Breaking carries many meanings, yet public life rarely lets it remain multiple: interruption is most often made legible only as damage awaiting repair. This article follows breaking through contemporary social movements to specify what a critical tradition descending from Foucault, Scott, and De Certeau leaves underarticulated, now that infrastructural systems are designed to anticipate and absorb disruption. Reading Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s account of Neapolitan tinkering, alongside Yuk Hui’s diagn…
Read moreBreaking carries many meanings, yet public life rarely lets it remain multiple: interruption is most often made legible only as damage awaiting repair. This article follows breaking through contemporary social movements to specify what a critical tradition descending from Foucault, Scott, and De Certeau leaves underarticulated, now that infrastructural systems are designed to anticipate and absorb disruption. Reading Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s account of Neapolitan tinkering, alongside Yuk Hui’s diagnosis of unbreakable technical ensembles, the argument situates breaking as world-making: a material politics over what is held together, what is relinquished, and at whose cost. Four contemporary repertoires – the No TAV movement, Soulèvements de la Terre, the looting of Black uprisings, and algorithmic poisoning – yield four recurring dimensions of breaking as intentionality, labour, temporality, and byproduction. Against repair’s moral economy, breaking emerges here as a diagnostic practice that prises open provisional futures where systems still give way.
