Chaos As Social Order

tin art projects:Chaos As Social Order

Introduction

            Chaos is a new way of understanding social order.  Rather than a perverse paradox, this assertion draws on the diverse developments of chaos theory in the natural and mathematical sciences (Barnsley 1988; Crutchfield et al 1986; Dewdney 1985; Gleick 1987; Mandelbrot 1983; Mullin 1993).  Over the past two decades, chaos theory has been applied in many disciplines of theoretical and applied science (Baier and Klein 1991; Cohen and Stewart 1994; Davies and Gribbin 1992; Gleick 1987; Hao 1990; Holden 1986; Moon 1987; Mullin 1993; Rasband 1990; Ruelle 1989), including some areas of social science (Brown 1994; Chen; Dendrinos and Sonis 1990; Gell-Mann 47-48; Goodwin 1990; Hao 573-632; Holton and May; Kiel and Elliott 1996; Lewin 44-62; Nicolis 1991).  The latter applications, however, have used chaos theory as a mathematical tool incorporated into conventional conceptual frameworks rather than as an alternative conceptual framework which could illuminate the very social order from which chaos theory has arisen.  To serve conceptually chaos theory must be understood conceptually.

            In this article, I do not produce mathematical models or computer simulations nor do I offer copious new data.  I also definitely do not use chaos as a metaphor.  This is not a literary exercise designed to decorate the social sciences with yet another image, such as the machine, the organism, the deductive system, or the adversarial debate (Morgan 1986).

            It might seem appropriate to group chaos with such heuristic metaphors.  These metaphors have been used in social science to approach and explore phenomena which were thought to be otherwise intractable to rigorous scientific examination.  However, the success of multiple research efforts in the mathematical, physical, life, and social sciences in identifying various kinds of chaotic dynamics suggests that chaos should be grouped not with metaphors but with known types of order such as linear deterministic, stochastic, and random.

            This grouping emphasizes that I use chaos as a theory not as a model (Harvey and Reed 309).  My use of chaos is therefore theoretic and not semantic (Richards 98).  This grouping also does not deny that the bulk of existing research has regarded chaos as an outcome of changes in parameters of deterministic systems.  Chaos is usually viewed as deterministic chaos.  It affirms, additionally, the discovery of chaotic dynamics in social science data (Kiel and Elliot) where the social situations generating the data cannot be reduced to linear deterministic principles or equations.  From this affirmation seems to flow the possibility that chaos is a kind of order which is not strictly dependent on deterministic systems for its existence.  Indeed, as a type of order, chaos may be the first clear, non-reductionist link between certain specific conditions in numeric and physical systems, such as phase transitions, and a pervasive, spontaneous quality of social reality.  Rather than a fad or a misplaced metaphor, chaos may be a small window into a new and larger way of understanding human life which includes determinism, stochasticity, and randomness.

            Grouping chaos with known types of order frames chaos as a comprehensible form of order rather than as a metaphor for some incomprehensible condition.  Besides being a more useful alignment, this grouping also raises a deeper question for the philosophy or foundations of social science.  This question defines the horizon of my inquiry here:  What properties must the (social) universe have in order to exhibit all four kinds of order?

            Considering chaos as a type of order allows me to use the results of experiments to prepare the conceptual ground for chaos as social order.  I present the established features of chaos which bear on social order.  I highlight the mixing/folding phenomenon characteristic of physical chaotic phenomena (Crutchfield et al 51-4; Gleick 122, 255, 257; Mullin 19-21).  My focus on social power as actions upon actions provides a necessary bridge for understanding chaos as social order.

            After this presentation of chaos theory as a conceptual framework, I then lay out an application of chaos theory to diverse social phenomena–oppression, modernization, language change, moral change, political change, and cyberspace.  In the course of this application, I show that chaos theory can be used conceptually to clarify contemporary social order but that the nature of social phenomena place significant limitations on the mathematical application of chaos theory to social science data.

Social Power

            We begin by reflecting on the fact that others–mother, father, siblings, pets, blankets, rain, sun–have been acting upon us for a long time.  Others, both animate and inanimate, have been acting not only on our bodies as rain acts on tin, water, or sand but more specifically on our bodies’ attempts to act.  These actions include the entire range of qualities–caress and punch, embrace and push, praise and blame, approve and reject, and so on.  These actions upon our actions have induced and introduced social power:  actions upon actions.

