revealing the distinction as merely superficial when, all things being equal, reality is just as outrageous as what it could have been, and by extension, will be. Ha-Ha
The elegance of Bok's writing makes the erudite concepts easy to follow despite ones not always being familiar with particular postmodern philosophies concerning language and knowledge. Definitely serves as a jumping off point into some really great stuff. I couldn't agree more with Bok in his description of Jarry's paralogy as not being against logic or rationality, but as serving to reconcile math and science with poetry. Where "in the world of possibilities, reality is the exception," Jarry offers a pataphysical universe where poetic exploration serves as a liberation from paradigmatic constraints on actual existence, not as a type of metaphysical transcendence that fills the new age isles in every bookstore but as a pataphysical reality in which meaning is liberated from objectivity and epistemelogical anarchy serves as the impetus to an infinite amount of permutations for creativity. "To explore the rule is to be emancipated from it by becoming the master of its potential for surprise, whereas to ignore the rule is to be imprisoned in it by becoming the slave to the reprise of its intention." Rule is not puerily caste aside for some sort of petulant rebellion, rather it is apperceptively used and superextended in a hyperbolic Umour that creates its own world replete with charicatured contradictions and personified irony, getting one over on metaphysics by getting one over on itself.
The historical mapping of Jarry's ideas was also very enjoyable to read. I had never considered the futurists as being so intimately related to Jarry before, never really knew what the hell Oulipo was doing (l'OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle, who knew?), and never even heard of the Canadian Jarryites before. Overall Bok's breakdown of the structure and nature of Pataphysics (though not being exhaustive) and his extensive knowledge of those who do and have experimented within 'Pataphysics (both poets and philosophers alike) make this well worth the time and reinvigorates the individual creative process, not by offering some new form or fad, but by looking into the nature of the poetic experience itself(be it writing or reading) as being just as fantastical as that of the logical and thus instilling the poetic back into the scientific, the scientific with the poetic, and revealing the distinction as merely superficial when, all things being equal, reality is just as outrageous as what it could have been, and by extension, will be. Ha-Ha
March 8, 2010
Less a study or a celebration (or both) than an entombment. If Bok's jargon-heavy prose doesn't drive you nuts, you've gone to theory's dark side. The man seems incapable of writing a graceful sentence. And, too, the book is surprisingly unfunny. Bah.
July 22, 2015
Rereading this I realize I've become a lot smarter in the last two years. That's a nice change from how I usually feel.
Still interesting, not as mind blowing as before.
Still interesting, not as mind blowing as before.
June 13, 2010
decudnirepus
’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is the only book I have read backwards. I was inspired by Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy (1958), which examines probability in mechanical systems for subatomic phenomenon in relation to philosophical thought, as well as chapter 22:00 of Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget (2001). It’s been noted the concept of clinamen (the atomic swerve) in Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics occurs in Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminancy, known as the uncertainty principle, which proposes that simultaneous values cannot be assigned to the position and momentum of a physical system. If language is not merely descriptive but creates physical reality, then poetry constitutes a manipulation of physics, which would redefine poetry as not just a phenomenon of consciousness or experience but a physical mutation on the species, one that is capable of Bök’s articulation of the “prohibited hypothesis” of pataphysics, where “the most radical gesture in science” through the “impulse to revolutionize the condition of the species” could entail “the abolition of the species itself.”
The most radical gesture in poetry could destroy poetry by redefining it. If poetry is a physical mutation on the species, could its most radical gesture, like the most radical gesture in science, destroy the species? If matter cannot be destroyed, only redistributed as energy or another form of matter, then annihilation is an antecedent to transition, or what could be called novelty, where matter changes, its borders mutable and adjustable. Distinct objects compared in metaphor are changed by the act of comparison, suggestive of how molecules are changed by observation, and how, according to Heisenberg, “the transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’ takes place during the act of observation.” Whitman: “And now {the grass} seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” In this context chance might be defined as physical change prompted by novelty.
One aim of backward-reading a critical-sequential book that hyperbolically-geometrically performs the pataphysics it describes is to test the probability of a position-momentum. Could the position (space) and velocity (time) of the system of reading be simultaneously determined? If quantum mechanics held, the answer would be no and the uncertainty principle expressed.
