There
is for me an evidence in the realm of flesh which has nothing to do with the
evidence of reason.
-Antonin
Artaud, Manifesto In Clear Language
For Pataphysics
all phenomena are totally gaseous.
-Jean
Baudrillard, Pataphysics
-Motto of The
Collge de Pataphysique
We are
nothing more than a state of virtual fart
-Jean
Baudrillard, Pataphysics
There is no
deal to be made with death.
-Jean
Baudrillard, Pataphysics
Unsurprisingly,
the first remarkable thing about Jean Baudrillards limited edition text Pataphysics is its pass, handmade,
deckle-edged, luxury cover. I say remarkable in that I still tend to identify
Baudrillard with the small, slick black covers in which Semiotext(e) introduced him
to America; covers which implied more of a techno aesthetic than this solemn
neo-gothic one.
The second remarkable
thing about this book is its slim size: it is only 14 pages long.
Thus I was
immediately struck by the nonsensical pairing of a distinguished looking faade
that supposedly signified some kind of venerable authenticity with an
interior teensy-weensy substantive content. But as I gleefully plunged past the
books sign-value
packaging and into the distinguished Simon Watson
Taylors English translation (his final) of this circa-1950 text (ostensibly on
the subject of Pataphysics, which Baudrillard here defines as the philosophy
of gaseous states, as tautology (the use of redundant language that
adds no information) (p. 8) and as the minds
loftiest temptation (p. 7)) this pairing made a peculiarly drle sense, as immediately I started
reading about fake stucco self-infatuation and vast flatulence (p. 7),
followed soon after by talk of fake universes (p. 8).
I had first
encountered this slim but fascinating text, which Baudrillard wrote at the
tender age 21, when it appeared unexpectedly in Baudrillards collection of
art-related essays which Sylvre Lotringers Semiotext(e) released in 2005
called The Conspiracy of Art (it is a different translation,
however). But lacking the kind of provocative packaging Atlas (in association
with The London Institute of Pataphysics) has given this version, it made a
rather minor impact on me at the time. But this new stucco-coated version, with
the what one might be tempted to say is rather pretentious outside packaging,
has focused my mind sympatheticly by actualizing some of the significant pataphysical concepts
raised within the text itself. And for that its idiosyncratic design intelligence must be appreciated.
Of course this
style choice is internally consistent with Baudrillards notion that systems of
signification and meaning are only understandable in terms of their ambivalent interrelationships. How better to reinforce his iconic
concepts of viral seduction, simulation, and hyperreality than this paradoxical
presentation of the blatantly conservative with the imaginative far-out?
One might first be tempted to point to
the traditionalist signifiers being played with here as substantive affirmation
of what some of his readers have identified as Baudrillards rather thinly
veiled conservative longing for a lost originality in face of digital
virtuality; an impulse which verges on the nauseating nostalgic. Indeed this
impression is enhanced when reading in the prelude that the publisher pulled
out the old rare book ploy here. There are only 177 numbered copies of this
letterpress-printed book and 44 numbered copies signed by the hand of Baudrillard
himself. What a rare and valuable commodity - if one dances to that sort of
consensus trance.
Undeniably, such a comic example of
self-imposed rarity in the age of virtuality can be infuriating - but that
would be taking this project way too seriously. Assuredly Baudrillard here puts
forth that Pataphysics is not serious but that it possesses a silliness that
perhaps constitutes precisely its seriousness. (p. 10) Better to just scan it
and pass it around up on the internet. Better still to just concentrate on its
intangible pleasures.