            Actions upon actions sounds repetitive.  Not redundant, but repetitive in the sense that something similar is recurring in each action.  Similarity through difference characterizes individual life stories, family histories, and community histories.  Indeed, as historical beings, all of human life is involved in each human action upon an action–patterned, compressed, focused, refracted, fractionated–as much as all of a language is “in” any instance of its use.

            What precisely then is the process of actions upon actions?  We can interpret the phrase as scalar recursion which is the recurrence of similar structure on different scales.  Something is similar in every instance of actions upon actions, whether it is in the relationships between a Supreme Commander and an entire military establishment, a lieutenant and a platoon, or one private and another.

            Paying closer attention to the phrase “actions upon actions” supports such a linking of social power with chaos theory.  The first and third terms–”actions”–are identical but this identity is qualified by the second term–”upon.”  The preposition “upon” is used rather than those which indicate symmetry or equality, such as “with,” “together with,” “beside,” etc.  The verbal sense of “action” is amplified by the dynamic sense of the preposition.  These observations may be provisionally summarized:  the structure of social power as actions upon actions is dynamic asymmetry.

            We next observe the absence of any modifiers of the noun “actions.”  Words such as “all,” “most,” “many,” “some,” etc. could have been used.  But no one can actually count the number of actions upon their body.  This noncountability extends across all human time scales.  This is true whether the time scale of the actions is generations of national patterns mediated by living cohorts, years of family patterns mediated by relatives, years of being a consumer, student, parent, child, or employee, or months of dating, going steady, being engaged, or being married.  It is not possible, therefore, to fit this idea of social power into a quantitative, countability dualism such as finite/infinite.  This impossibility in turn refines the provisional summary in the preceding paragraph:  “upon” is ambivalently or ambiguously asymmetric.  It is not necessarily either symmetric or asymmetric.

From Detector To Attractor

            This understanding of social power can be used as a power detector.  It can be used in any human situation to bring into view, to outline or highlight, to unmask or reveal, power relations.  This power detector is not like a metal detector that finds a distinct, physical thing nor is it like a thermometer that quantitatively reduces a complex physical condition.  It is a detector of human situations in which people’s actions may be found to be acting upon people’s actions.  It can be used analytically to consider relations of cooperation or collaboration, which are indeed actions upon actions, as well as to consider situations of oppression.  It predicts that social power will be dynamic, ambiguously and fluidly symmetric/asymmetric, and numerically uncountable.

            The condition of uncountability may be understood as meaning that actions can be decomposed and recomposed indefinitely into more and less inclusive patterns.  The oppression of being forcibly confined in a mental institution, for example, can be analyzed in many terms–architectural, political, economic, familial, social, psychiatric, etc.  All the terms are relevant to an analysis aimed at completeness though none of the terms exhausts the entire range of actions upon actions in such a situation.

            We can now consider a smooth social process or the surface of water in laminar flow without turbulence or chaos.  The onset of turbulence or chaos constitutes both a qualitative and a quantitative change from the laminar condition and is not simply an accumulation of prior conditions.  The change introduces a pattern characterized by repetition and similarity across different scales of the pattern.  The detector of social power detects a repeated action upon action among human beings.  The repetition and the similarity indicate a certain attraction of the actors to one another.  The detector indicates an attractor.

            In chaos theory, an attractor is a pattern in space.  The kind of space is state or phase space.  Phase space is a multidimensional space inclusive of the Cartesian coordinates and the momentum of a system, i.e., the attractor.  There are many definitions of attractors in the literature (Cohen and Stewart 204-7; Coveney and Highfield 166-75; Gleick 150, 232-6; Hao 16-18, 51-63; Kiel and Elliott 26, 54-5, 172; Mainzer 4-7, 58-9; Mullin x-xii; etc.).  Moon’s definition is simple and useful:  An attractor is a “set of points or a subspace in phase space toward which a time history approaches after transients die out.  For example, equilibrium points or fixed points in maps, limit cycles, or a toroidal surface for quasiperiodic motions, are all classical dynamical attractors” (261).  The attractor pattern is an equilibrium state or set of states to which a dynamical system converges.  An attractor is not necessarily either one or many states exclusively.

