Chaos As Social Order

contexts to be basins of attraction.  A basin of attraction is a set of initial conditions in phase space which leads to a particular attractor or context.  These initial conditions are usually connected, such as the practices of a group, and form a continuous subspace in some larger cultural phase space.

            Reported by Peter Yam in the March, 1994 issue of Scientific American, numerical experiments conducted by Edward Ott and John C. Sommerer, in which a particle in motion on a “frictional surface is occasionally pushed,” led to indeterminacy as to which of two attractors “the particle would chase, because one basin is riddled with pieces of the other basin.”  According to Yam, the researchers found that, so far from basins simply overlapping each other at their edges or occasionally penetrating each other’s space, “every area in one basin, no matter how small, contained pieces of the other basin within it.”

            This research supports chaos theory as a good representation not only of particular practices but also of contexts which interpenetrate by mixing and folding.  All human practices are accumulations of other practices.  Any one practice can be either decomposed into smaller practices with varying histories or recomposed into larger practices with varying histories.  For example, learning to use a computer keyboard involves the fine coordinations of using different fingers separately as well as the gross skills of using equipment powered by electricity, such as plugging in a plug and turning on a switch.  What we mean by tradition, custom and habit is precisely a layering–mixing/folding–process by which information is compressed and through repeated use and application eroded

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