Note: Initial knowledge of intersectionality required
The world we live in is complex and even chaotic. To many, this is a pretty obvious observation and assertion. The response to the obvious, and I argue inherent, complexity and chaos of our current reality has turned out to be a much less straightforward matter than ‘simply’ noticing it. In the following I aim to establish multiple definitions and connections between intersectional feminism (see Crenshaw 1989, 1991; McCall 2005), more-than-human anthropology (see Locke and Muenster 2018; Tsing 2015), chaos theory (see Bishop 2017; Gleick 2008) and a philosophical position I call panchaoticism, as an attempt at a provisional response to the chaos that surrounds us. The motivation behind this attempt is to contribute to what I believe to be the purpose of philosophy, feminism, anthropology and indeed all critical scholarship in theory and in practice: making currently oppressed ways of existing more possible and aid in their flourishing, as well as creating new concepts, knowledges and practices to make new, interesting and life-affirming ways of existing possible.
I will start by elaborating on a philosophy I call panchaoticism. An important aspect of this position is metaphysical, although because no region of philosophy can be separated from the rest, it also includes epistemological, ethical and aesthetic aspects. The main focus of this introduction will be first the metaphysical and then the ethical parts of panchaoticism.
Panchaoticism does not necessarily require a beginning, but if one wanted to define one it would be the theory that chaos is everything. The entirety of reality is encompassed and made up of only chaos. This presupposes that reality and chaos exist, and while these presuppositions can be criticized (especially from an epistemological perspective), panchaoticism doesn’t assume any specific version of chaos and especially of reality exists, which I see as the main and justified reasons for criticism of any statements made about the nature of reality. Therefore I opt to move forward with these presuppositions. The key question then becomes: what is chaos? The definition of chaos in panchaoticism, and therefore large parts of its substance, is derived from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s 1994 book: “What is Philosophy?”. Two passages from the book are most relevant to this discussion of chaos, first: “ [There is no] concept possessing every component, since this would be chaos pure and simple” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 15) and: “ […] chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 42). I opt to paraphrase the second passage like so: Chaos is not the absence of determinations/orders, it is the taking shape and vanishing of determinations/orders at infinite speeds. The conclusion drawn from the first passage is that chaos, much like Spinoza’s god or nature, is the only thing which encompasses everything and is (a part of) everything. From it follows that everything that is not chaos in its totality (e.g. people, a building, mushrooms, a landscape, ecosystems, a chair, words etc.) is a fragment/part of chaos. And that no fragment of chaos (human cognition being one such fragment) can ever encompass or be or understand chaos in its totality. This is mainly due to the second passage and my paraphrasing of it, which are the fundamental definitions of chaos in panchaoticism. What is incomprehensible (to humans) in chaos are not its determinations, which could also be called categories. We can at first glance understand the existence of categories quite well, although many currents of thought, intersectional feminism being one of them, effectively challenge this assumption. What we can’t understand, I argue even at first glance, is infinite speed. Due to this, ‘pure’ chaos as in a state where all determinations really do take shape and vanish at infinite speeds has never occurred in the timeframe of human knowledge, since if it had, there is ground to believe human knowledge as we know it would have ended at that point in time. Therefore all aspects of reality are not only fragments of chaos and never ‘pure’/’total’ chaos itself, but all these fragments (especially the ones intelligible to us) move at non-infinite speeds in time and space.
But at this point I want to stop talking about the what of this version of chaos and move on to the why. Why would one choose to view reality through this lens of chaos, how can its consequences be interpreted and implemented, and what are its connections to intersectional feminism, more-than-human anthropology and chaos theory? The last aspect of panchaoticism I want to mention here is that it is not meant to be a “god trick” in the sense Donna Haraway describes objectivity and relativism (Haraway 1988). It is not meant to be a one-all theory to explain everything through the lens of metaphysical chaos, it is meant to be a way of paying attention to reality that acknowledges its complex and ephemeral nature, which almost always extends beyond the limits of (especially) individual human understanding. This call for attention is the key ethical requirement of panchaoticism.
Thinking through panchaoticism opens up possibilities. When chaos and complexity (I will be using the two terms somewhat interchangeably in the following, since they have many relevant areas of overlap, despite this they are not completely congruent), and not a specific order, are presupposed many different ways of existing can emerge and co-exist without being immediately judged in relation to a limited number of worldviews and their exclusionary categories.