First off, there is the pleasure to be
found in examining Baudrillard backwards (so to speak) in terms of hyperreal nonsense. (*1) Backwards in that we already know
considerably well his mid-career and recent oeuvre, but poorly, if at all, such
early formative texts. And following this backwards flip, we may examine him
circularly and hence self-pataphysicly in that Baudrillard also defines
Pataphysics as that which revolves around itself. (p. 8) So we can now
regressively time trip and spin-view retrospectively his various observations,
theories and analyses of technological communication through a young and
delirious metaphysics deeply inspired by French and German poetry, the
pataphysical anti-concepts developed by Alfred Jarry and the brilliant ravings
of Antonin Artaud. These last two associations are explicit, as the reader is
clued into these two contextual references in the texts prelude, most
importantly the texts lapidary reaction to the publishing of key Artaud texts
and the formation of the Parisian Collge de Pataphysique. (p. 5)
By way of the understanding
Artauds impact on the young Baudrillard, it may be valuable to recall Artaud's
proposal in Le Thtre et Son Double (The Theatre and its
Double) that art (in his case drama) must be a means of influencing the human
organism and directly altering consciousness by engaging the audience in a
ritualistic-like trance. Even though in his essay The Theatre of Cruelty and
the Closure of Representation Jacques Derrida describes how
Artaud's theory may be seen as impossible in terms of the established structure
of Western thought (*2), this is precisely why Baurillards youthful creative
text can be placed in position to Artaud's hypothesis and well within the Collge de
Pataphysique. Indeed Baudrillard writes here that Artaud demands a
re-evaluation of creation, of coming into the world. (p. 10)
The Collge de Pataphysique was founded
on May 11th, 1948 by an anarchic group of artists
and writers interested in the philosophy of Pataphysics. These zealots devoted
their time to perpetuating (and often distorting) Jarry's philosophical pranks.
In 1959 Marcel Duchamp agreed to be a satrap in the Collge de Pataphysique (*3) and there have been
numerous links established with the Oulipo literary movement - specifically
through the participation in both groups by the poet Raymond Queneau. The
fabulous wordsmith Jean Genet has described himself as following in the
pataphysical tradition, and so Baudrillard seems now retrospectively like a
fitting young candidate for the Collge (he evidently became a transcendent
satrap there) as he, like Jarry and Genet
both, obsessively circumnavigate around absurd mocked-up topographies.
For anyone who
may not know, Pataphysics is the absurdist pseudo-philosophy/ideology
devised by Alfred Jarry. The term first appeared in print in Jarry's article Guignol in the April 28th
(1893) issue of L'cho de Paris littraire illustr. It is a form
of conceptual flatulent hot air that hinges on the idea of utter nonsense. A
practitioner of Pataphysics is a pataphysician or a pataphysicist.
For Jarry,
Pataphysics is the anti-scientific realm beyond metaphysics that examines the
laws which preside over exceptions - an attempt to elucidate an
imaginary cosmos. Jarry specifically defined Pataphysics as the science of
imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects,
described by their virtuality, to their lineaments. (*4)
So we recognize
here some rhizomatic roots that may have nurtured Baudrillard's hyperbolic and
jaded view of an incongruous virtual-reality drenched world. In Jarry we
already relish an artificial Baudrillardian simulated world created by an
hallucinatory social structure where shimmering objects decree in odd ways what
people can and cannot do within the vast void of virtuality. Indeed, like
Jarry, Baudrillard mostly arrives at this social examination without
demonstrating any sustained systematic analysis. Poof! Voila: a gaseous bon
dlire: an airy imaginary solution. But in Pataphysics, every occurrence in the
universe is established to be an extraordinary event. No simulation possible.
Of
course this aim of creating an
inorganic world ex nihilo and luxuriating in its
rarefied artificiality was not unique to Jarry.
Indeed it was perfectly articulated in 1884 with the publication of Joris-Karl
Huysmans's dcadent novel A Rebours (Against Nature), a
story of a recluse art worshiper who yearns for new sensations and perverse
pleasures within a transcendental artificial ideal. Recall that Dcadent French
theory, which is almost equivalent to Fin-de-Sicle Symbolist theory, aspired
to set art free from the materialistic preoccupations of industrial society.
But what struck
me as most exact to the young Baudrillard texts bizarre propositions was its
deep reflection (one might even say brooding) on the theme of ignobility, and
this shoddily shifted something in my appreciation of Baudrillards total word
production. Notably, already evident is Baudrillards display of a mordantly
witty obsession with language, a flatulent smoky language that tests the limits
of form and stretches the bounds of meaning by recasting our experiences of
encountering wildly disjunctive ideas into the sumptuously physicality of total
negation.
