Chaos As Social Order

been considered ethnically homogenous tribes, clans, or cultures.  As the borders of the world’s nations change, as data transfer technologies dissolve the barriers of time, space, and place, as war and environmental degradation persist, as droughts, floods, and volcanoes displace people, more and more human beings are culturally vaporized.

            The condition of cultural vaporization, moreover, involves three simultaneous expansions–the increase in human population, the increase in urban dwellers, and the increase in standardization by the extension of centralized, bureaucratic control over larger and larger numbers of people and into more and more details of human life.  Coincident with these expansions is the contraction of total per capita living space and within that contraction a further contraction of unstandardized living space.

            Unstandardized, unoppressed living space can be a space of resistance, armed or unarmed, written or unwritten.  In the US, for example, where the rhetoric of individuality is continually encased in the gestures of conformity, the only unoppressed living space many people have is their bodies.  Thus, resistance to oppression as forced uniformity, as the constraint of standardization without the liberation of individualization–standardization as erasure of difference–appears as tattoos, body piercings, jewelry, hair-do’s, make-up, cars, clothing, music, dialects, food, and gestures.  But the information conveyed by such diversity has no clear or deterministic relation to the initial conditions of the resistors, that is, to their ancestors, their indigenous groups, or their homes.  Resistance by differentiating the appearance of one’s body is a response to

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