            The verbal phrase “to which…converges” conveys this non-dualistic quality and also points toward the quality of an attractor that makes it strange:  a final equilibrium is never reached–symmetry is never reached, nor is a “stable” asymmetry reached.  The pattern shows self-similarity across scales but it never reaches an identity, or, equilibrium condition.  Using Moon again, a strange attractor is “the attracting set in phase space on which chaotic orbits move.  An attractor that is not an equilibrium point nor a limit cycle, nor a quasiperiodic attractor.  An attractor in phase space with fractal dimension” (267).

            A strongly defining characteristic of a strange attractor, moreover, is sensitive dependence on initial conditions.  The pattern of a strange attractor may be taken as the pathways of points that begin at arbitrarily small distances from each other.  Over time, those distances change so much and so quickly that at a later time in the pattern the initial conditions are no longer observable.  The later state of the pattern or system cannot therefore be connected deterministically with the beginning state.

            It has been proven repeatedly in both numerical and physical experiments that such a pattern must involve simultaneous folding and stretching.  For example, you put a spot of dark blue dye on the surface of a large lump of white bread dough.  You then knead the dough.  Kneading folds and stretches the dough.  Folding and stretching mixes the blue dye through the dough until it is distributed throughout the dough.  The entire mass of dough is pale blue.  It is physically or mathematically impossible to determine from the final state of mixed dye where in the dough the spot was in the beginning.  The sensitivity of the system to its initial conditions thus means that, regardless of how close to each other the elements are initially, stretching and folding results in the initial conditions no longer being observable or deterministically relevant.  Such mixing involves simultaneous expansion and contraction.  As this happens, old or earlier information is destroyed and new or later information is created.

Chaos And Oppression

            When introduced into a consideration of oppression, this approach illuminates some crucial aspects.  First, oppression works on the human body in two distinct ways–one by removing the body from home and two by covering the body with non-indigenous, uniform clothes.  Examples of both operations can be found with prisoners of war, convicted criminals, committed mental patients, military personnel, and students in compulsory education.

            Second, oppression works on human structures and on the earth.  Imperialism, whether religious, political, military, or ecological, has repeatedly involved the destruction of buildings and of parts of the earth such as groves, crops, livestock, fields, and species.  Examples are the destruction of groves of trees in the Old Testament, the burning of manuscripts in China in 212 BC and the burning of the library in Alexandria, in 525 AD.  More currently, the destruction of human living spaces and places, from rain forests, to living sites, to old sections of cities, involves the destruction of old information and the creation of new information.

            Combining these two operations of oppression, we see the human bodies of survivors, born and bred close together, then moved, mixed, and clothed so that, when observed later, no traces of their initial conditions–their indigenous or native states–remain.  The old information about the former identity of the displaced persons or of the destroyed places is replaced by new information resulting from actions upon the persons and the places.  If we add to this the repression, disuse and disappearance of unprivileged languages and customs, then the image of uniform mixing, or, mixing for uniformity, becomes clearer.

            Third, sensitive dependence on initial conditions in both numerical and physical experiments involves amplification of small initial differences into larger differences later.  Twins, siblings, and neighborhood or village cohorts often develop lifeways that not only put out of focus their initial conditions but also differ from one another in ways that are not susceptible to deterministic, linear calculation.  In the case of groups of ethnically homogeneous refugees crossing a border into another country, individual lifeways can diverge beyond linear reckoning over time.

            From the standpoint of social power, the actions of such people are worked on by the actions of social operations that “mix,” “fold,” and “stretch” everyone.  At one and the same time, contemporary, industrial, urban society functions to stereotype everyone while making available the physical and mental means for individual differentiation.  From the standpoint of chaos theory, this allows for indefinitely small and large distances between points, or subjects, in the pattern of the strange attractor.  It also allows for signs and signals, such as hair styles, clothing, gestures and jewelry, web pages, and c(i)ber(dentities), increasingly bereft of any anchorings in known, traditional societies–traditional initial human conditions.  Instead, these signs and signals increasingly occur in production, consumption and communication patterns that transcend national, linguistic, and ethnic differences or origins.

