We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2022
The term disruption has been offered as both an ethos and set of practices framed as a broad response to all manner of social and political ills. This article offers a speculative reflection on disruption as a planetary mood, and the sensory qualities of a change in politics no longer defined by governance and what is governable, but by a series of continuous experiments hedged upon the creation of new geopolitical frontiers and life forms that position all matter and contingency towards a specific kind of value tied to chaos. In thinking about the kinds of authority and legitimacy being fashioned around visions of so-called disruptive futures, I draw on materially-grounded illustrations of disruptive dispositions to examine three different arrangements of affect, feeling, and intensity being animated to give disruption its power of transmissibility and adaptability, as well as its unintuitive emphasis on disorder and ‘breaking things’ as both a moral good and unconditional response to questions concerning global conflict, crises, and instability. Ultimately, disruption as a planetary mood draws on a libidinal economy that does not bend towards justice or equity, thus warning against misanthropic commitments to collapse and the consequences of investing in a world premised on an ethos of erasure.
1 Ngai, Sianne, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 44Google Scholar.
2 Grove, Nicole Sunday, ‘Welcome to Mars: Space colonization, anticipatory authoritarianism, and the labour of hope’, Globalizations, 18:6 (2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Vardi, M. Y., ‘Move fast and break things’, Communications of the ACM, 61:9 (2018), p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See Aradau, Claudia, ‘The promise of security: Resilience, surprise and epistemic politics’, Resilience, 2:2 (2014), pp. 73–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Mareile Kaufmann, and Kristian Søby Kristensen, ‘Resilience and (in)security: Practices, subjects, temporalities’, Security Dialogue, 46:1 (2015), pp. 3–14; James Brassett, Stuart Croft, and Vaughan-Williams, Nick, ‘Introduction: An agenda for resilience research in politics and international relations’, Politics, 33:4 (2013), pp. 221–8Google Scholar; David Chandler, Kevin Grove, and Stephanie Wakefield (eds), Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance and Politics at the End of the World (London, UK: Routledge, 2020).
5 In important ways, this typology emerged from an attempt to bring together and respond to multiple generous conversations and prompts facilitated by the editors of RIS over more than a year. See contributions from Louise Amoore, ‘Machine learning political orders’, Review of International Studies (2022), pp. 1–17; and Charmaine Chua in this Review of International Studies forum.
6 Levina, Marina, ‘Disrupt or die: Mobile health and disruptive innovation as body politics’, Television & New Media, 18:6 (2017), p. 549CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cited in Sharon Shahaf and Chiara Francesca Ferrari, ‘Interrogating “disruption”: Global television culture between continuity and change’, Critical Studies in Television, 14:2 (2019), pp. 153–9.
7 Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen, ‘Disruptive technologies: Catching the wave’, Harvard Business Review, Jan–Feb (1995), pp. 43–53.
8 Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovators Dilemma (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997); Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).
9 Christensen and Raynor, The Innovator's Solution; see also Gobble, MaryAnne M., ‘Defining disruptive innovation’, Research-Technology Management, 59:4 (2016), pp. 66–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Alison Agnes Veith, ‘“Don't Be Evil”: Google's Labor, Technology, and the Limits of Corporate Good (Dissertation, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, 2015), pp. 70–1.
11 Clayton M. Christensen, Rory McDonald, Elizabeth J. Altman, and Jonathan E. Palmer, ‘Disruptive innovation: An intellectual history and directions for future research’, Journal of Management Studies, 55:7 (2018), pp. 1043–78.
12 Christensen Institute website, available at: {https://www.christenseninstitute.org} accessed 2 July 2022.
13 Nieto-Gómez, Rodrigo, ‘“The power of the few”: A key strategic challenge for the permanently disrupted high-tech homeland security environment’, Homeland Security Affairs, 7:1 (2011)Google Scholar; Nabil Sultan and Ziyaad Sultan, ‘The application of utility ICT in healthcare management and life science research: A new market for a disruptive innovation’, The European Academy of Management Conference EURAM (2012), pp. 6–8; Christensen Institute profile of Drinkwell's ‘water ATMs’, available at: {https://www.christenseninstitute.org/blog/targeting-nonconsumption-the-most-viable-path-to-growth} accessed 2 July 2022.
