Creating
Kismet

Jackson Pollock famously said he denied the accident. Not that he planned everything. That the impulse to resist preplanning was itself a deliberate choice. There is a word for what he was pointing at: kismet. The Turkish word for fate or destiny. Serendipity is the pathway to it. A chance event that produces an outcome so fitting it feels inevitable. Artists do not wait for this. They build conditions that make it more likely.

The chapter identifies three techniques for doing this, which it calls disjunctive strategies: remixing, rebooting, and deconstructing. Each one breaks continuity in a different way, and each creates the conditions for unexpected insight. Remixing reconfigures existing material. Think of Eisenstein's film theory, which held that cutting two shots together generates a third meaning neither contained on its own. Or the Santa Fe Institute, where physicists, novelists, botanists, and programmers sit in the same room and refuse to speak only their own language. The insight lives in the gap between fields, not inside any one of them. Rebooting goes further. It does not reshuffle the deck. It starts a new one, while retaining enough of the original to make the departure legible. Lacan rebooted Freud through structuralism, then insisted he was still a Freudian. Deconstruction is the most radical move. It does not remix or reboot. It looks past the surface of a text to ask what it is concealing, and gives voice to whatever the structure was designed to suppress.

Academic work is often presented as the product of careful method applied to a well-defined question. But the most interesting work rarely arrives that way. It arrives sideways, through an unexpected connection, a collaborator from an adjacent field, a source that contradicts the argument. Disjunctive strategies are a way of inviting that sideways arrival rather than waiting for it to happen by accident.

The risk is real. Too much disjunction produces noise, not signal. The jump cut that works for thirty seconds becomes exhausting at feature length. But the researcher who never breaks continuity becomes a data miner, finding only what they set out to find, confirming what they already believed. Somewhere between those two positions is where new meaning actually gets made.

Meaning is never located in a single fixed place.
It appears when two perspectives collide.

The artist/academic binary has always been more porous than either side likes to admit. Kierkegaard inflected Kafka. Kafka inflected Sartre. Le Corbusier's buildings presaged Lyotard's theory. The influence runs in all directions, across media and disciplines, through channels that no one planned and no one could have predicted. Recognizing this does not make scholarship less rigorous. It makes it more honest about where its ideas actually come from.

The digital environment accelerates all of this. Remix, reboot, and deconstruction are no longer visible as techniques. They are simply how culture operates. The fan edit, the mashup, the reboot franchise, the Wikipedia rabbit hole: disjunctive strategies running at scale, without anyone naming them as such. What changes when you name them? Probably the same thing that changes when Pollock calls his process intentional rather than accidental. The practice becomes available to reflection, and reflection opens it to purposeful use.

The deeper question the chapter leaves open is methodological. If disjunction is a valid scholarly tool, how does it coexist with the obligation to be accountable for what you claim? The data miner is at least finding real data. The researcher who wanders serendipitously may arrive somewhere more interesting, but they also need to be able to retrace their steps. What a methodology of productive disruption looks like in practice, how you document the sideways arrival, …remains genuinely unsettled. Which means the method is still being invented.