Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Deleuze and the Social: Is there a D-function?
- I Order and Organisation
- 1 Order, Exteriority and Flat Multiplicities in the Social
- 2 The Trembling Organisation: Order, Change and the Philosophy of the Virtual
- 3 The Others of Hierarchy: Rhizomatics of Organising
- II Subjectivity and Transformation
- III Art and the Outside
- IV Capitalism and Resistance
- V Social Constitution and Ontology
- Notes on contributors
- Index
1 - Order, Exteriority and Flat Multiplicities in the Social
from I - Order and Organisation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Deleuze and the Social: Is there a D-function?
- I Order and Organisation
- 1 Order, Exteriority and Flat Multiplicities in the Social
- 2 The Trembling Organisation: Order, Change and the Philosophy of the Virtual
- 3 The Others of Hierarchy: Rhizomatics of Organising
- II Subjectivity and Transformation
- III Art and the Outside
- IV Capitalism and Resistance
- V Social Constitution and Ontology
- Notes on contributors
- Index
Summary
Order and Chaos
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari suggest that all thinking is a way of bringing order out of chaos, whether it takes place in the form of art, philosophy or science. Each of these distinct ways of thinking imposes its own kind of order in accordance with the different materials and methods it brings to the task: percepts and affects in the case of art, concepts in the case of philosophy, functions in the case of science. Order is what protects us from chaos. It enables us to recognise ourselves, each other and the world in which we live. In the absence of the order brought to our perceptions by the pure concepts of human understanding, Kant argued, we would be confronted with nothing more than a disorderly manifold or multiplicity of such perceptions. Order among our percepts and concepts enables us not merely to survive but to conceive and pursue projects which give meaning and purpose to our lives.
However, order can also imprison us in fixed and immobile patterns of thought and action, inhibiting creativity or change. Deleuze and Guattari cite a text of D. H. Lawrence on the source of poetry:
people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent – Wordsworth's spring or Cézanne's apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 203–4)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Deleuze and the Social , pp. 21 - 38Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006