Can we still be «disruptive»?

This article is published in the number 4-5 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 31, 2023

If there is one thing that no one can really object to Madonna, it is that she has always been disruptive: she has not become an icon by following the rules but by breaking them, and destroying each time the boxes and definitions in which she herself risked being locked up.
Her destruction of bourgeois values ​​and clichés – which lead her to still be considered indecorous, exaggerated, uncontrollable today – confronts us with a difficult question: how can one be disruptive in a world where every attempt has already been made? ? How do you destroy the rules without ending up imitating those who have already done it before us?

To answer it, it may be useful to listen to what Miles Bron, the very rich and influential entrepreneur, played by Edward Norton, protagonist of the film, thinks about it Glass Onion – Knives Out. After gathering his closest friends in a splendid hyper-technological villa, Miles addresses them as disruptors and offers a guide to perfect destruction: «If you want to shake things up, start by breaking something small, a norm, an idea, a convention, a small business model. Go with things that people are tired of anyway. Everyone gets excited because you’re destroying things that everyone wanted to break anyway.”
The secret is therefore obvious: find something that is already half broken, that is too much in the past, discover its breaking point and hit it with all the strength you have: in this way you will have invented the future and you will have consigned yourself to history.

Yet, this concept is no longer as revolutionary as it used to be, and shows us how disruption has become a passe-partout word, emptied and exploited by anyone in every field, a bit like “resilience”. By the way, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler wrote that disruption is the radicalization of the overturning of all economic, political or musical values, both for good and, much more often, for evil. The Glass Onion characters, in fact, highlight the very limits of this concept, revealing that contemporary disruptors are much more functional to society than one might think, sometimes more stupid and arrogant than the average, and no more ingenious. You destroy it without having any purpose, or at least to accumulate power, and you end up adhering to a new conformism that doesn’t really create transformation or awareness.

How, then, can you be truly disruptive? How did Madonna create a scandal, to be a field of experimentation and discovery?
Making life erotic, that is, trying to bring the Dionysian into a world that pushed people to be “normal” at all costs. The Dionysian can take different forms, but it is always divergent from the canons of its time.
Today, then, being disruptive has to do with the ability to free oneself from an individual perspective, seeking gestures and actions that can create a collective transformation. Performing an act not to have a cone of light upon oneself, but to illuminate the lives of others.
As Madonna has always done, starting from herself she has made erotic the life of those who felt and feel out of context, out of time, out of the norm, out of the stringent ordinary canons.

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