chaosmos

English

Etymology

Blend of chaos +‎ cosmos. Coined by Irish novelist and poet James Joyce his in 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.

Noun

chaosmos (uncountable)

1. The world, viewed as a fusion of order and disorder.
   • 2003, Cristina Farronato, Eco's Chaosmos: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernity, page 11:

     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.

   • 2003, Richard Doyle, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living, →ISBN, page 15.6:

     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.

   • 2006, Jeffrey A. Bell, Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos, →ISBN:

     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.

2. The world, viewed as a meaningless assemblage of infinite perspectives.
   • 1999, Marcus A. Doel, Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science, →ISBN:

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

   • 2013, Matthew Beaumont, Matthew Ingleby, G.K. Chesterton, London and Modernity, →ISBN:

     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'?

   • 2014, Douglas Brownlie, Paul Hewer, Mark Tadajewski, Expanding Disciplinary Space: On the Potential of Critical Marketing, →ISBN:

     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.