14 ‘Disruptive’ technologies are commonly identified as those outlined in communications such as the 2013 McKinsey Global Institute report, available at: {https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/disruptive-technologies} accessed 2 July 2022. See also description of the United Nations Global Pulse Big Data for Development partnerships, available at: {https://www.unglobalpulse.org} accessed 2 July 2022.
15 See Daniele Rotolo, Diana Hicks, and Ben Martin, ‘What is an emerging technology?’, Research Policy (2015).
16 Levina, ‘Disrupt or die’, p. 556; see also Latzer, Michael, ‘Information and communication technology innovations: Radical and disruptive?’, New Media & Society, 11:4 (2009), pp. 599–619CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Geiger, Susi, ‘Silicon Valley, disruption, and the end of uncertainty’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 13:2 (2020), pp. 169–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christopher Groves, ‘Horizons of care: From future imaginaries to responsible research and innovation’, Shaping Emerging Technologies: Governance, Innovation, Discourse (2013), pp. 185–202; Levina, ‘Disrupt or die’; Marina Levina and Amy Adele Hasinoff, ‘The Silicon Valley ethos: Tech industry products, discourses, and practices’, Television & New Media, 18:6 (2017), pp. 489–95.
18 Alison Agnes Veith, ‘“Don't Be Evil”’.
19 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
20 Levina, ‘Disrupt or die’, cited in Geiger, ‘Silicon Valley, disruption, and the end of uncertainty’.
21 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York, NY: Verso, 2018).
22 Lauren Anderson, ‘Disruption: Catalyst for a collaborative future’, Collaborative Consumption (13 August 2013).
23 Safiya Umoja Noble, ‘Algorithms of oppression’, in Algorithms of Oppression (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2018); Juliet B. Schor and Steven P. Vallas, ‘The sharing economy: Rhetoric and reality’, Annual Review of Sociology, 47 (2021). See also Doorn, Niels Van, ‘Platform labor: On the gendered and racialized exploitation of low-income service work in the “on-demand” economy’, Information, Communication & Society, 20:6 (2017), pp. 898–914CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Jill Lepore, ‘The disruption machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong’, The New Yorker, 23 (2014), pp. 30–6.
25 Raymond Henry Williams, Marxism and Literature, Vol. 392 (Oxford, UK: Oxford Paperbacks, 1977), pp. 128–9.
26 Ibid., p. 131.
27 Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup (eds), Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture, Vol. 5 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2015); Coleman, Rebecca, ‘Theorizing the present: Digital media, pre-emergence and infra-structures of feeling’, Cultural Studies, 32:4 (2018), pp. 600–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Ahmed's reversal of William's paradigm in ‘feelings of structure’, in Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) and Sigrid Schmitz and Sara Ahmed, ‘Affect/emotion: Orientation matters. a conversation between Sigrid Schmitz and Sara Ahmed’, FZG–Freiburger Zeitschrift für GeschlechterStudien, 20:2 (2014), pp. 13–14.
28 Berlant, Lauren, ‘Structures of unfeeling: Mysterious skin’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 28:3 (2015), pp. 191–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Ibid., p. 194.
30 Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 132.
31 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 4.
32 Ibid., p. 3.
33 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
34 Ulrich Beck, ‘Modern society as a risk society’, The Culture and Power of Knowledge: Inquiries into Contemporary Societies (1992), pp. 199–214; Richard Ericson and Aaron Doyle, ‘Catastrophe risk, insurance and terrorism’, Economy and Society, 33:2 (2004), pp. 135–73; cited in Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster, ‘Governing terrorism through risk: Taking precautions, (un)knowing the future’, European Journal of International Relations, 13:1 (2007), pp. 89–115.
35 Peter Adey, Ben Anderson, and Stephen Graham, ‘Introduction: Governing emergencies: Beyond exceptionality’, Theory, Culture & Society, 32:2 (2015), pp. 3–17; See also Brassett, Croft, and Vaughan-Williams, ‘Introduction’, pp. 221–8 and David Chandler, ‘Security through societal resilience: Contemporary challenges in the Anthropocene’, Contemporary Security Policy, 41:2 (2020), pp. 195–214.
