activity par excellence, that of creation: creation of concepts, creation of
artistic, narrative, poetic and musical assemblages.
These chaoids have the function of making of the world a circum-
stantial world (Umwelt), a populated and inhabited world. However,
this order is absolutely provisional, just as friendship is provisional,
allowing different actors to recognize each other in the same refrain, to
follow the same rules, to breathe with the same rhythm.The first philosophers are those who institute a plane of imman-
ence like a sieve stretched over the chaos. In this sense they con-
trast with sages, who are religious personae, priests, because
they conceive of the institution of an always transcendent order
imposed from outside by a great despot or by one god higher
than the others ... Only friends can set out a plane of immanence
as a ground from which idols have been cleared. (What Is Philo-
sophy?, 43)Infinity is the continuous unmaking of affective-chaosmotic orders
and the continuous creation that constitutes them in new and always
mutable planes of consistency. It’s like a competition, a game of tag
between mind and brain, between chaos and chaoids, between concep-
tual refrains and infinity. It’s a problem of speed: the constellations of
which the world is composed are transformed at mad speed, and the
world proliferates in all directions along continually broken lines.
Moreover, the brain, as neurophysical activity, as creative potential,
moves at a crazy speed. Then there is the slowness of singularization,
of assemblages between singular, conscious organisms and infinite pro-
liferation. The chaoids function like reductions of complexity, like
grids that allow the organism to recognize the world in which it
moves, to interact with it with full awareness.
But we do not always succeed in maintaining this speed, and the
game can generate a collapse, a loss of rhythm, a painful sensation of
disorder, an anxiety and a feeling of panic and also depression, that is,
a disconnection from the chaosmotic rhythm and the renunciation of
desiring investments.Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed
with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that
is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles
and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to dis-
appear immediately without consistency or reference, without con-136 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_13_cha12.pdf 10/3/08 11:36 AM Page 136