Chaos As Social Order

available the physical and mental means for individual differentiation.  From the standpoint of chaos theory, this allows for indefinitely small and large distances between points, or subjects, in the pattern of the strange attractor.  It also allows for signs and signals, such as hair styles, clothing, gestures and jewelry, web pages, and c(i)ber(dentities), increasingly bereft of any anchorings in known, traditional societies–traditional initial human conditions.  Instead, these signs and signals increasingly occur in production, consumption and communication patterns that transcend national, linguistic, and ethnic differences or origins.

            Such uniformity of pattern and signal leads, fourthly, to another illuminating characteristic of strange attractors also repeatedly proven by physical experiments.  This is a continuous power spectrum.  When a mutable medium, a fluid for example, is excited beyond a certain threshold, its measurable signals change sharply from continuous to discontinuous to continuous.  At the extreme level of excitation, the signals are continuous.  Rather than showing discrete peaks and valleys throughout the signal, the bulk of the signal is continuous, undifferentiated “noise” (Brown 135; McBurnett (2) 43-5).  Urban areas where waking human activities go on twenty-four hours a day are examples of such social “white noise.”  This noise has the power to eclipse bird-songs, wind sounds, and much of human speech.  In urban areas, everyone’s and everything’s sounds and noises are folded upon one another and mixed into collective sound.  This mixing produces a variety of aural experiences which cannot be predicted from knowing the origin and quality of any particular sound–emergence and

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