36 Martin Coward, ‘Recombinant resilience and the temptations of global interdiction’, in Alex Houen (ed.), States of War since 9/11: Terrorism, Sovereignty, and the War on Terror (London, UK: Routledge, 2014), pp. 216–35.
37 Crawford S. Holling, ‘Resilience and stability of ecological systems’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics (1973), pp. 1–23; cited in Chandler, Grove, and Wakefield (eds), Resilience in the Anthropocene.
38 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York, NY: Picador, 2017).
39 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the societies of control’, Surveillance, Crime and Social Control (London, UK: Routledge, 2017), pp. 35–9.
40 McKenzie Wark, Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twentieth-First Century (New York, NY: Verso Books, 2020), p. 47.
41 Arthur K. Cebrowski and John W. Raymond, ‘Operationally responsive space: A new defense business model’, The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, 35:2 (2005), p. 3; see also Der Derian, Project Z.
42 Peter Dombrowski and Eugene Gholz, ‘Identifying disruptive innovation: Innovation theory and the defense industry’, Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 4:2 (2009).
43 Christopher E. Sawin, ‘Creating super soldiers for warfare: A look into the laws of war’, Journal of High Technology Law, 17 (2016), p. 105.
44 Charmaine Chua, ‘Disruption from above, the middle and below’, Review of International Studies, this forum.
45 Michael Gallagher, ‘Educational unsustainability in sub-Saharan Africa: In search of counter-narratives to policy pressures and exponential tech growth’, Visions for Sustainability, 12 (2019), pp. 40–51.
46 Robert Bogue, ‘Design for disassembly: A critical twenty-first century discipline’, Assembly Automation (2007); Philip Crowther, ‘Design for disassembly–themes and principles’, Environment Design Guide (2005), pp. 1–7; Fernanda Cruz Rios, Wai K. Chong, and David Grau, ‘Design for disassembly and deconstruction-challenges and opportunities’, Procedia Engineering, 118 (2015), pp. 1296–304.
47 Nof Nathansohn, Molly Mason, David Allen White, Hugh Timothy Ebdy, Yaara Yacoby, Hila Sharabi, and Lawrence Sass, ‘Design for disassembly: Using temporary fabrication for land politics in the Negev’, International Journal of Architectural Computing, 18:2 (2020), pp. 155–73.
48 Andrew Herscher and Daniel Bertrand Monk, The Global Shelter Imaginary: Ikea Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), p. 23.
49 Charmaine Chua, ‘Containing the Ship of State: Managing Mobility in an Age of Logistics’ (Dissertation, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 2018), p. 217.
50 Charmaine Chua, ‘The monstrosity of maritime capitalism’, Boston Review (4 May 2021), available at: {https://bostonreview.net/articles/the-ever-given-and-the-monstrosity-of-maritime-capitalism} accessed 7 June 2022.
51 Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Economic Studies, 1934); Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1939).
52 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 3–4, 31.
53 Louise Amoore, ‘Algorithmic war: Everyday geographies of the war on terror’, Antipode, 41:1 (2009), pp. 49–69; Louise Amoore and Rita Raley, ‘Securing with algorithms: Knowledge, decision, sovereignty’, Security Dialogue, 48:1 (2017), pp. 3–10; Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Marijn Hoijtink, ‘“Prototype warfare”: Innovation, optimisation, and the experimental way of warfare’, European Journal of International Security (2022), pp. 1–15; Rocco Bellanova, Kristina Irion, Katja Lindskov Jacobsen, Francesco Ragazzi, Rune Saugmann, and Lucy Suchman, ‘Toward a critique of algorithmic violence’, International Political Sociology, 15:1 (2021), pp. 121–50.
54 J. Grove, Savage Ecology, pp. 22–3.
55 Amoore, ‘Algorithmic war’; Lucy Suchman, ‘Algorithmic warfare and the reinvention of accuracy’, Critical Studies on Security, 8:2 (2020), pp. 175–82; Lauren Wilcox, ‘Embodying algorithmic war: Gender, race and the posthuman in drone warfare’, Security Dialogue, 48:1 (2017), pp. 11–28; Antoine Bousquet, Jairus Victor Grove, and Nisha Shah, ‘Becoming war: Towards a martial empiricism’, Security Dialogue, 51:2–2 (2020), pp. 99–118.
