Ok everybody, time to get provoked. First, broadly, I don’t think we can treat ‘failure’ as an absolute quality. I think any definition or consideration of failure demands to be understood within its own social context. When failure matters, failure names a relation of accountability, and thus a relation of power–the failure to live up to a certain standard designated by someone with the power to bestow a desirable identity or status. I think that there is a vogue now for failure, and that this vogue has a lot to do with the social and political-economic dynamics we read about in last week’s readings on digital labor.
So I wonder if failure is something of a poisoned gift. When you’re in on the joke, failure can be transformative (as Carr puts it), even ecstatic in its beauty. When you’re called a failure, on the other hand, you feel like a stranger in your own skin. In its present fashionable condition, failure enjoins us to certain affects and stances that are germane to capitalism. In other words, failure in its present guise invokes a certain style, affective posture, or libidinal economy that capitalism (in its current appropriation of user-generated content) can appropriate to its own ends: everything from the popular Jackass movies to YouTube stars, from the glorification of ‘white trash’ on Jersey Shore to the Silicon Valley startup culture of ‘fail fast’ that we saw in the reading of 37 Signals. The libidinal economy is this: ‘don’t worry if you fail, liberate yourself to be free!’ That’s not in itself objectionable, but in practice it often gets deployed within a shallow politics of visibility and lifestyle-expression that means buy, baby, buy. Let’s be honest, failure’s fun!
I say all that just to signpost that we should be critical about the redemptive qualities of failure. On the other hand, I’m rather besotted with the possibilities of failure as a critical praxis, exemplified in this week’s readings on pedagogy. My only question is, if we succeed at failing, have we really failed? In other words, if we enshrine ‘failure’ in order to appreciate its illumination of textual craftsmanship (or social construction, social hierarchies, gender, or anything else), do we domesticate its radical and subversive potentiality? In that way, there’s a certain banality to a text like Allison Carr’s (which is otherwise quite raw and compelling), and I wonder if that banality is simply an aesthetic effect or rather a root cause of failure-as-praxis. So this goes back to my first paragraph and the dangers of fetishizing failure. There’s so much else I want to elaborate, like: does the glorification of failure represent the zombie-like claim to power of an identity–let’s provisionally say whiteness, privilege, masculinity–within a postmodern moment that otherwise enshrouds us in uncertainty? What about those who can’t afford to fail?
I haven’t addressed the texts directly here, rather obliquely–hope I’ve failed. 😉
Dear Anders,
I submitted your post to Fail Army (https://www.youtube.com/user/failarmy).
Failing to comment to your post,
Jojo
Major SNAPS to this post, Anders… Lots of questions raised here which I too was pondering while doing the readings and listening to the lecture.
First of all, I love how you unpacked what failure means, here:
When failure matters, failure names a relation of accountability, and thus a relation of power–the failure to live up to a certain standard designated by someone with the power to bestow a desirable identity or status.
When we think of failure through this lens, your question about who can afford to fail (and in what ways) takes on new urgency. There are so many white bros from upper-middle class backgrounds in the start up world because they can more easily take big risks knowing there’s a safety net there to catch them.
Failure, defined as not living up to a standard designated by someone with the power to bestow identity or status, is NOT the kind of failure which is being referred to in the CMU lecture, in the various media sources you cite, and even in the 4 kinds of failure in Stewart’s article, which I would say, using your formulation, are all “in on the joke” / low-stakes kind of fails. I call the pedagogical uses of failure low-stakes because Carr and Stewart are talking about educators creating situations in which students can fail somewhat “safely,” and not just learn to correct their mistakes, but to appreciate the role of failure in the creative process in general.
That kind of pedagogy, however, relies on striking a balance between a low and high stakes environment, which we can’t always have. Not all professors have full academic freedom to determine what the spectrum between success and failure looks like and compulsory measures of failure / success are often rigged (think: emergent bilingual students forced to take an on-grade level English test after being in the country for 1 year, the biased SATs, etc).
A successful pedagogy of failure would also prompt educators to figure out their own relationships to failure. Identity is so closely tied to whether one is perceived as succeeding or failing, and how one deals with it when it happens. I was good at school during most of my life for a host of reasons (cultural capital of home and school matched, my gender, class, race, and ethnicity privileged me in certain ways, I was a bookish/curious kid), and I tended to shy away from venues where I wouldn’t be as successful (see: athletics…!) When I became a middle school teacher, I failed every day, and it was extremely distressing because I couldn’t just ‘shy away’ — it was very high stakes (kids’ educations on the line!) Eventually, I had to recognize that every lesson wasn’t going to succeed, due to all of the variables in and out of my control, and could look more clinically at my practice. Now I try to learn a great deal about what’s tripping them up, reflect on whether my pedagogy is engaging, inspiring, and scaffolded enough, and to advocate for differentiated, more accurate measures. (And I call Sakina!)
Also, one thing that all of these articles don’t cover, which is almost taboo to talk about — what about that handful of students who are just not trying (or too busy to try)? Do we accept that kind of failure as generative in the way we accept other ways of failure as generative?
I’m glad that you mentioned the “not trying” students, Sara. That situation is quite different from having students actively input to the course design, as described by Friend in How (Not) to Plan Your Entire Course. My gut reaction would be that students should have agency over how to allocate their time and effort, and while the instructor should do their best to design the course in the most accessible way, it is not realistic to account for an unwillingness or inability to participate. But then, especially when it is a “too busy to try” situation, wouldn’t I be neglecting structural inequality which led to such a condition, or even reinforcing it? It is not always easy to differentiate between unwillingness and inability. This brings back the failure defined in a power relation as Anders describes early on—if the stakes cannot be lowered for the student and/or for the teacher, is it possible to reconcile with failure?
Anders,
Thanks for the starting the discussion on the reading this week. I didn’t want to make the mistake of failing to respond to your provocation this week, so here it goes… First of all, seeing the “The Aesthetics of Failure,” almost instantly reminded me of a current special exhibit on display at the Met Breuer, that being “Unfinished.” The comparison made me think about the contrast between deliberate or complete failure and the failure that results from the realization that a product is, or eventually will be, in some way unfinishable. While I suppose that the end result is still failure, I still cringe at the later form because it means that the project has not come to a decisive close. After all, a project’s failure due to being unfinishable might be more challenging to learn from.
On a more practical note, I particularly liked Carr’s suggestions for “failed” classroom activities. Recently, low-stakes writing has been something that I’ve been hearing quite a bit about the benefits of incorporating into regular instructional practices. Keeping an ungraded journal and providing prompts for students to respond to appears to be useful for getting students to feel comfortable producing an imperfect piece of writing and relieves some of the hesitancy that they may feel about expressing themselves through text. Establishing “Classroom Rules” surrounding failure as McGarry suggests in a piece on Teaching Fails in JITP could also be effective as means of establishing comfort with imperfection that often goes with the process of producing something original or creative. It’s an iterative process and failure can be the unlikely source from which new ideas can emerge.