The opposition to any type of stable categories or (social) order is a main bridge between panchaoticism and intersectional feminism. Leslie McCall differentiates between three types of intersectionality applied in feminism: anticategorical, intracategorical and intercategorical in her Article: “The Complexity of Intersectionality” (McCall 2005). Panchaoticism is most closely aligned to anticategorical and intracategorical frameworks. Anticategorical approaches consider (social) life too complex to be categorized in any fixed way, and that any attempt to categorize produces exclusion and inequality by simplifying reality according to an always limited and subjective perspective. The focus of anticategorical intersectional theory and practice is then to deconstruct and destabilize analytical categories, to stop/undo the process of categorization which is seen as harmful (McCall 2005). Through the lens of panchaoticism, this intention and its results are analogous to the attempt to deconstruct all aspects of reality that reduce the speed of determination’s and categories’ taking shape and vanishing, based on a negative interpretation of the reduction of speed and reductionism as a whole. The opposition especially to reductionism but also essentialism is a central unifying aspect of all the approaches named in the introduction, but this point will be returned to later.
Intracategorical intersectionality as described by McCall shares a critical view of categorization and the assumption that social life is highly complex, but more so than anticategorical approaches, it recognizes the effects of categories as oftentimes stable to people living in specific moments in time. While it remains critical of these categories throughout, intracategorical research tends to focus on groups or individuals: “at neglected points of intersection—“people whose identity crosses the boundaries of traditionally constructed groups” (Dill 2002: 5) —in order to reveal the complexity of lived experience within such groups.” (McCall 2005: 1774). This approach can also be closely aligned with panchaoticism, since it seeks to understand why some determinations/categories are ‘slower’, so to speak, and what kind of effects these categories and their unique speeds and attributes have in relation to other categories and aspects of reality. The insights generated from this perspective can be very useful contributions to the aim of making and changing what ways of existing are possible.
One of the biggest threats to a proliferation of life-affirming ways of existing today is the global ecological crisis (climate change and biodiversity loss being two key aspects). And while intersectionality (anti-, intra- and intercategorical) can and is used to analyze and criticize the interconnected capitalist extractivist, racist, sexist origins and effects of this crisis in fields like ecofeminism (Kings 2017), in part because of its origins in law (Crenshaw 1989) and its strong historical connections to traditionally anthropocentric social studies and humanities, intersectionality is not often thought of in immediate connection with ecology. Anthropology, specifically more-than-human/multispecies anthropology provides an effective bridge while also housing many concepts that connect and are interesting to a panchaotic perspective. I will be using Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s 2015 book: “The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” as my primary example for more-than-human anthropology.
In her book, Tsing analyzes the ecological, economic and social relationships and entanglements between matsutake mushrooms, pines and humans (Tsing 2015). She does this in the context of supply chain salvage capitalisms’ interaction with human disturbed forests and their human and nonhuman inhabitants: a complex, indeterminate and chaotic set of systems. To conceptualize her work, she presents multiple concepts. The three I want to focus on in this text are assemblage, contamination and precarity.
Tsing takes the concept of assemblage specifically from ecology. Assemblages in ecology are “[…] open-ended gatherings.” (Tsing 2015: 23) of species that may or may not influence each other in a given space and time: “The question of how the varied species in a species assemblage influence each other – if at all – is never settled: some thwart (or eat) each other; others work together to make life possible; still others just happen to find themselves in the same place.” (Tsing 2015: 22). An example for an assemblage Tsing gives are fields of shifting cultivation in Indonesian Borneo. Where unlike in industrialized monocultures, many different crops grow together on any given field. Each of these crops has a different rhythm, some more like other plants’ than others. These plants and their rhythms interact not only with the humans harvesting them, but also with different pollinating insects, microorganisms and insects in the soil, the atmosphere etc.. She goes on to suggest that paying attention to how assemblages work is a way to notice the possibilities of indeterminate and multidirectional (i.e. chaotic) history, and I agree: “[…] if we want to know what makes places livable we should be studying polyphonic assemblages, gatherings of ways of being. Assemblages are performances of livability” (Tsing 2015: 157-158).
The second concept of contamination ties into the assertion that: “Assemblages don’t just gather lifeways [/determinations]; they make them.” (Tsing 2015: 23). The process of the creation of lifeways is contamination. Contamination describes the fact that we as so-called human individuals, but also different species, concepts, landscapes etc. change through encounters with each other. The dynamic process of contamination is constant and inescapable, analogous to chaos in panchaoticism. Tsing puts it best when she says: “Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option.” (Tsing 2015: 27). Contamination, like the concepts of assemblage, intersectionality and chaos, implies irreducibility, contingency, interconnection and indeterminacy. Categories and lifeways don’t come to be and interact in a self-contained manner, they emerge from their encounters. Paying attention to the process of contamination in this sense requires, like intersectional frameworks, a presupposition of nonessentialism. Categories cannot have stable essences if they emerge from and are changed and contaminated by their encounters with other categories and concepts. This form of more-than-human anthropology therefore aligns with anti- and intracategorial intersectionality frameworks in its approach to categories and the lived realities that constitute and are constituted by them.
