Semantics of Chaos: Modernity, Law and the Commons

Abstract

Abstract The mythology of modernity is arguably premised on a double gesture of emergence from chaos. The modern subject, self-posited, constructs the world of “order” by acting as the demiurge that brings the “civilized” world into existence. At the same time he negates the chaotic materiality of nature (including the body). This mythology is an exclusionary one. All modes of possessions escaping the abstract simplicity of the modern binary of public (sovereignty) and private (property), are ideologically and materially expunged from the parameters of common sense. This article will suggest however, that chaos operates also under a different semantic configuration, namely that which is directly linked to the corporeal, unbiddable complexity of social practices. In this alternate sense, which dis-articulates the linear narrative of modern emancipation, chaos is far from a primordial, disordered state of nature in need of either a self-positing subject or a policing Leviathan. The complexity of these social practices always already contains a plurality of arrangements, which are chaotic, yet, not disordered. From the perspective of liberal and neo-liberal hegemonic legalities, these chaotic practices remain “monstrous” and a “threat to the public order,” feared as a resurgence of that corporeal materiality the modern subject has striven to forget; from the perspective of the commons however, they are resisting strategies traversing liberal modernity, and may be understood, with Foucault, as (legal) insurrections.