After starting with the last sentence of the Epilogue, I scanned punctuation to find the beginning of the previous (my next) sentence. When sentences started at the beginning of a paragraph rather than within the same paragraph, it was easy to slip into normative reading. In order to avoid this I prevented myself from reading sentences twice. This created more uncertainty in relating to the nuanced fireworks of the content but made the backward-reading sustainable. Sometimes a sentence was split among pages. I would begin on one page, then flip backward in the book (my forward) to find the start of the next sentence, then flip forward in the book (my backward) to read the sentence, and then flip backward in the book (my forward) again to find the start of the next sentence. Cognitively this was like being a double agent who is a double agent where no one, including the double agent, knows what side they are on. Perhaps influenced by having read this book forward years ago, my reading back to front at the scale of the sentence made the future appear remembered before the past happens. In this way the experiment engaged with the probability of a future time as posited by quantum theory and Jarry himself, who proposed by way of an “imaginary present” that time is the becoming of a memory….
’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is the only book I have read backwards. I was inspired by Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy (1958), which examines probability in mechanical systems for subatomic phenomenon in relation to philosophical thought, as well as chapter 22:00 of Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget (2001). It’s been noted the concept of clinamen (the atomic swerve) in Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics occurs in Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminancy, known as the uncertainty principle, which proposes that simultaneous values cannot be assigned to the position and momentum of a physical system. If language is not merely descriptive but creates physical reality, then poetry constitutes a manipulation of physics, which would redefine poetry as not just a phenomenon of consciousness or experience but a physical mutation on the species, one that is capable of Bök’s articulation of the “prohibited hypothesis” of pataphysics, where “the most radical gesture in science” through the “impulse to revolutionize the condition of the species” could entail “the abolition of the species itself.”
The most radical gesture in poetry could destroy poetry by redefining it. If poetry is a physical mutation on the species, could its most radical gesture, like the most radical gesture in science, destroy the species? If matter cannot be destroyed, only redistributed as energy or another form of matter, then annihilation is an antecedent to transition, or what could be called novelty, where matter changes, its borders mutable and adjustable. Distinct objects compared in metaphor are changed by the act of comparison, suggestive of how molecules are changed by observation, and how, according to Heisenberg, “the transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’ takes place during the act of observation.” Whitman: “And now {the grass} seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” In this context chance might be defined as physical change prompted by novelty.
One aim of backward-reading a critical-sequential book that hyperbolically-geometrically performs the pataphysics it describes is to test the probability of a position-momentum. Could the position (space) and velocity (time) of the system of reading be simultaneously determined? If quantum mechanics held, the answer would be no and the uncertainty principle expressed.
After starting with the last sentence of the Epilogue, I scanned punctuation to find the beginning of the previous (my next) sentence. When sentences started at the beginning of a paragraph rather than within the same paragraph, it was easy to slip into normative reading. In order to avoid this I prevented myself from reading sentences twice. This created more uncertainty in relating to the nuanced fireworks of the content but made the backward-reading sustainable. Sometimes a sentence was split among pages. I would begin on one page, then flip backward in the book (my forward) to find the start of the next sentence, then flip forward in the book (my backward) to read the sentence, and then flip backward in the book (my forward) again to find the start of the next sentence. Cognitively this was like being a double agent who is a double agent where no one, including the double agent, knows what side they are on. Perhaps influenced by having read this book forward years ago, my reading back to front at the scale of the sentence made the future appear remembered before the past happens. In this way the experiment engaged with the probability of a future time as posited by quantum theory and Jarry himself, who proposed by way of an “imaginary present” that time is the becoming of a memory….
December 5, 2007
am still ruminating & regesting; very nice to have a survey of post-jarry pataphysics; very heady (and ironic?) to read it in such academic prose, but that's how it is
nothing i'd read to my aunt irma long distance over a telephone, but some folks here i know will dig it 'tho
"pataphysics is the science ... "
nothing i'd read to my aunt irma long distance over a telephone, but some folks here i know will dig it 'tho
"pataphysics is the science ... "
July 29, 2007
There is something fantastically attractive about this book. Perhaps it is Bok's symmetrical sections, or the fact that he pulls off literary theory as poetry. Or maybe its the vocabulary boost: you'll need a good dictionary, but you won't regret it.
December 10, 2009
A strange sort of hypnopopic philosophic treatise on the imaginary science of Pataphysics, reflecting on its creation by Alfred Jarry in the late 19th century and how it has influenced artists and writers in the century since. A fun romp through avaunt-guard literary theory.
July 10, 2009
Really insightful, complex study of the influence of Jarry and his 'pataphysics on the poetry world. Important work for anyone interested in conceptual poetics, oulipo or otherwise.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews