Order out of Chaos: The Pharmacology of Cybernetics in The Posthuman Comedy

Order out of Chaos: The Pharmacology of Cybernetics in The Posthuman Comedy

This paper interprets Dung Kai-cheung’s novel Hou Renjian Xiju (The Posthuman Comedy) as philosophical fiction exploring the dynamic interplay between order and disorder through the lens of cybernetics. It identifies three intersecting themes—the political, the planetary, and the epistemo-ontological—that both draw on and reconfigure insights from cybernetics to address the challenges posed by increasingly complex entanglements of man, machine, and the environment. Borrowing the phrase“order out of chaos”from Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, this paper employs it as a metaphor to examine how the novel navigates the tension between order and disorder. This analysis reveals two distinct articulations of“order out of chaos.”In the first, chaos is conceived in an epistemological register, as something that can be tamed or regulated through algorithmic governance. In the second, chaos is understood to be inherently interwoven with order, serving as a vital catalyst for the system’s ongoing evolution. The conclusion proposes a new Promethean image of thought centered on the productive tension between noumenal unknowability and reflective interpretability that characterizes the condition of posthumanity depicted in the novel. This reframing of Prometheanism offers a critical resistance to today’s dogmatic technoscientific imperative of translating“what can be done”into“what must be done.”