Issue 19 -
Autumn 2025
Disruption
Guest-edited by Farouk El Maarouf, Justus Grebe
& Anastasiia Marsheva.
& Anastasiia Marsheva.
Read here: On_Culture's Issue 19 (Autumn 2025): "Disruption"
_Editorial
_Articles
_Essays
_Perspectives
Rethinking the Good Life
A Crip Critique of Hon Lai-chu’s Surrealist Short Stories
_Abstract
This _Article examines the intersection of disruption, disability, and ‘post-’ concepts in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s 2019–2020 protests. Sparked by opposition to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance amendment, these protests escalated into a broader resistance movement against the erosion of civil liberties, which was eventually suppressed by the National Security Law, a lasting disruption to Hong Kong’s sociopolitical landscape. The _Article investigates how disability metaphors have been co-opted to uphold enforced optimism for Hong Kong’s neoliberal developmentalism under this new regime. A curative logic that positions health and stability as prerequisites for progress is used to justify the NSL, producing a ‘post-disruption’ identity marked by compulsory able-bodiedness and conformity to state norms. Turning to the surrealist short stories of Hong Kong writer Hon Lai-chu, the _Article explores how narratives of disabled lives critique and disrupt the affective politics of neoliberalism. Interpreted through the lens of crip critique, these stories expose the violent disruptions that challenge the neoliberal promise of progress. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism,’ the _Article argues that post-2019 optimism not only disrupts the lives it seeks to improve but also creates a fractured identity landscape where stability is illusory. This analysis deepens understanding of the ongoing effects of the 2019–2020 protests on Hong Kong’s identity and futurity.
Disruptive Subjects
Operaismo and Radical Feminism in Italy and the United States
_Abstract
This _Article examines the role of disruption in two pivotal instances of subject formation in the late 1960s and 1970s Atlantic World: Operaismo (Workerism) and radical feminism in Italy and the United States. To do so, it traces the history of the self-creation of workers and women as political subjects. It underscores how this becoming-subject emerged, both conceptually and tactically, through the disruption of their assigned role, place, and function within society. It describes the autonomous, unruly, and unexpected subjectivities that emerged from this disavowal and the new forms of politics, praxis, history, being-with and against that women and workers created. The conclusion discusses the fortunes of disruptive politics and subjectivity since the 1970s and what these historical struggles can say to the liberation struggles of our present.
Whose Heritage–Whose Narrative?
Disrupting Place-Based Narratives to Re(claim) Heritage Sites in Political Agendas
_Abstract
The question ‘Whose heritage?’ is a central denominator when it comes to cultural heritage and the representation of the past in the present. It invites us to rethink who shapes heritage for whom, while simultaneously opening spaces for diverse actors to (re)-appropriate heritage and to disrupt its discourses and performances on different scales and scopes. Unsettled and governed by dissonances and controversies, the heritage pluriverse is a hugely diverse as well as competitive arena, that affects and is itself affected by disruptions and the positioning of alternative (counter-)narratives. This _Article argues that disruptions can hint at crucial issues in heritage spaces, such as the plurality of vested interests, as well as multivocality and individual affective responses. Through the example of St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt and the discourse surrounding sites of democratic history in Germany, it examines how different stakeholders in the heritage pluriverse put forward very different positionalities and argumentative patterns in order to narrate their version of a heritage site and draw associations with particular memories and identities. The _Article traces how counter-narratives form a substantial part of the heritage process and demonstrates how disruptions can become a productive lens for mediating and doing heritage in a diverse and complex world.
Disruptive Paradox
Deconstructive Architecture and its Subversive Power
_Abstract
Throughout art history, disruption has been a deliberate tool for conveying meaning. In architecture, deviations from norms provoke reflection and challenge principles like Vitruvius’ firmitas, utilitas, and venustas. From the 1980s on, deconstructivist architects systematically used disruption to express Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction through form, space, and perspective. Though buildings are not texts, this movement questioned architectural and societal norms. This article explores how deconstructivist architecture functions as a reflective medium, radically challenging political, social, and aesthetic structures. Disruption, as theorized among others by Lars Koch and Tobias Nanz, acts as both a destructive and productive force. Architects like Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, and Daniel Libeskind integrated Derrida’s philosophy into their work, exposing architecture as the “last fortress of metaphysics”—an illusion of stability masking its own constructed nature. Their buildings reveal hidden structures and produce an ambiguity of many possible orders and norms without referring to one of them. By employing disruption as a subversive tool, deconstructivism bridged architecture and philosophy, provoking critical reflection on the built environment.
