Anomaly Quotes

“Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“An anomaly has his own ambitions. You can try reasoning with him, but that's like using money to bribe a beast.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Anomaly enables miracle.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“The key is to remain an unpredictable anomaly.”
― Steven Redhead, Life Is A Cocktail

“In the face of the threats of a total weightlessness, an unbearable lightness of being, a universal promiscuity and a linearity of processes liable to plunge us into the void, the sudden whirlpools that we dub catastrophes are really the thing that saves us from catastrophe. Anomalies and aberrations of this kind re-create zones of gravity and density that counter dispersion. It may be hazarded that this is how our societies secrete their own peculiar version of an accursed share, much after the fashion of those tribal peoples who used to dispose of their surplus population by means of an oceanic suicide: the homeopathic suicide of a few serving to maintain the homeostatic balance of the group.
So the actual catastrophe may turn out to be a carefully modulated strategy of our species - or, more precisely, our viruses, our extreme phenomena, which are most definitively real, albeit localized, may be what allow us to preserve the energy of that virtual catastrophe which is the motor of all our processes, whether economic or political, artistic or historical.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Don't just be... Be a positive anomaly.”
― Damon Thueson

“A negative passion cannot become universal. You cannot imagine a federation of hatreds. You might almost wish to see such a scenario come about. But the worst situation doesn't always materialize. The fact remains that from this point on there is something which is completely beyond social regulation. If this is not the end of History, it is certainly the end of the social. We are no longer in anomie, but in anomaly. Anomaly is what escapes not only the law but the rule. What is outside the game, `offside', no longer in a position to play. The outlaw space bred violence; this offside space breeds virulence. But as to what exactly is being bred in anomaly, we have no notion. When a system becomes universal (the media, networks, the financial markets, human rights), it automatically becomes anomalous and secretes virulences of all kinds: financial crashes, AIDS, computer viruses, deregulation, disinformation. Hatred itself is a virus of this kind.
Take Paulin, the man from Guadeloupe who went around murdering old ladies a few years ago. A monstrous individual, but cool, and with no apparent hatred in him. He had no identity, and was of indeterminate sex and mixed race. He committed his murders without violence or bloodshed. And he recounted them with an odd detachment. Being indifferent to himself, he was eliminating people who were themselves indifferent. But we can assume that behind all this there was a deep fund of radical hatred. Doubtless Paulin `had the hate', but he was too classy, too educated, to express it openly.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

“We confront a paradoxical process, then, whose duality - tetanization and inertia, acceleration in a void, overheated production with no attendant social gains or aims - is a reflection of the two phenomena conventionally attributed to the crisis: inflation and unemployment.
Traditionally, inflation and unemployment are variables in the equation of growth. At this level, however, there is really no question of crisis: these phenomena are anomic in character, and anomie is merely the shadow cast by an organic solidarity. What is worrying, by contrast, is anomaly. The anomalous is not a clear symptom but, rather, a strange sign of failure, of the infraction of a rule which is secret - or which, at any rate, we know nothing about. Perhaps an excess of goals is the culprit - we simply do not know. Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Whence the special status of such extreme phenomena - and of catastrophe in general, understood as an anomalous turn of events. The secret order of catastrophe resides in the affinity between all these processes, as in their homology with the system as a whole. Order within disorder: all extreme phenomena are consistent both with respect to each other and with respect to the whole that they constitute. This means that it is useless to appeal to some supposed rationality of the system against that system's outgrowths. The vanity of seeking to abolish these extreme phenomena is absolute. Moreover, they are destined to become more extreme still as our systems grow more sophisticated. And this is in fact a good thing - for they are the leading edge of therapy here. In these transparent, homeostatic or homeofluid systems there is no longer any such thing as a strategy of Good against Evil, there is only the pitting of Evil against Evil - a strategy of last resort. Indeed, we really have no choice in the matter: we simply watch as the lesser evil - homeopathic virulence - deploys its forces. AIDS, crack and computer viruses are merely outcrop pings of the catastrophe; nine-tenths of it remain buried in the virtual.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“We do not usually surrender the intellectual system of a lifetime for one bit of information that does not fit.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“I like the duck-billed platypus
Because it is anomalous.
I like the way it raises its family
Partly birdly, partly mammaly.
I like its independent attitude.
Let no one call it a duck-billed platitude.”
― Ogden Nash