4. Nonlinear scheme of cultural and historical development
In recent decades more and more popular becomes synergetic approach. Synergetic is a new area of interdisciplinary research. Object of synergetic - processes of self-organization in different systems: physical, chemical, biological, climatic and so on. The founders of synergetic are a Belgian scientist, Nobel laureate in chemistry I. Prigogine and german physicist H. Haken. Synergetic approach is used in cultural studies. It provides a fruitful opportunity to build a new theoretical model of mechanisms of social and cultural changes.
According to a synergistic approach, culture appears to be an open nonequilibrium nonlinear self-organizing system. Nonlinearity of the system means that system has a many different ways of its evolution. The process of self-organization reveals an ambivalent nature of chaos, which can serve as a destructive factor and as a creative principle. In situations when the system reaches a certain critical level of nonequilibrium and becomes unstable then in the system appears at least two or more possible directions of development, attractors. This situation is called a point of bifurcation or polifurcation. I. Prigogine demonstrated that in the neighborhood of bifurcation points, some small fluctuations (random deviation) can play a very significant and even decisive role in determining the fate of the system. That means than near the bifurcation points opens multivariance of development of system and the chance starts to play a crucial role.
Thus the synergetic forms an idea alternativeness of ways of development of complex systems. This potentially gives a choice of options for further development of culture that meet the goals and interests of humanity and would not be detrimental to natural environment.
Thus, when in the nineteenth century biological science acted as constructive basis for making cultural theories (based on it, for example, appears evolutionary view of culture), then today a similar role do mathematical models that are developed within the framework of synergetics. They bring new insights into possible behavior of highly organized systems, including culture and possible ways to manage them.
The peculiar interpretation of the cultural dynamics is represented by theorists of post-modern tradition. Postmodern model of socio-cultural processes is based on the idea of disordered spreading of cultural processes that are essentially deprived of direction and regularity: it is a kind of "movement of desire". For them, the dynamics of culture are not growth or development, but a fundamentally different type of movement which can be denoted by the term "rhizome". The term "rhizome" as a postmodern image cultural dynamic was borrowed from botany, where it means a way of plant growth, which differs from both the branching stems from a single root (the metaphor of the systemic, orderly development of the cultural processes) and from "bundle" root. As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the originary source of "things" and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those "things". A rhizome, on the other hand, "ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles" (Guattari). The rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a "rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo". The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation. In this model, culture spreads like the surface of a body of water, spreading towards available spaces or trickling downwards towards new spaces through fissures and gaps, eroding what is in its way. Rhizome is disordered spreading of the multiplicity, which has no predominant direction and goes sideways, up, back, without any regularity, which would give the possibility to predict the next movement.