What is Applied Research in Patacriticism?

ARP is a workshop for designing and building educational tools. While ARP's tools are digital, they take their origin from a continuing investigation into the technology of the book and its extended network of communicative mechanisms. The power and sophistication of that network-- its capacity for simulating and harnessing creative human invention -- dwarfs our current digital tools and networks. Nonetheless, digital instruments are already clearing a space for themselves. We believe that digital culture will prosper to the degree that it can expose, understand, and augment our inherited bibliographical technology.

ARP is thus interested in promoting the inventiveness of human beings, who have made a habit of inventing tools that propagate human invention. 'Patacriticism is the interpretive method that follows from a 'pataphysical understanding of phenomena. Its 'patacritical goal lays primary stress on concrete/imaginative forms of communicative action (over against an abstract/informational form such as you're reading now). Making tools that support these 'patacritical methods is the central mission of ARP.

ARP was founded in 2003 to begin a broad and especially a practical dissemination of Alfred Jarry's ideas into the field of general education. Poet and intellectual entrepreneur, Jarry invented the discipline of 'Pataphysics, which he called "the science of exceptions" and "the science of imaginary solutions". 'Patacriticism is a scholarly and pedagogical derivative of Jarry's late nineteenth-century initiative.

In this first phase of its work, ARP has focused on the analytic transformation of our inherited (graphical and bibliographical) archive, whose 'pataphysical status is obscured, paradoxically, by every effort to expose its 'pataphysical ground. This tedious introduction illustrates the problem perfectly. The inherited archive is thus itself the record of those paradoxical efforts, which metastasize through the instrumental devices of language and other forms of human expression. A 'patacritical transformation of that archive is thus an initial analytic imperative.

This entails interpretive investigations that Charles Sanders Peirce called "abductions" and that progressive social agents call "the praxis of theory". We must imagine what we don't know. In the realms of education and scholarship, such imaginations are always performative and frequently, as Jarry's work illustrates, ludic and deformative.

In ARP's work this transformation takes two component forms.

The first has been underway for more than half a century in the digitization of our cultural inheritance. Most important here is the work to digitize bibliographical works since the book has been perhaps our most effective 'patacritical technology. But the great 'patacritical resources of book and print are regularly obscured by the purely administrative uses to which we put these instruments in our daily intercourse with the state and its ideological apparatuses. ARP's archival and interface tools remediate the digital technology for handling traditional documentary materials.

Two projects focus this component of ARP's work: The Rossetti Archive and NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). The first involves building a documentary core that is large enough for complex transformations but compact enough so that it can serve as an experimental study-model. The second involves building a model for a study-space that promotes highly individual imaginative activity within a collaborative environment of many individuals.

The other, related part of ARP's work is to design and build the specific tools that will promote a 'patacritical implementation of ARP's two basic projects. Some of these devices facilitate basic access and comparison functions. Others supply the human agent with tools that remediate and transform not only the documentary materials under study, but the study operations that the agents are themselves executing and involved with.