Chaos As Social Order

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

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