Elias Courson tracks the ambiguous and shifting lines of formal anomaly in his discussion of Sue Van Zyl's lecture.
The main focus of
Sue’s paper is an attempt at theorizing or problematizing the concept of ANOMALY. She identifies four types of
anomaly: being, exchange, action and thing. She anchors her conceptual project
on Foucault’s genealogies: the notion of power/knowledge relations, and other
theoretical insights from structural anthropology.
In her examination
of these four types, she tries to examine the politics of Form with
relation to anomaly. In my understanding, she describes anomaly as a very fluid
concept that cannot be categorically defined and contextualized in any
particular social form. Thus, anomaly as Form is socially constructed and
politically institutionalized depending on what Foucault calls “discursive formation”. Anomaly is used here as a logic not of
negation in political discourse. Knowledge formations create the conditions for
the production of anomaly.
She describes
anomaly as ‘indiscernible counterpart’.
It is an exception, but also it is something that crosses established
ways of categories. In life, we have man, animals, and things: The combination
of any two of these categories produces a form of anomaly because such products cross categories (an anomaly in this sense is a Form that exhibits two
categories in equal proportion). Anomalous Forms that traverse categories thereby
produce difficult circumstances. Anomalous Forms in her view, occupy spaces of
two categories: it is neither a form nor its negation. All four (monsters,
contrabonds, neurotic symptom and art) are examples of anomalous Forms with
political consequences as long as we don’t know what to do with them. Thus in each
example, what are the consequences at stake in each anomalous situation? In all
of these anomalous Forms, the Form cannot be categorized into any category. For
example, the ‘monster’, she argues, is half animal and half man, e.g, the
centaur, sphinx and harpy (thus it is neither man nor animal), hence, it is an
anomalous Form. The monster as an anomalous Form occupies two categories, and
in modern science the monster as an anomalous takes various Forms, i.e, the
combination of ‘thing and man’ or animal and man’ depending on the anomalous
Form of monster conceived.
Similarly, neurotic
symptom would be considered as a Form of anomaly since actions undertaken by
such persons cannot be classified in the realm of sanity or insanity. A
neurotic is half sane and half insane, and actions by such individual cannot be
classified into any of the realms (sanity or insanity) by law. Since the action
does not fall within the purview of sanity or insanity, the need to determine
its rationality or irrationality is required in order to give it a category.
The politics of anomalous Form is thus about an issue/action that affects the
legality or illegality of an action. By politics of anomalous Form, she refers to the
politics and intricacies involved in the determination of the category of a
person’s action. A situation whereby the actions of neurotic (a man half sane
and half insane) has to be examined, to determine if such a person is liable or
not is the politics of anomalous Form. In law ordinarily, punishment awaits all
murderers, however a sane man is expected to face the wrath of the law while an
insane is left off the hook on grounds of irrationality. The neurotic rebuttal
is what Sue regards as anomaly of Forms. The neurotic is a Form of anomaly
because psychiatrics and other experts would be called to determine the state
of the neurotic so as to assign him a place in law. This is what Sue calls “the
politics of Form”. There is a lot at stake in Forms of anomaly as espoused by
Sue because we do not know what laws to judge them upon. As a Form of anomaly,
we do not know how to police it. Forms of anomaly are thus problematic because
we do not know what to do until we put them into category or categories: until
they are put into categories we are at a loss. Spaces for Forms of anomaly are
only created under historical circumstances: from the state of the actor in
modernity we now have to prove whether an act is punishable or not, right or
wrong. The action before its determination would be regarded as neither right
nor wrong – making it metaphysical.
She seems to argue
that once one has said that something is neither of categories, one is debarred
from saying that it is or will be, of attributing to it a category or a
dissolution in time, or any alteration or motion whatsoever. She supposes that
anomalous Form had not always existed in its present cosmic state. They are
derived from two categories, which they assert in various ways in order to
produce category in the present world-order.
Sue’s Form of
anomaly, I would conclude, is a ‘category-iless’ Form whose category is only
socially constructed and determined by knowledge/power relations.
Elias Courson is lecturer in the Philosophy Department, Niger Delta University