This
reality-rejecting text delivers an airy irrational punch of nonsensical
negation by tying together methods of insouciant informality with a visceral
camp irony: at turns hip and flamboyant, then turning towards the morally
outrageous. At times the text simulates the disappearing ephemeral we associate
with electronically provided information today on the internet, and the
flickering of its translucent form. Still the reader is expected to work
devotedly to solve the absurd flatulent conundrums supplied here, to supply mental
transitions between the diverse and massive assortment of irrational elements
which supply the text its pataphysical hooks. One must fabricate a complicated
forensic fairy-tale out of this flatulent mlange, which keeps slipping in and
out of idiosyncratic narration. And that recitation keeps turning back into one
about stinking death, that strange, incurable and deeply irrational affliction.
Baudrillard in fact defines here the rules of the pataphysical game as narcissism
of death, a lethal eccentricity. (p. 8) Yes, I read this text as a meditation
on humiliating death in all its undifferentiated fabulousness, by which I mean
its essentially nasty comedy. So this is a young mans text about funny,
difficult death then, which while pulling down our pants and revealing our
soiled undies, keeps everyone laughing (or at least gurgling) till the bitter
end.
According to
Baudrillard, in Pataphysics all things become artificial, poisonous, resulting
in a schizophrenia induced by pink stucco angels. (p. 11) But also there is
here an awareness of impertinent splendor in the tranquility of flatulent
decomposition, which makes it all seem faintly heroic in face of deaths
inexorability. Thus this irrational text implies an antiphilosophers knowledge
of dumb deaths putrid ignobility - but Baudrillard will not give in to that
parody either. And this is what gives the work its extraordinary sense of
dignity, a dignity which asserts lifes primacy over death because death is
beyond narration and words.
So this texts irrational
gaseous hypothesis is actually fine absurdist Ubu art. (*5) But an Ubu art
which does not merely help us pass the time away; it enlivens time if we
surrender to its fearful pataphysical difficulty. A vertigo intricacy of which
Baudrillard says is anaemic (p. 11) and impossible (p. 10) as its
procedure is a vicious circle within. (p. 11)
So Baudrillards
work here provides the chance to do the counter-fearful thing then, to look at
what we fear so that such an effort will help release us from fears irrational
grip. Then we can pataphysically expand into the airy void and see beneath the
stucco surface of Maya (*6) and so enjoy absurd life all the
more. So that the ignobility of death can be ignored and nonsensical dignity
restored for the fleeting moment.
Joseph Nechvatal
Paris / Fall
2006
(*1) Sokal, A. and J. Bricmont (1998)
"Jean Baudrillard" in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern
Intellectuals' Abuse of Science New York: Picador. pp. 147-153
(*2) Derrida, J. (1978)
"The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation" in Derrida,
Jacques (1978) Writing and Difference. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, pp. 232-250
(*3) Sanouillet, M. (1973) "Marcel
Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition," in Marcel Duchamp, Philadelphia:
The Museum of Modern Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art
(*4) Jarry, A. (1963) "What is
Pataphysics?" Evergreen Review, no. 13: pp. 131-151, p. 131
(*5) Ubu is defined by Baudrillard in
this Pataphysics text as the gaseous and caricatural state (p. 7)
(among other things).
Baudrillard builds here on Alfred Jarry's play
Ubu Roi,
a play that created a famous scandal when it was first performed at the Theatre
de lOeuvre in Paris in 1896. It is an important precursor of Dada. Through a
language of shocking lad hilarity, Ubu Roi tells the farcical story of
Pre Ubu, an officer of the King of Poland who is a grotesque figure who
epitomizes the mediocrity and idiocy of middle-class officialdom. Baudrillard makes swift reference to him in Pataphysics on page
7. It was through writing Ubu Roi that Jarry became the
creator of the science of Pataphysics, his absurd a-logic which defined the
science of imaginary solutions as enshrined since 1948 in the Collge de
Pataphysique.
(*6) The concept of Maya in Indian
philosophy refers to the purely phenomenal, insubstantial character of the
everyday world.
Note: This is the first draft of my text
published at the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies: http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/