On the way to Nonlinear Literature: Order

According to the Cambridge Dictionary order means;

the way in which people or things are arranged, either in relation to one another or according to a particular characteristic.1

Chronologic, taxonomic, or numeric are only a few techniques of order that assist us in organizing our thoughts, hence our life. Leibniz suggests that one can understand the order of the universe by looking at the working principles of a machine system. Seemingly Leibniz's approach is tangible yet also outdated when it comes to today's phenomenon like the internet or algorithms. Through Leibniz's studies, Lazare Carnot proposes the scientific term entropy, which later on recognized as the second law of thermodynamics, refers to changes in the status quo of a system and produces randomness or disorder(chaos).


Atlas: Order of Memory, Gerard Richter

Since the order requires categorization, it inevitably engenders a hierarchy of some sort. Atlas: Order of Memory of Gerard Richter, for example, objects to the usual notion of the archive as a system of the hierarchical ordering of visual content and offers juxtaposition and discontinuity, as opposed to sequential and taxonomic ordering, are the order of the day.2 Atlas gathers family photos, historical archives with landscapes, as well as snapshots of Richter’s wives and children with Holocaust images, sketches of exhibitions, and commercially printed photos of sunsets, still lives, and travel vistas.

As hierarchy is one of the three theories of Michael Foucault, he elaborates on it in his preface of The Order of Things with the concept of heterotopia where multiple orders can co-exist in a place. In heterotopia, all the possible orders exist separately and simultaneously and become a lawless and uncharted dimension called the heteroclite. Things are laid, placed, arranged in sites, and it is too difficult to find a common ground for them all.3

Therefore, I conclude researching further on order in place/space may enrich this research and also add another perspective to perceive the nonlinear narratives as they don’t follow rules of space.

Word count: 324
1. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/order
2.https://www.riha-journal.org/articles/2018/0200-mesquita-duarte
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/
https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/michel-foucault-representation-pipe/
Mayer, Thomas F. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 96, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1544–1546. www.jstor.org/stable/2781914
https://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/gunesch/Entropy/soc.html
https://litreactor.com/columns/out-of-order-a-discussion-of-nonlinear-narrative-structure

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