I’ve never heard of this movement before but it makes a lot of sense in the context of the time. This is about the time that David Hilbert would push the world

I’ve never heard of this movement before but it makes a lot of sense in the context of the time. This is about the time that David Hilbert would push the world of mathematics to tie up its last loose ends. Physics was seeming “almost done” as well, since we hadn’t foreseen quantum mechanics. Modern architecture was well underway, creating perfectly reproducible, characterless buildings that would perfectly fit anywhere. I can only imagine how self-important and insufferable academics must have been at the time, with the feeling in the air that all problems were just about to be solved and modernity had officially arrived. The next generation would produce figures like Wittgenstein, Gödel, Turing, Einstein—all of whom in their own way contributed to “officially” putting academia in its place. Pataphysics seems to me like an informal attack to the same effect, an artistic intuition that there must be things uncomputable, undecidable, uncertain, and otherwise ineffable.