Chaos As Social Order

“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

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