Chaos As Social Order

reject, and so on.  These actions upon our actions have induced and introduced social power:  actions upon actions.

            Actions upon actions sounds repetitive.  Not redundant, but repetitive in the sense that something similar is recurring in each action.  Similarity through difference characterizes individual life stories, family histories, and community histories.  Indeed, as historical beings, all of human life is involved in each human action upon an action–patterned, compressed, focused, refracted, fractionated–as much as all of a language is “in” any instance of its use.

            What precisely then is the process of actions upon actions?  We can interpret the phrase as scalar recursion which is the recurrence of similar structure on different scales.  Something is similar in every instance of actions upon actions, whether it is in the relationships between a Supreme Commander and an entire military establishment, a lieutenant and a platoon, or one private and another.

            Paying closer attention to the phrase “actions upon actions” supports such a linking of social power with chaos theory.  The first and third terms–“actions”–are identical but this identity is qualified by the second term–“upon.”  The preposition “upon” is used rather than those which indicate symmetry or equality, such as “with,” “together with,” “beside,” etc.  The verbal sense of “action” is amplified by the dynamic sense of the preposition.  These observations may be provisionally summarized:  the structure of social power as actions upon actions is dynamic asymmetry.

            We next observe the absence of any modifiers of the noun “actions.”  Words such as

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