410

Anomaly designates an incongruous result that falls outside calculations of probability within a given set of constraints. While most commonly associated with the scientific experiment, it has become a central metaphor in modern expressions of averages and norms, and a means by which the scale of a particular phenomenon can be realised. For instance, a door in a wall which allows us to step, momentarily, outside the known threshold of a house, the better to perceive the scaffolding, and identify other possible architectural configurations.

Anomaly is usually difficult to incorporate without changing the parameters of the experiment, social structure, or legal framework, so it is usually easier to allow it to surface, ponder briefly over it, and then either relegate it to an archive, in the hope that it may at some point become useful, or – alternatively – try to forget it. Quite often, experiments have anomalies codes into the parameters of investigation, empty spaces designating an unforeseen consequence outside the envisioned results. Anomaly usually depends upon spatial representation – statistic, relic, photograph.

In fiction, characters often move from archetype to subject through encountering what is anomalous, either about their own experience or about something in the world around them; anomaly enables a certain kind of action, generated by a subjective response to the undeterminable. Most detective stories, for instance, are organised around the anomaly as a central mystery, a disturbance interrupting business as usual. In order for the anomaly to appear, a framework must make it possible, just as in order for a rogue gentleman detective to solve crimes on an ad hoc basis, a judicial system must be in place that will try its best to ensure that justice is served when the riddle is solved. Almost every detective story involves the death of an anomaly.

Lara Choksey