Laura Smithers

My thoughts have been more unfocused than usual recently. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. In honor of this unfocus, here’s some thinking on the work of order and chaos, and why I think these concepts come to matter in the study of higher education.

[Kris Renn via Dahlia Lithwick on order and chaos muppets comes to mind in relation to American higher education research, but it’s not my jumping off point here.]

If the posts/new materialisms/ontological turn etc. etc. ad infinitum do anything to alter normative ways of thinking and being, or habit, they do this work through strategic utilization of (false) binaries to exploit the contingency (and thus possibility) of the world as it is. Today’s false binaries: order and chaos.

Order: the straightening of the world. The world’s adherence to a grid of intelligibility. Pure machinic assemblage + collective assemblage of enunciation. Legibility.

Chaos: the queer, the deviation, a line of flight, the unintelligible, the non-legible.

The wisdom to know when order or chaos is the engine of progress is elusive – to know it comes . The problem isn’t just in the duality of order and chaos, but in conceptions of progress and time.

Progress: an increase in our power of activity. Determinate or indeterminate. Measurable or immeasurable. Indeterminate/immeasurable progress: not simply something without a current apparatus of measurement (with making one indexes more progress), but an irreducibly qualitative value. Examples: making a new friend, falling in love, appreciating the beauty of a space, developing trust – these are real qualities without being actual (and thus determinate/measurable) things.

Time: duration, sometimes straightened into chronological order. A concept for later.

Order and chaos: the duality that begets the fascism of thin blue line flags (always say the whole phrase: [cops are] the thin blue line between order and chaos). Chaos, from a nationalist, strongman perspective is an objectively bad and unlivable state of affairs, one that in particular threatens agential (dominant culture) humans who have made the right choices. Order comes from a few enforcers of the law. Society faces annihilation without the threat of force to tame it. Progress is order that responsible humans follow and that a select and exalted few enforce on the irresponsible.

Order and chaos: the duality that fuels desires to become productive humans, to order our worlds such that no time is wasted, every moment is not simply used but maximized. Order optimizes environments as it optimizes ourselves. It provides the moral force and clarity for action. Hustle harder, or choose to be poor. Chaos impedes what is not just optimal but moral. Actions uncategorizable in each moment as efficient need straightening. We need to create cultures of productivity (of data, of assessment, of strategic planning, of institutional transformation) to transform ourselves into embodiments of order – a current and future order, here and now.

Order and chaos: chaos as liberation, chaos as a space and time on the outside of order. To live not just in contradiction to order but without it, with no reference to it. To return to a different order would to be overdetermined differently. Chaos here as liberation is pure freedom – a line of flight. Order grounds – a territorialization. Pure freedom doesn’t leave room for an entangled world. Pure order overdetermines our collective existence.

Order in chaos in order in chaos…: attempts to make static a changing world become destructive when forced into permanency. Enforced interpersonal order on social relations is totalitarianism. Enforced order on ourselves is discipline, power made internal. Enforced order made environmental is biopolitics, control, ontopower, power that remakes reality. Enforced chaos under any of these conditions is an anarchy that… well, would definitionally defy enforcement. A relation of becoming – the no longer and not yet of order and chaos – the space and time wherein we increase our power of activity. A situation of progress that doesn’t need a strongman relation from the outside or from within.

[Order, chaos, order, chaos certainly finds its musical expression in 30/90 from tick… tick… BOOM.]

In a world of productivity gone environmental – a world of opportunities and threats to be produced or blocked as if they are real before they are real – how can we (we, collectives, small, shifting, together-apart) insist on living in the middle? We have things to do, so many things to do, emails to return, classes to teach, publications to author, all largely unbounded by concerns of space and time. Why aren’t you a thought leader yet? Can you sell those insights on the side for money? Can you sell those insights within your job to externally fund your own institution? Can you publish an increasing number of articles every year until retirement? Can you minimize the time you spend teaching students so you can maximize the time you spend producing objects of value for your institution (graduates, seat counts, publications, grants, reputation)?

What is liberation in an entangled world? What moral force comes with living in the middle? Order in chaos in order in chaos. The middle denies the colonizing force of order and chaos. The middle is a grind, but one that increases our power of individual – and collective – power. The middle denies the fantasy of becoming properly ordered (sorry to your thought leader aspirations) or properly chaotic (sorry to your pure anarchist aspirations). Liberation as collective is messy, difficult, impermanent, shifting, never complete, and hopeful. I think this is what Ahmed’s queer orientation provides, here regarding orienting to concepts rather than objects. To be straightened, to come into line with a normative world, is to become order. To orient queerly isn’t to orient to pure chaos; it is to live in a world not made for you to increase your power and to do so anyway. It’s to orient away from order, towards progress, to queer order for progress, order, chaos, order, chaos.

[Why can’t you stay 29
Hell, you still feel like you’re 22
Turn thirty 1990
Bang! You’re dead,
What can you do?]

Over and over throughout the years I have seriously questioned why I just don’t open up (somehow, on vibes) the combination coffee shop/bookstore of my dreams. It would have good music too. And feature local art. Add more hopes and dreams here. Rainbows and smiles. At this point, what keeps me from this (besides capitalism) is this persistent urgent feeling that our various pursuits of order in higher education are killing education, or our collective pursuit of progress. With this death comes the death of our ability to live collectively in ways that increase our power. A response of chaos is inadequate as it cannot hold, and I don’t think it would be desirable to try. Order, chaos, order, chaos, break the colonizing hold of straightening devices, orient queerly to the pursuit of learning. Of education. Of living together. The world of measurable progress follows this, if only we could trust life in the middle, without calculations and strongmen et al. as external locations of trust. Life in the middle gives hope. Life after the end of higher education will certainly relocate our middle, but not its actions.

[30/90
30/90
30/90
30/90
30/90
30, 30/90
What can I do?]

I published something on this five or so years ago and I am still learning its lesson. Perhaps this post is also middle. Maybe next I’ll have thoughts on time. There are various products I need to produce in the meantime.