Chaos As Social Order

into shapes and forms that are usable–reproducible–over long periods of time and in different spaces.  The different spaces of guard and prisoner, patient and doctor, or consumer and producer are thus different contexts–attractors–which continuously operate upon and within each other.

            Paradoxically, the decomposability of human practices reflects the nondecomposability criterion of chaotic systems:  “Chaotic systems are indecomposable because they cannot be broken down into two subsystems that do not interact; this arises because of topological transitivity” (Richards 96).  This point can be understood mathematically as the requirement that “[n]onlinear differential equations, and the phenomena or problems they describe, must be seen as a totality, that is, as nondecomposable” (Kiel and Elliott 4; see also, Jaditz 69).  For example, riding a bicycle can be viewed as a combination of large muscle skills using legs and arms, or of small muscle skills using hands, feet, and eyes, or of social sensitivities involving posture, appearance, and style.  Each of these three combinations can be viewed separately as a verbal or even quantitative event.  However, none of them can be lived, experienced, or learned separately.  They all come with each other; they all interact with, impact, and are impacted by each other.  However finely the “subsystem” involved in bicycle riding–or using a computer, singing, swimming, painting, riveting–is described as a separate coherent skill or ability, it is always (already) interacting with all of the other systems.  Indeed, the growing popularity during recent decades of terms such as “interpersonal,” “interaction,” “interconnection,” and “interpenetration” suggests that chaos

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