ABSTRACT

This chapter adopts a CCO lens to examine the salient triggers that activate the interplay of order and disorder as dialectical tensions. Four features-boundary work, struggle, meaning and context-emerge from the existing literature as forces through which communication constitutes (dis)order in the interplay of opposites. Boundary work and struggle enact order and disorder as separate processes that implicate each other and privilege one pole over the other, whereas negotiating meanings and representing contexts treat order and disorder as interdependent concepts that become mutually entangled. Materiality, such as technology, objects and spaces, surface in the turning points or the shifts between order and disorder. These triggers have implications for constituting complexity as human and nonhuman actors come together in assemblages or entanglements with each other and with contradictory forces. Actions and interactions in these entanglements amplify or attenuate complexity in the ways that multiple agents deal with tensions. In the studies that adopted a CCO approach to order-disorder, assemblages of association and assemblages of affect amplified or increased the intensity of tensional relationships, while ones that developed a metalanguage reduced complexity through elasticity that stretched opposites and formulated a new whole.