Research in the social and cultural sciences focuses on questions of social order. As different as the theoretical approaches and empirical findings may be, they are always based on specific ideas of order: rules are to be worked out, patterns identified, and structures made visible. The social appears as a multi-layered ordering context of classes and types of capital, functional systems and organizations, networks and interaction situations, life course regimes and modes of subjectivation, socio-technical arrangements and communication media, worlds of meaning and practices. At the same time, concepts of order are always accompanied by specific notions of non-order. What order is can only be determined in demarcation from its outside. In social and cultural science theories, however, this other usually appears only as an exception.