Excerpts from "T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone"  By Hakim Bey:


  ... "Chaos Linguistics" traces a presence which is continually disappearing
  from all orderings of language and meaning-systems; an elusive presence,
  evanescent, /latif/ ("subtle," a term in sufi alchemy) -- the Strange
  Attractor around which memes accrue, chaotically forming new and
  spontaneous orders. Here we have an aesthetics of the borderland between
  chaos and order, the margin, the area of "catastrophe" where the breakdown
  of the system can equal enlightenment.


APPENDIX A. CHAOS LINGUISTICS

NOT YET A SCIENCE but a proposition: That certain problems in linguistics
might be solved by viewing language as a complex dynamical system or "Chaos
field".

Of all the responses to Saussure's linguistics, two have special interest
here: the first, "antilinguistics," can be traced --  in the modern period
--- from Rimbaud's departure for Abyssinia; to Nietzsche's "I fear that while
we still have grammar we have not yet killed God"' to dada; to Korzybski's
"the Map is not the Territory"; to Burroughs' cut-ups and "breakthrough in
the Gray Room"; to Zerzan's attack on language itself as representation and
mediation.

The second, Chomskyan Linguistics, with its belief in "universal grammar" and
its tree diagrams, represents (I believe) an attempt to "save" language by
discovering "hidden invariables," much in the same way certain scientists are
trying to "save" physics from the "irrationality" of quantum mechanics.
Although as an anarchist Chomsky might have been expected to side with the
nihilists, in fact his beautiful theory has more in common with platonism or
sufism than with anarchism. Traditional metaphysics describes language as
pure light shining through the colored glass of the archetypes; Chomsky
speaks of "innate" grammars. Words are leaves, branches are sentences, mother
tongues are limbs, language families are trunks, and the roots are in
"heaven"... or the DNA. I call this "hermetalinguistics" -- hermetic and
metaphysical. Nihilism (or "HeavyMetalinguistics" in honor of Burroughs)
seems to me to have brought language to a dead end and threatened to render
it "impossible" (a great feat, but a depressing one) -- while Chomsky holds
out the promise and hope of a last-minute revelation, which I find equally
difficult to accept. I too would like to "save" language, but without
recourse to any "Spooks", or supposed rules about God, dice, and the
Universe.

Returning to Saussure, and his posthumously published notes on anagrams in
Latin poetry, we find certain hints of a process which somehow escapes the
sign/signifier dynamic. Saussure was confronted with the suggestion of some
sort of "meta"-linguistics which happens /within/ language rather than being
imposed as a categorical imperative from "outside." As soon as language
begins to play, as in the acrostic poems he examined, it seems to resonate
with self-amplifying complexity. Saussure tried to quantify the anagrams but
his figures kept running away from him (as if perhaps nonlinear equations
were involved). Also, he began to find the anagrams /everywhere/, even in
Latin prose. He began to wonder if he were hallucinating -- or if anagrams
were a natural unconscious process of /parole/. He abandoned the project.

I wonder: if enough of this sort of data were crunched through a computer,
would we begin to be able to model language in terms of complex dynamical
systems? Grammars then would not be "innate", but would emerge form chaos as
spontaneously evolving "higher orders," in Prigogine's sense of "creative
evolution". Grammars could be thought of as "Strange Attractors," like the
hidden pattern which "caused" the anagrams -- patterns that are "real" but
have "existence" only in terms of the sub-patterns they manifest. If
/meaning/ is elusive, perhaps it is because consciousness itself, and
therefore language, is /fractal/.

I find this theory more satisfyingly anarchistic than either anti-linguistics
or Chomskyanism. It suggests that language can overcome representation and
mediation, not because it is innate, but /because it is chaos/. It would
suggest that all dadaistic experimentation (Feyerbend described this school
of scientific epistemology as "anarchist dada") in sound poetry, gesture,
cut-up, beast languages, etc. -- all this was aimed neither at discovering
nor destroying meaning, but at /creating/ it. Nihilism points out gloomily
that language "arbitrarily" creates meaning. Chaos Linguistics happily
agrees, but adds that language can overcome language, that language can
create freedom out of semantic tyrrany's confusion and decay.