Chaos, Post-Chaos

Chaos is that state of disorganisation and anarchy affecting a collectivity of any sort, once it’s beset by catastrophe. The post-chaos is that phase when a new order is reconstructed on the basis of a revolutionary, metamorphic logic.

It’s the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth, as expressed in Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return of the identical, as well as in René Thom’s mathematical theory of catastrophes. The society we know can’t be fixed, the system can’t be saved. This is the illusion of every conservative tendency. The sole solution to the present situation will come from chaos — from civil war, economic depression, etc. — that overthrows established mentalities and makes acceptable and indispensable that which was previously unimaginable. Only in situations of chaos are the given variables changed and does it become possible to establish another order — the post-chaos. Only in crisis, then, will a solution be found. To construct a new home, it’s first necessary that the old one collapses. It’s not a pessimist but a realist who sees this.

‘What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence…”’ From Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 194. This is one of Nietzsche’s central ideas.

René Thom (1923-2002) was a French mathematician who is best-known for his development of catastrophe theory. The theory is complex, but in essence it states that small alterations in the parameters of any system can cause large-scale and sudden changes to the system as a whole.

(see convergence of catastrophes; interregnum)