When Disruption Becomes Reconstitutive: Conditions of Viable Transformation
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 28, 2026 Jihoon Yang
Disruption does not automatically lead to genuine transformation. Breaking an old structure can open new possibilities, but it can also destroy the capacity to reorganize. Transformation becomes reconstitutive only when three conditions are preserved: answerability to what exceeds the self, corrigibility of self-interpretation, and expansion of future response capacity. The paper distinguishes reconstitutive disaggregation, which enables reorganization, from foreclosing collapse, which closes future response capacity. False recovery occurs when a person or system adopts the signs of transformation while preserving the structure that produced collapse. A transformation is viable not because it breaks the old, but because it preserves the capacity to be corrected into a future.