Anomie and Anomaly

Definition

Anomie and anomaly are the paired terms with which Baudrillard periodizes the political in Fatal Strategies (1983): the political era was one of anomie (deviation from law), the transpolitical era one of anomaly (deviation from norm). "The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness, and revolution. The era of the transpolitical is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence." The distinction: "Anomie is that which escapes the jurisdiction of the law; anomaly is that which escapes the jurisdiction of the norm. (Law is an institution, but the norm is a curve; law is a transcendence, but the norm is a mean.)" Anomie was tragic and transgressive; anomaly is "harmless, harmless and inexplicable. It is on the order of a pure and simple apparition, the rising to the surface of a system (ours) something come from elsewhere." "Anomaly has no critical incidence in the system. Its figure is rather that of a mutant." "There is infraction, or rather waywardness, with respect to a state of things we no longer know to be a system of cause and effect." The concept is Baudrillard's instrument for claiming that contemporary aberrations (obesity, terrorism, the obese body, the handicapped) are no longer scandals or crimes but mutants of a system that has lost the very norm against which deviation could be measured. It gives the transpolitical its periodization and its diagnostic category. See transpolitical, obscenity, catastrophe, destiny.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "Anomie is that which escapes the jurisdiction of the law; anomaly is that which escapes the jurisdiction of the norm"; "Its figure is rather that of a mutant"; "an aberration of no consequence" (1983).
• Émile Durkheim (not yet paged) — the classical theorist of anomie (normlessness) whose concept Baudrillard implicitly updates and displaces.
• Michel Foucault — norm, discipline, and biopower, against which Baudrillard poses the "anomalous."
• Not yet paged: Georges Canguilhem — The Normal and the Pathological, the missing reference for the norm/anomaly distinction.

Related Concepts

• The Transpolitical — anomaly is its diagnostic category.
• Obscenity — anomaly is obscene in its harmlessness and visibility.
• Catastrophe — the anomalous event: "an event without consequences."
• Destiny — the mutant as a figure of fate, not of chance.
• The Masses — the masses as the anomalous body of the social.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "Figures of the Transpolitical": the anomie/anomaly periodization; "Its figure is rather that of a mutant"; the obese, the hostage, the obscene as anomalies.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the orders of simulacra and the remainder as the unclassifiable.
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the Carceral Archipelago and the Fractal City as the spatial anomalies of the transpolitical.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Baudrillard's "anomaly" is a loose term of art; is it a clinical-scientific concept (Canguilhem, Durkheim) or a rhetorical label? The wiki should mark the missing Canguilhem reference.
• Does the shift from anomie to anomaly describe a real historical change, or Baudrillard's own move away from the political? The page should remain agnostic.
• The "mutant" is a biological figure applied to social forms. Is this a productive analogy or a category error?