According to the Lucretian account of chaos falling into order by the chance concourse of atoms -- Sometimes, wrote Lucretius, at uncertain times and places, the eternal, universal fall of the atoms is disturbed by a very slight deviation - the "clinamen." The resulting vortex gives rise to the world, to all natural things.
The clinamen is also translated as "swerve," and in its literary dimension marks a point of intellectual revision. (see Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence.) Lucretius attributes both the creation of nature and the creations of mind to the clinamen. "The fact that the mind itself has no internal necessity to determine its every act and compel it to suffer in helpless passivity--this is due to the slight swerve of the atoms at no determinate time or place."
"Again, if all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order -- if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect -- what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the world?" Lucretius, De Natura Rerum, Book II.
No atoms, casually together hurl'd
Could e'er produce so beautiful a world.
Nor dare I such a doctrine here admit,
As would destroy the providence of wit. --Dryden
Prigogine refers to Michel Serres' studies of Lucretius and links the clinamen to the attempt to explain turbulence. (from Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos p.141)For Michel Serres, the clinamen is" the minimum angle to the laminar flow that initiates a turbulence." (Serres, Hermes, p.99)
Presumably, Prigogine's "fluctuations" are instances of the clinamen. (see bifurcation) (see also self-organization) cf " sensitivity to initial conditions"
For Jean Laplanche, the transformation of the functions of instinct into sexuality is a clinamen.The clinamen is the operator that marks the passage from the theoretical to the practical: it is the birth of existence.
In general, what is a form? Answer: some smooth plus some folds (Serres, Atlas,p.48)