56 Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Vinh-Kim Nguyen, ‘Government-by-exception: Enrollment and experimentality in mass HIV treatment programmes in Africa’, Social Theory and Health, 7:3 (2009), pp. 196–217.
57 Hoijtink, ‘“Prototype warfare”’, pp. 3–4.
58 Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
59 Ibid., p. 112.
60 Louise Amoore, ‘Machine learning political orders’, Review of International Studies (2022).
61 E. Tendayi Achiume, ‘Digital racial borders’, American Journal of International Law, 115 (2021), pp. 333–8.
62 David J. Gunkel, ‘Other things: AI, robots and society’, in Zizi Papacharissi (ed.), A Networked Self and Human Augmentics, Artificial Intelligence, Sentience (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019); cited in Elke Schwarz, ‘Delegating moral responsibility in war: Lethal autonomous weapons systems and the responsibility gap’, in The Routledge Handbook on Responsibility in International Relations (London, UK: Routledge, 2021), p. 177. See also Joshua Zitser, ‘A rogue killer drone “hunted down” a human target without being instructed to, UN report says’, Business Insider, available at: {https://www.businessinsider.com/killer-drone-hunted-down-human-target-without-being-told-un-2021-5} accessed 2 June 2022.
63 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, pp. 42–3.
64 Bernard Stiegler, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (New York, NY: Polity, 2019).
65 Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code (New York, NY: Polity, 2019); See also Seb Franklin, The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and Nabil Hassein, ‘Against black inclusion in facial recognition’, Digital Talking Drum, available at: {https://digitaltalkingdrum.com/2017/08/15/against-black-inclusion-in-facial-recognition} accessed 15 May 2022.
66 Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (London, UK: John Hunt Publishing, 2014).
67 J. Grove, Savage Ecology, pp. 203–04; See also Sara Ahmed on the way that hate is given coherence as something that crosses psychic, social, collective, and individual resonance, ‘Affective economies’, Social Text, 22:2 (2004), pp. 117–39 (p. 119).
68 Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk (Eruditorum Press, 2017), p. 337.
69 Ibid.
70 Akane Kanai, ‘Girlfriendship and sameness: Affective belonging in a digital intimate public’, Journal of Gender Studies, 26:3 (2017), pp. 293–306.
71 Daniel Deudney, Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 47–38. See also Olga Raggio, ‘The myth of Prometheus: Its survival and metamorphoses up to the eighteenth century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21:1–2 (1958), pp. 44–62.
72 Deudney, Dark Skies, p. 48
73 Jairus Victor Grove, ‘From geopolitics to geotechnics: Global futures in the shadow of automation, cunning machines, and human speciation’, International Relations, 34:3 (2020), p. 440.
74 Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Jairus Victor Grove, ‘The new nature’, Boston Review, available at: {http://bostonreview.net/forum/new-nature/jairus-grove-jairus-grove-response-jedediah-purdy} accessed 8 June 2022; See also J. Grove, Savage Ecology and Andreas Malm, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (New York. NY: Verso Books, 2021).
75 Mamdani, Mahmood, ‘Making sense of political violence in postcolonial Africa’, Socialist Register, 39 (2013), pp. 132–51Google Scholar; Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
76 Ahuja, Neel, ‘Reversible human: Rectal feeding, plasticity, and racial control in US carceral warfare’, Social Text, 38:2 (2020), pp. 19–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in conversation with Jairus Victor Grove, ‘Weaponizing Phenomenology’, unpublished lecture.
77 Richter-Montpetit, Melanie, ‘Beyond the erotics of Orientalism: Lawfare, torture and the racial–sexual grammars of legitimate suffering’, Security Dialogue, 45:1 (2014), pp. 43–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Julian Borger, ‘US report on “enhanced interrogation” concludes: Torture doesn't work’, available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/senate-committee-cia-torture-does-not-work} accessed 2 July 2022. See also Lisa Hajjar, ‘American torture: The price paid, the lessons learned’, Middle East Report, 251 (2009).
78 Berlant, Cruel Optimism.
79 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Miéville, China, ‘On social sadism’, Salvage, 2 (2015)Google Scholar; Rosie Warren, ‘Some final words on pessimism’, Salvage, available at: {https://salvage.zone/some-last-words-on-pessimism} accessed 2 July 2022.
