Chaos and Possibilities (a Preview)

[genderjumper]

So for the past year, I kept a daily journal of some of the chaotic phenomena of our lives. Some were personal or interpersonal, some were emerging, and a few I was able to give historical context on HOWITGOTTHISBAD.

My thought process was that so much of our material are digitized at this point that if we ever lost the ubiquity of the Internet or electronic material altogether, this would be a new "dark age" (so called in Europe not because times were so bleak or because the weather was always cloudy, but because there was so relatively little written material to go on compared to the Greeks and Romans before and the Renaissance after). I'm trying to preserve some things materially (and bonus: my hand no longer hurts when I write for more than three minutes!).

A couple of folks I told when I started this initiative seemed shocked and concerned for my wellbeing, because to them chaos was inherently a bad thing and therefore I was courting or even celebrating depression and BAD THINGS. But chaos is not BAD THINGS, it is entropy. Entropy is bad when your worldview is centered on order in perpetuity, but entropy is the more natural (and according to my very rudimentary understanding of chaos theory, is itself cyclical: once a pattern devolves and structure is no longer useful, new patterns will emerge on a different scale and the whole process will start over again).

Anyway, I did not in fact get any more depressed or bleak over the course of 2023 than I would have without that journal. It gave me a focal point to observe the world around me in a new way. Having done so, I want to continue but in a new way for 2024.

The next theme of my journal will be POSSIBILITIES. On the surface, this is a reflection of the Chaos Journal -- what is humanly possible at this time that has never been before and/or may never be again? But I'm also trying to use that perspective to discern some greater truths that are evident across times and geography -- a novice effort at metasociology, perhaps? The vast majority of the social sciences as we know them are so steeped in "Western" hegemony that studies will be impossible to replicate under other economic, cultural, and technological circumstances. Seeing the present moment, vis à vis pandemic(s), war(s), and corruptions(sss), as roughly an apex or precipice culminated on everything that came before (and with very little room to go anywhere but down), we have a unique birds eye view if we take the time to appreciate it. We have way more information about humans than has ever before been accessible, and we are at the peak of human understanding before it either crashes back down or is handed over to computers to process on our behalf (or hell, maybe both). Why not try to use this purview to leave something behind that is beyond ourselves?

Relatedly (perhaps), I am also thinking about trying to review and develop a canon of research to bridge the social relationships of human beings and time itself. I mean, it's pretty fascinating that we have this incredible physical understanding of space-time (we still don't know why it only moves in one direction, and string theorists like to posit that it's only our perspectives that work that way but they STILL can't explain why) and we have a decent enough multidisciplinary understanding of how human beings construct selves and culture and how these all interact together, and there are even fields to deepen the understanding of how humans are sculpted by our material (not just economic, though yes that, but also things like roads and institutions and food sources and waste removal) realities, and so far as I can tell there is no central field studying how time and culture intersect.

My biggest inspiration for this is a cosmology book I read over a decade ago, About Time by Adam Frank, but there are others strewn around in books on neurocognition and quantum physics and chaos theory and cultural studies and marketing and the history of factories and demography... but there's no academic hub I can find that pulls it altogether and says, "This is how human relationships and cultures reflect their material relationship with time." I don't think it could help being metaphysical (even spiritual), but then the emergence of sciences are rarely the cold, calculating laboratories we bias today.

Anyway, if you know any good books on sociotemporality (whatever its authors call it), let me know?