            Such uniformity of pattern and signal leads, fourthly, to another illuminating characteristic of strange attractors also repeatedly proven by physical experiments.  This is a continuous power spectrum.  When a mutable medium, a fluid for example, is excited beyond a certain threshold, its measurable signals change sharply from continuous to discontinuous to continuous.  At the extreme level of excitation, the signals are continuous.  Rather than showing discrete peaks and valleys throughout the signal, the bulk of the signal is continuous, undifferentiated “noise” (Brown 135; McBurnett (2) 43-5).  Urban areas where waking human activities go on twenty-four hours a day are examples of such social “white noise.”  This noise has the power to eclipse bird-songs, wind sounds, and much of human speech.  In urban areas, everyone’s and everything’s sounds and noises are folded upon one another and mixed into collective sound.  This mixing produces a variety of aural experiences which cannot be predicted from knowing the origin and quality of any particular sound–emergence and synergy–and which blur into white noise in which no one sound dominates although any one sound may be momentarily more or less distinct.  In fact, the blur of urban noise obscures not only origins but also dynamics (Brown 123; Dendrinos 241; McBurnett (1)171-5, 185, 190).  Is the dynamics of urban “white noise” random, stochastic, chaotic or yet another type of order which a conceptual use of chaos theory can illuminate better than other kinds of order concepts?  I will return to this question in my conclusion.

            A continuous power spectrum connects with sensitive dependence on initial conditions in describing, at the onset of chaos, the destruction of old information and the creation of new information.  Pre-chaotic signals literally disappear and are replaced by erratically punctuated broadband noise.  This characteristic connects with oppression in that the latter always involves the injection of new energy into an existing system.  Destroying living sites, destroying some bodies and moving others, burying the dead and clothing the living then resocializing the survivors injects new energy into the bodies and into their relations with others.

            Oppression not only subjects bodies to new forms of energy but also makes new energy available to those bodies.  It should be emphasized here that this use of chaos theory does not lead to any simple, reductionist view of social power or of social order.  Social power may constrain or it may liberate or it may do both in the same situation and through the same person.  Declines in the hegemony of white, American, heterosexual, Christian males, books and chainsaws coupled with empowerment of women, children, homosexuals, non-whites, non-Christians, non-Euroamericans, hard drives, and endangered species show oscillations of social power in contemporary social order.

            Some further examples of this mixing and folding are Gandhi learning English and English law which he used to drive the British from India, Crazy Horse learning to use a rifle with which he killed invading soldiers, prisoners using weapons taken from guards against guards in prison riots, and students using computers to attack the military-industrial complex, university regulations, or high school dress codes.  This variable characteristic of energy-induced continuous power spectra–as though the law of the conservation of energy were functioning socially to preserve social power regardless of who has it or what its change of hands does to existing social order–shows that some kinds of social power persist through interruption.

            Two examples of persistent social power are the physical structure of a modern prison and the legal and temporal structure of modern mass education.  In the former, a prisoner’s body is disciplined twenty-four hours a day by its environment of bars, walls, locked doors, and fences with or without other individual human presence.  In the latter, people from six to sixteen years of age are persistently disciplined by a system that linearly encloses every day of the calendar year with its own significant events, such as the beginnings and endings of classes, quarters, terms, and semesters.

            A closer look at an excited fluid will strengthen the connections just mentioned.  When heat is applied to water in an open container the water moves gradually until there is a sharp transition to boiling.  Boiling may be understood as the creation of infinite surface in finite volume.  The water occupies a finite space.  The elements of the water, the water molecules, remain forever separate but move more and more rapidly.  Since the molecules cannot turn into each other and since they cannot stop moving, they must have infinite surface.  They get infinite surface by the rolling of the water which is a process of stretching and folding the fluid medium.

            The water mixes, folds and stretches indefinitely and unpredictably.  Boiling may be further understood as releasing thermal energy to air.  The more heated water is exposed on the surface to air, the more heat is released.  If the heat is stopped the water will cease boiling and return to its pre-chaotic, quiescent regime.  If the heat is continued the water will slowly vaporize until the container is empty.