Of Sleeps and Cycles
Digital Disruptions and the Myth of Awakening
_Abstract
This _Essay explores digital disruptions at the intersections of awakening narratives and historical revivals in the postdigital era. Characterized by the normalization of technology, the postdigital (as opposed to the hyphenated post-digital) invites critical reflection on the political, social, and cultural implications of digital infrastructures. While optimism surrounding digital advancements is often framed through the lens of apolitical affordances, this _Essay challenges that perspective by foregrounding the concept of cyclical time. The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ exemplifies that this temporal framework is used politically: the 2010–2011 uprisings in North Africa initially sparked hopes for liberation through technology (Spring/Awakening) only to be followed by disillusionment and despair (Winter/Sleep). These cycles highlight an apparent duality of digital affordances to both empower and constrain. Through the metaphor of biphasic pre-industrial sleeping patterns, this _Essay delves into the ideological underpinnings of digital disruptions and how they animate a contemporary return to imagined medieval fantasies. This resurgence reveals troubling overlaps between alt-right ideologies and digital culture. Ultimately, this analysis contends that the postdigital has become a fertile ground for rewriting and reimagining history, one that calls for selected knowledge seeking, and where the struggle for democratic rights continues amidst the spectre of reactionary forces.
Disrupted (Post)identities
Memory, Place, and the Power of the ‘Post’
_Abstract
For a recent issue of the journal Dialogues in Human Geography, I was asked to write a response to an article that examined the use of the word ‘post’ as a heuristic to better understand places associated with ‘post’ ascriptions—in the case of the original article, post-apartheid (Houssay-Holzschuch, 2021). The post anchors a present-day entity to the past; it does so by opening and holding open a space of hope. This hopeful space is cruelly optimistic (cf. Berlant, 2011); it tethers identities to places and events of the past, while also carrying the promise of unattachment (Anderson et al., 2023). I concluded my response with a provocation drawn from Doreen Massey’s (1999) scholarship on the space-time regime, by asking: “Who uses that vocabulary most powerfully and to what effect?” (Drozdzewski, 2021: 5) Thoughts on that question comprise the subject matter of this _Essay—what can the ‘post’ do? To think-with the power and effect of the ‘post,’ I draw from a range of examples: (post)conflict, (post)war, (post)Socialist, (post)national, and (post)disaster. Then, using case study examples from Poland, Germany, and Australia, I explore the politics of identity, place, and memory across spatial and temporal contexts to show how the post functions powerfully as a lexicon, while being simultaneously sanguine and banal in its application.
Jerūiyq
Journey Beyond the Horizon
_Abstract
The Kazakhstan project at the 60th Venice Biennale (20 April 2024–24 November 2024) was titled Jerūiyq: Journey Beyond the Horizon. According to the curators, Anvar Musrepov and Danagul Tolepbay, it aimed to stimulate Kazakh decolonial futurism: “We wanted to create our own Wakanda, our post-nomadic essence, our ‘Kazakhness.’ Technology and the future are present in it, but they are not the primary focus. There is something beyond language, a spirituality, perhaps something connected to space and the landscape, our identity, which largely determines our way of thinking.” In these words we see how decolonial futurism functions as a creative disruptive fiction that mediates between forging spatial identity, geographical imagination, and decolonial indigeneity.
Stickering through Grief
Subverting Normative Practices Through Mourning and Memorial
_Abstract
Following the death of my close friend and artistic mentor Justin in 2021, my friends and I, connected by grief, embarked on a collective stickering project using Justin’s graffiti tag. This initiative, spanning across North America and Europe, was conceived as a tribute to honour Justin’s memory by occupying space and mapping our collective loss. The act of stickering emerged as a powerful medium for expressing collective grief, offering a form of affective mapping and anti-temporal mourning. This paper analyzes the stickering project to reveal how creative practices can function as a form of witnessing and transformation. It highlights the ways in which graffiti’s autobiographical nature can evolve into a communal practice outside of its common subculture, pushing against the conventional cultural contexts within which graffiti typically operates. My analysis of this project draws on theoretical frameworks such as affective mapping, relationality, and testimony as developed by scholars including Dominick LaCapra, Kelly Oliver, Judith Butler, Leigh Gilmore, and Shelley Hornstein. Through this lens, the paper examines how the stickering project navigates the dynamic interplay between past and present, space and time, embodied experiences, and empirical knowledge. I attempt to further explore this anti-temporal dimension through the notion of ‘grief-time,’ modelled after ‘queer-time,’ as articulated by Jack Halberstam and Carolyn Dinshaw. This paper considers the transient nature of both graffiti and grief, underscoring the stickering project’s role in confronting and negotiating the temporal aspects of mourning. It demonstrates how artistic and communal expressions can offer new insights into the processes of memory-making, creating an active practice of remembrance. This exploration of our collective endeavour underscores the transformative potential of creative practices in the face of loss and the complex ways in which they interact with the cultural and temporal dimensions of human experience.