Journal #23:

"deviant"

Introduction by: Zeynep E. Celik

The new science of criminal anthropology admits without dispute that homicidal maniacs, certain incendiaries, many thieves and vagabonds, act under an impulsion… but in spite of this and because of this, it demands that the appeasing of the sincere longings of these degenerate creatures be prevented by all means…. It never occurs to us to permit the criminal by organic disposition to "expand" his individuality in crime, and just as little can it be expected of us to permit the degenerate artist to expand his individuality in immoral works of art. The artist who complacently represents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it, perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from the criminal who actually commits it.

Max Nordau, Degeneration, 1892.

Attempts to identify, analyze, and classify criminal types by measuring their deviation from a norm certainly existed prior to Max Nordau's writings.¹ However, Nordau's widely read book Entartung (Degeneration) published in 1892 was crucial in popularizing the view that the modernist artist was a socially deviant type produced by the same conditions that brought into being sadism, anarchism, and hysteria.² Nordau's vitriolic attack on modernist art and literature thus inextricably weaved together modernity, modernism, and deviance. As such, it can be said to have prefigured one of the dilemmas of modernism in the twentieth century: on the one hand, modernism's need to formulate itself as a deviant act upon what was perceived as the norm; on the other hand, its disgust with deviance and its concomitant desire to order, regulate, and clean.
Over a century later, it is not sufficient to dismiss Nordau's late nineteenth-century response as being simply anti-modernist. At a time when modernism is undergoing such rigorous critiques, both in architecture and in other fields, it is important to remember that a fascination with deviance has always been inseparable from a desire to eliminate it. Today there seems to exist more willingness to attend to the deviant instance as an opportunity to challenge the generality of norms. But the uncritical celebration of deviance does not guarantee freedom from the norms from which the deviant is imagined to have escaped.
Hence, despite the titillating ring of the word "deviant," this issue of thresholds is equally concerned with norms. Many articles published here focus their critical energies on extreme cases in which the most normal instance is transformed into the most deviant and vice versa. Rodophe el-Khoury, for example, takes cues from the work of the young artist An Te Liu to investigate the perverse extremes of the hygienic mandate of modern urbanism. Sheila Kennedy experiments with the most generic of building materials, drywall, to produce unexpected architectural conditions. In his analysis of a twentieth-century republication of a nineteenth-century text, Sunil Bald illustrates how narratives of deviance can be utilized by the institutions of a modern state to promote nationalist histories. Adnan Morshed reminds us of the potential for inversion latent in modernist utopias. In each instance, the deviant is not that which departs from the norm-a different species, so to speak-but has the intriguing quality of always carrying within itself that which appears to be its opposite.

¹ For example, Cesare Lombroso, to whom Nordau acknowledged his indebtedness, had attempted to relate criminal psychopathology and physical defects at the University of Turin.
² Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895). Originally published as Entartung in German in 1892.

Karl Blossfeldt, Ferns III, working collage in preparation for the composition of the final photograph, 1920s.