Chaosmos

This chapter analyses the elements that characterize Eco's tension between order and disorder, between cosmos and chaos, and that bring him to find a middle theory that characterizes his chaosmos.

Deleuze and Guattari write of the necessity of tearing such holes through clichés and opinion to enable the arrival of difference in the form of chaosmos: "A chaosmos, a composed chaos — neither foreseen nor preconceived...Art struggles with chaos but it does so to render it sensory.

In this sense, the paradoxical instance, or what we have defined as paradoxa, is the condition of possibility for chaosmos, or for any functioning assemblage, and it is chaosmos which is the expressed within events, or within the first stage of passive genesis.

For me, there is nothing outside the chaosmos. However, that does not mean that the chaosmos is unified, totalized, or complete.

Which is worse, asks Kelly Hurley, 'London as a chaosmos–a space of meaningless noise, activity, sensation in which narratives indiscriminately crowd one another and no one narrative has any more significance than the next' or 'the paranoid network of deeply-laid and infernal designs'?

This is an evocation of the messy multiplicity and ambiguity of consumers and outsiders, in the warm chaosmos and on the far fringes of Birdland.