Chaos and Creation

In Deleuze, how is chaos linked to creation?

Chaos is not the opposite of Creation. They are allies.

The opposite of creation is: cliché, opinion, calcified habits, thoughts made into commodities, inherited frameworks masquerading as fresh perceptions. 

The world we inhabit is always cluttered and almost full. There is very little space. What occupies the world is not simply things or facts but names, rules, formulas, classifications, categories. Everywhere we turn, things have been assigned a name, a rule, a role, a mode of employment.

Everywhere also there are little communities: academics, businessmen, salesmen, with their nomenclatures, their jargon, their games, their symbolic systems, their open yet masonic gestures.

This is where we begin, in this already occupied territory.

One must first of all destroy some of it, tear through some of it, move it aside or collapse it in order to create. Or rather in order to allow the air to rush in without which there is no creation.

The writer or artist begins not with a blank page or a blank canvas but a word already there, a stereotype, a world of seeming facts, opinions and habits that have to be rubbed out and destroyed in order to win air and freedom. Once one has cut into this canvas of clichés, this page of preconceptions, something else is let in, something behind or above or underneath it. Air, chaos. “a breath of fresh air from the chaos that brings us vision”.

This act of destruction is the first creative act. It is destruction but always escape. An act of escape. Literary language is both these things at one. A destruction of received language and an escape, a continuous and innervating escape from the weight and numbness of consuetude.

But chaos can be anything, whatever punctures or disrupts the run-of-the-mill. In Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, chaos is the catacombs, the seeping wounded earth, the frozen agonies of Pompei seen by the Bergman character. In such moments, in the dark corridors of the dead or face to face with ancient statuary, with the steaming wound in the ground, one is stripped of one’s symbolic clothing, pitched beyond opinion, rules, law, one feels the inrush of air from the outside.

Chaos is anything which deranges the conditioned perceptions and senses, anything which awakens you to your own symbolic servitude. Bergman, unlike her costive husband, has the potential to open herself to this chaos but in the end reverts to her joyless marriage.