The sociologist Jean Baudrillard uses metaphors about chaos or non-Euclidean geometries in his discussions of history or society. But these metaphors are rather arbitrary, and do not at all clarify what he means, as the following example shows:
One must, perhaps, consider history itself as a chaotic formation where acceleration puts an end to linearity, and where the turbulence created by acceleration definitively separates history from its end, as it separates effects from their causes. The destination, even if it is the Last Judgment, we shall not reach it, we are henceforth separated from it by a hyperspace with variable refraction. [Baudrillard (1992)]
And, for another example, quoted by Gross and Levitt (1994):
There is no topology more beautiful than Möbius' to designate the contiguity of the close and the distant, of interior and exterior, of object and subject in the same spiral where the screen of our computers and the mental screen of our brain become intertwined with each other as well. [Baudrillard (1987)]
As Gross and Levitt say: ``This is as pompous as it is meaningless; but it is well contrived to impress readers whose knowledge of mathematics is superficial or nonexistent." (Gross and Levitt, 1994). Finally, some works of Guattari alone combine an almost random sequence of scientific and philosophical words:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis. The notion of scale needs to be expanded to consider fractal symmetries in ontological terms. [Guattari (1992)]and it goes on and on like that, for pages after pages.