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Giving Voice to Anomalies: Nachtmelke and other Irregularities

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 134; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2019.0042

1080-6598

Jocelyn Holland,

Science Education and Perceptions

Giving Voice to Anomalies: Nachtmelke and other Irregularities Jocelyn Holland (bio) If we resist the common understanding of the anomaly in terms of that which deviates from the law, or nomos, and consider its proper etymology as that which is lacking in evenness—as the introduction to this volume encourages us to do—then one discovers a history of the anomaly much more closely linked to the aesthetic. That the dominant mode of “perceiving” anomalies in this history is associated with vision likely comes as no surprise. In the scientific fields of astronomy, biology, physiology, and pathology, anomalies have historically been perceived and described in visual terms: the features of monstrous countenance, the trajectory of an orbital deviation, the contours of a cervical rib. The same holds for philosophical approaches to the history of science such as Thomas Kuhn’s. When he articulates a model of “normal science” that charts the progress from the perception of anomaly to crisis and paradigm switch, he does so in terms of “gestalt switches.”1 Numerous passages in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions discuss the discovery of anomalies and the ensuing paradigm changes in terms of vision, to the point where Kuhn himself asks the degree to which such an emphasis on vision is necessary. “Do we,” he writes, [End Page 534] “really need to describe what separates Galileo from Aristotle, or Lavoisier from Priestly, as a transformation of vision? Did these men really see different things when looking at the same sorts of objects?” (Kuhn 120). He answers these questions in the affirmative. What if, as a kind of thought experiment, we were to close our eyes, bracket the visual dominance of the anomaly concept, and consider anomalous phenomena that are perceived along other sensory avenues?2 This essay undertakes just such an experiment by considering a sub-category of anomalies associated with auditory phenomena. Drawing on the original notion of the anomaly’s unevenness, I understand the irregularity of the anomaly in terms of a sonic and psychological irritation, such as what occurs when some anomalous objects “speak” to us in a provocative way that does not conform with our usual linguistic habits. This approach remains faithful both to the Greek omalos, which could also be understood in terms of “smooth” sound,3 and to the anomalos, which can refer to the “capricious” behavior of individuals, as one can read in Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. This is an idea that Johann Heinrich Lambert will reformulate as the Willkührlichkeit of the spoken word, Nietzsche stages as the utterance of a linguistic anomaly, and Blumenberg addresses via the concept of metaphor. Although each of the three case studies on the anomaly in this essay are historically quite distinct, they resonate with one another in surprising ways. The Speaking Organon The first case study is taken from Lambert’s Neues Organon (1764), a sprawling work dedicated to laying the philosophical foundations [End Page 535] for the distinction between truth and falsehood. It is also one of the most extensive philosophical engagements with the anomaly in the eighteenth-century German context. Lambert divided his treatise into four parts: dianoiology (the doctrine of those laws according to which our understanding orients itself); alethiology (the doctrine of the truth); semiotics (the doctrine of the designation of thoughts and things); and phenomenology (the doctrine of appearances, including the means of distinguishing between truth and appearance—a branch of philosophy whose name was coined by Lambert himself). The sections on semiotics and phenomenology are most relevant to the present discussion because they connect anomaly to sense perception. In the section on phenomenology, vision is the dominant sense, just as one would expect. Our perception of anomalies, such as in the astronomical context, testifies to the fact that we have erred from the truth. According to Lambert, anomalies therefore reveal Schein as Schein, and the converse is also true for him: the absence of anomalies allows us to conclude that there is no deviation between appearance and truth. The function of the anomaly in the section on semiotics could not be more different. The key term in this context is der Gebrauch zu reden: “In every theory...