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: