Its a process necessary to the perpetual motion of the cultural machine. Just as Sartrean Existentialism got corroded into the Boho-Beat impulses of the 50's and the Post-Marx fury of Situationism got tangled up with the Dionyisian dreams of the 60's, its been a tradition for a harmless idea to enter the slip stream of every day life and end up poisoning the cultural reservoir(or in all fairness sweetening it ). Look at the way Malcolm McClaren bastardized "The Revolution Of Everyday Life" to bring you the lucrative glories of the punk rock revolution.

Complexity with its highly impressive scientific credentials has already had its first taste of the pop experience Its most pedestrian off-shoot, chaos theory, acquired the status of bonafide fabulousness when ID magazine began to ponder such E-head insights as "The flutter of a butterfly's wing in a Brazilian rain forest can provoke a typhoon in Japan" and of course those fractal graphics, images based on ever spiraling mathematical variations were rapidly co-opted as a look of the moment. (Just check out Jodeci's new CD cover).

Dismissiveness aside Complexity with its lexicon and adages pertaining to "self-organizing adaptive systems', "information" and "emergence" arrives just in time to map itself into the chicness of the New Electro Culture. For instance, apply all those buzzwords to the Internet and you begin to glimpse the timeliness of this new school.

What is intriguing about Complexity , as we approach a millennial turning point, is its brazen confidence in numbers and computers, its reassurance that there is no such thing as randomness or erraticism, that every single thing in life is patterned is so positivist( in the protean sense), its almost as if Complexity is intent on bringing back God. Not necessarily the God of Nietzchian principles, but God as a symbol for structure, order, meaning, justice and symmetry in the universe.

Given the nihilistic tedium of the post-Nietzchean vision, a scientific/philosophical proposition that places "hope" at its core is halfway home on the layman's shelves. Complexologists are well aware of this, their titles proclaim things like "Dreams Of Reason." or in the test case we are presently considering "At Home In The Universe." by Stuart Kaufman of the Sante Fe Institute.

The essential base of the body of "complex" ideas --and bear in mind this is almost an infantile paraphrase-is as follows-For some reason, every aspect of human experience, from our molecular structure to the universe we exist in, organizes itself into--systems, children's games, families, governments, computer programs, highways, corporations, architecture, sleeping patterns,--all these things take on central organizing principles which start as simple variable.

Kaufman goes a long way in assuring us that these expansions and explosions have a plot and a path, that what looks like noise and meaninglessness actually has a traceable trajectory.

What is dazzling about Kaufman's proposition is his belief that by tracking the siftings of his synthetic systems, he can track the probable "evolution" of that given entity.

It brings into the big themes, like pre-determination and fate and it is around this juncture that "God" shows his complex face. If everything in the universe is designed , then which audacious force is doing all that overtime sculpting? In many ways Mr. Kauffman makes god of men when he stipulates that by tracking these "laws of complexity" we can discern the workings of the universe we exist in . We need not feel random and insignificant, we may be bequeathed an antidote to our modern alienation and nihilism.

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