The sociopolitical mystification of Chaos combines two advantages: it is an affordable rather than a dangerous thought; and it legitimates a type of auto-domination swathed in all the 'liberatory' and baroque glamour of scientific theories, certain of which even claim to have vanquished 'old-fashioned determinism'. We can appreciate the full force of the cretinizing seduction of the 'chaotizing' and of the ' self-organizing': a massive force like that of miracles, perfectly suited to excite the lusts of economists, of postmodern aesthetes, in short of all sociopolitological 'researchers', and of everything that feeds on the decline of the thinking of the political as such. Like all noncreative metaphors -- which we should call second-marriage metaphors -- Chaos, the Fractal, and Catastrophe are content to 'illustrate' and to 'bring to life' a model imported, as a turnkey solution, from mathematical theories. So they can happily dispense with any real thought experiment that might justify the choice of variables and parameters used to articulate pure mathematics with real causalities.
Gilles Chatelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs, pg. 33-34
