Is it possible to draw on scientifi c concepts to further our understanding of cultural processes? In Order Out of Chaos, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers proposed that the emergence of nondeterministic scientifi c approaches to material processes (e.g., thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, chaos theory) constitutes an important opportunity to forge a “new alliance” between the natural and human sciences.1 Prigogine and Stengers understand the gap between the “natural” and the “human” not so much as an ontological claim (based on the irreducibility of the human to the deterministic laws of nature) but as the historical product of a schism between physics and metaphysics. Such a schism, they claim, was precipitated by the modern emergence of mechanicism in engineering and reductionism in science with its image of a complex and free humanity endowed with spirit at loss in a universe ruled by strict mechanical laws. The result of this bifurcation of thinking is well known: disciplinarization and specialization reducing the relationship between the natural and the human sciences to sporadic and conflictual encounters.2
