5 Chaos as Dialectic: Stanislaw Lem and the Space of Writing

Abstract

St a n i s l a w Le m has a formidable range of interests. Trained as a physician, he is seriously interested in mathematics, has taught himself cybernetics, possesses a good working knowledge of biology, knows quite a lot about cosmology, has read extensively in critical theory and philosophy, and writes in Polish, German, and English. The one thing he seems not to know is chaos theory— at least not in the explicit forms discussed earlier, in which chaos is identified with a new set of paradigms. When Lem writes about chaos, he understands it in the older sense of chance, randomness, disorder. Through his reading in cybernetics, he has had ample opportunity to learn about the principle of self-organization that underlies Prigogine’s work. However, he has not published anything to date that would indicate he has read Prigogine or knows about applications of the idea of self-organization to chaotic systems. Yet chaos is a topic of almost obsessive interest for Lem. His writing suggests that he considers accounting for randomness and disorder perhaps the most important issue in twentieth-century thought. Influenced both by his scientific training and by poststructuralism, he is concerned with the interaction between something and nothing as they collaborate to form human meanings. His fascination with disorder, his wide reading in cybernetics, and the influence of post-