Joanie's Introduction to Pataphysics

Pataphysics is an influential anti-linear-thinking movement started by French philosopher Alfred Jarry a century ago. Its admirers and adherents include a host of important artists, writers and philosophers including Picasso, Duchamp, Breton, Joyce, Foucault and Beaudrillard. Modernist musician John Cage said "it influenced everybody".
 
Paul McCartney was a big fan, and his Beatles song Maxwell's Silver Hammer is a pataphysics allegory, mentions pataphysics, features pataphysical themes, and was modeled after Jarry's pataphysic anthem: the Debraining Song.
 
One of pataphysics' main themes is that western culture has been corrupted for thousands of years by a surfeit of linear thinking, and its consequent rationality. The cure is described metaphorically in early pataphysics literature as de-braining therapy. Paul McCartney starts his story by telling us that quizzical Joan, the song's protagonist, "studied pataphysical science in the home". Then she gets debrained by Maxwell's little silver hammer. We have to assume that Maxwell is quite a convincing pataphysician, as he goes on to debrain a policeman and a judge.
 
Jarry's influence has been enormous, but it's been argued that even though his work "influenced everybody" as John Cage asserts, he was not really a great genius, but rather just somebody in the right place at the right time. In any case it's interesting that Jarry's anti-linear, irrational pataphysics happened to be basically contemporary with the irrational, non-Euclidian geometries of the late Nineteenth Century; with the anti-rational physics of relativity and quantum-mechanics; and of course with all the anti-rational, non-linear art of Picasso, Duchamp, Dada, Surrealism, John Cage, James Joyce, and so many more.