Receding resilience: On the planetary moods of disruption

Abstract

Abstract 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.