The final concept Tsing introduces that I want to talk about is precarity. To live in a chaotic reality is to live precariously. Many things, indeed almost everything is out of one’s control. Even the idea of control is unstable and might disappear completely for indeterminate periods of time. This all doesn’t sound too good or comfortable, which may be reasons why many of our philosophical, political, social and economic systems are built on attempts at the avoidance if not outright denial of precarity. Gender/sex essentialism is a specific example. The (false) assertion that there are only two genders/sexes and that they have uniquely different, deterministic and self-contained attributes is an attempt to avoid the precarity of the gender/sex-binary as a historical cognitive framework with the purpose of reducing the contaminated multiplicity of all human bodies to one of two determinations/categories. The deconstruction of such a framework is surely worthwhile, since it opens up new possibilities for a multitude of previously oppressed bodies and identities. But precarity as an underlying attribute of our reality doesn’t disappear because of it. So how to proceed if “precarity is the condition of our time […]” (Tsing 2015: 20)? It is important to approach precarity carefully and with the assumption that it is inherently complex. Intersectional frameworks such as intracategorial approaches have been doing this for a long time by focusing on social groups at neglected intersections (McCall 2005). The neglect these groups face due to their marginalized positions in socio-ecological assemblages like cities and their (more) visible contamination put them in intensely harmful precarious states. It is a main goal of critical social analysis and scholarship such as intersectionality studies and select forms of philosophy, anthropology and other disciplines to aid in developing ways out of such situations. But even though there are multiple ways out, always contingent on the context of the situation and the subjects living in it, one thing is clear: no effective way out can involve completely eliminating precarity, indeterminacy, and chaos. “Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible” (Tsing 2015: 20). Therefore, if what I propose to be the purpose of critical thought is true in that it is to make (new) life-affirming ways of existence possible, precarity and indeterminacy must be key dimensions of that thought and of its practice. This is what panchaotic metaphysics and epistemology, but especially ethics is about. Paying attention to precarity and indeterminacy, finding new, effective ways to think about these phenomena to be able to help understand and live with(in) them to the best of our abilities. Chaos can never be neutral to us by virtue of our living in it, but it can be said to be indifferent in its varied changes and speeds. Precarity and indeterminacy are much the same. The task then is to imagine and make real those possibilities/determinations that exist within chaos that we might deem to be life-affirming and limiting/attempting to eliminate those we might deem to be harmful and discriminatory. While at the same time remaining attentive to chaos and its precarity and indeterminacy in ways that allow us notice when the designations we have chosen in the past have been fundamentally changed by contamination and the unplanned nature of time. So that we can then change them in tune with chaos to the extent that the changes align with the ultimate goal of creating and sustaining life-affirming possibilities.
Finally, I want to elaborate on some of the connections and differences between panchaoticism and at first glance maybe its most obvious relative in the realm philosophical/scientific thought: chaos theory. Chaos theory is a branch of science based in physics and mathematics which focuses on phenomena that appear to be characterized by chaos and randomness. It was first formulated on a larger scale in the 1960s and 1970s, therefore coinciding with the development of feminism and feminist philosophy of science to an extent (Skordoulis and Gkiolmas 2007). Both Chaos theory and feminist philosophy of science have several common positions that oppose the Newtonian paradigm in science. Skordoulis and Gkiolmas list them as such: “They both: a) Believe that scientific inquiry has a limited ability to find the truth and to be objective. b) Treat nature as an entity participating in the research science carries out on it, and c) Take into consideration the “difference” and deny reductionism” (Skordoulis and Gkiolmas 2007: 2). All these positions are shared by panchaoticism: a) scientific inquiry is a fragment of chaos, meaning that it has an ultimately limited capacity to comprehend chaos in its totality; b) earlier in this essay I compared chaos to Spinoza’s nature (albeit without determinism), as an entity that plays an active part in everything, since it is (a part of) everything, furthermore Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of chaos makes chaos an undoubtedly active concept and entity; c) and finally, the fact that panchaoticism denies reductionism has been stated multiple times throughout this text. That being said, there exist some important differences between chaos theory and panchaoticism. Firstly, panchaoticism as a philosophical-ethical position is not necessarily about finding order in chaos, it is about unleashing fragments of chaos from reductionist and essentialist frameworks (e.g. queerness within heteronormativity) in some instances and interacting with chaos to find/extract interesting and new concepts/orders to make existences within chaos possible in a certain time frame. There is no presupposition of an end goal of finding the order of chaos. And secondly, panchaoticism generalizes more than chaos theory. Chaos theory is seen to be complementary to other frameworks such as Newtonian or quantum mechanics, focusing only on the phenomena that those frameworks fail to explain (Skordoulis and Gkiolmas 2007). Although panchaoticism is explicitly not meant to be a “god trick”, it does go beyond just complementing Newtonian or quantum mechanics to state that chaos is everything on a metaphysical level. This doesn’t mean that the intent is to claim this position as ultimately objective, it is explicitly a theory (based on necessarily partial empirical and rational observations). The main intent and focus is instead exploring what sort of epistemological and ethical consequences and possibilities this position has for life-affirming thought and practice.