On the Paradigmatic Force of Anomaly

Abstract

On the Paradigmatic Force of Anomaly Jocelyn Holland (bio) and Joel B. Lande (bio) No text has shaped the contemporary understanding and analytic use of anomalies as much as Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). For Kuhn, the anomaly constitutes an exceptional moment in the ordinary course of scientific activity that eventually forces a large-scale revision of the game-rules according to which natural phenomena are investigated, explained, and predicted. Oscillating between novelty and inexplicability, Kuhn’s anomaly tests the limited character of dominant epistemic procedures and encourages the search for new norms and practices. This understanding of the anomaly has come to play a salient role in both the history of science and literary studies. At the same time, this ‘normalization’ of the anomaly concept runs the risk of overshadowing a rich and complex history, one full of ambiguities and misprisions that have ramifications for how we think today, particularly for how we think about the interdependence of norms and their exceptions. In order to grasp the tensions inscribed in the concept, it is instructive to recall Ian Hacking’s introductory remarks to the prestigious fiftieth anniversary edition of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he provides the following intuitively plausible etymology: “The a in anomaly is the a that means ‘not’, as in ‘amoral’ or ‘atheist.’ The nom is from the Greek word for ‘law’. Anomalies are contrary to lawlike regularities, more generally, contrary to expections” (xxvi). This familiar definition is fundamentally incompatible with the one advanced in Georges Canguilhem’s On The Normal and the Pathological, which was first published in 1943: “‘Anomaly’ comes from the Greek [End Page 527] anomalia which means unevenness, asperity; omalos in Greek means that which is level, even, smooth, hence ‘anomaly’ is, etymologically, an-omalos, that which is uneven, rough, irregular in the sense given these words when speaking of a terrain” (131). In addition to providing an etymology supported by the most authoritative Greek dictionaries, Canguilhem liberates the anomaly from a rigid relationship to the law, nomos. His philological work opens up rich metaphorical “terrain,” because, according to Liddell and Scott and other lexica, the “evenness” suggested by omalos evokes a range of sensory impressions: the consistency of a surface, the composition of sediment, and the uniformity of sound, to name just a few. With the privative prefix a-/an- indicating the deviation from or absence of such conditions, anomalos thus signifies in Ancient Greek the irregularity of movements and periods of time, the inconstancy of fate, the capricious behavior of individuals, and the intractable mutations of language. This widely expanded range of potential applications brings a number of things into focus. For one, it establishes the conection between the history of the anomaly and sense perception, thus rendering it an “aesthetic” concept in the most general sense of the word. It also makes clear that sight is not the only sensory faculty invoked in the early history of the anomaly. Tactility, too, plays a role in the “roughness” (or, in Canguilhem’s terms, “asperity”) of anomalies. Along the same lines, an anomaly can be an aberrant acoustic event, which calls for attention and explanation. With these discrepant etymologies in mind, we are able to rethink the epistemic import of the anomaly. It encourages us to ask how, broadly speaking, cultures cope with non-homologous, but nonetheless intelligible, phenonena and actions—anomalies that are fixtures of a culture’s conceptual matrices as incommensurable elements. Such phenomena and actions are, to borrow a turn of phrase popularized by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, included as the exclusions to dominant modes of ordering, and can be social or political, mathematical or chemical, linguistic or sense-perceptual. The revision and expansion of the commonly held understanding of the anomaly—as the paradigmatic challenge to lawful order—offers the opportunity to revisit those fields of inquiry, pre-Kuhnian as well as post-Kuhnian, in which the anomaly concept has figured prominently. In an effort to frame the historical case studies and methodological observations introduced by the essays collected in this volume, we would like to sketch out some salient features of the discursive field in which the concept moves. The...