On failure

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Failure is all of a sudden quite trendy. Glossy

feature articles everywhere from theNew York

Times to theHarvard Business Reviewinstruct

us that we must fail in order to succeed.

Cheerfully quoting the words of Samuel Beckett

(theatres deathless muse of failure) Fail

again. Fail better they proclaim that we mustlearn from our failures, becoming stronger,

more resilient in the process. Failure, in their

eyes, is both the bed-partner of that neo-liberal

fetish innovation and a necessity in a world

without guarantees: in getting comfortable

with failure, they imply, we can also get

comfortable with neo-liberalisms other

intimate, precarity.

On the other end of the publishing (and

political) spectrum, a urry of scholarship

from queer studies, art criticism and especially

performance studies has also focused on

failures intimate relationship with creativity.1These authors recuperate failure, even

champion it as a site of resistance. For them,

failures promise lies in its capacity to unravel

the certainties of knowledge, competence,

representation, normativity and authority.

Failure, they argue, is the inevitable and critical

counterpoint to modernitys empty promises of

progress and betterment. And this is failures

moment. From the recent catastrophes of the

global economy, to the impending collapse of

our eco-system, to the long, slow entropy of

the political left, we live mired in failure. Our

current sense of urgency to theorize and own itshould come as little surprise.

But the fact is that despite failures recent

modishness, weve been failing for a long

time. Failure saturates our lives, shapes our

experience and delineates the contours of our

institutions. And mostly (as Beckett well knew),

it feels like shit.

This issue aims to face failure head on, to

see if performance might provide us with

a metaphor and methodology for failure. Our

collective project is not to be cheerleaders of

failure, nor to redeem it or prevent it, but toanatomize it in all its irreducible complexity,

painful ambivalence and variety. We have

chosen to focus on pedagogy, not only in the

institutional context of the university but also

in public art projects, those sites of performance

that aim to educate an audience or inspire

a community to self-education or self-reection.

This scene of teaching and learning, rather than

the experimental space of performance art with

its privileged freedom to fail, brings into sharp

relief the stakes, economies and politics of

failure. These essays, dialogues, ethnographies

and theoretical reections tap the analyticpower of failure to chart this terrain in which we

teach and perform. Failure, for these authors,

is neither a dead end nor a pit stop on the path

to success but a generative, unsettling and

revelatory force. Together, they reckon with the

fraught and isolating affective experience of

failure, so often disavowed or dismissed. Their

musings intimate that locking eyes with failure

in this way can point us to an alternative form

of participatory and process-based politics,

without defaulting to the pursuit of success that

only breeds further failure.

This issue is inspired not only by the senseof living in failures moment but by the

conviction that any meaningful response

to it as performance scholars and artists,

and above all as teachers requires an act of

methodological imagination to which failure,

On Failure (On Pedagogy)Editoi Itodctio

R I S N O G O R M A N & M A R G A R E T W E R R Y

1 For just four of the mosprominent recentpublications, see LeFeuvre (2010), Halbersta(2011), Bailes (2011) andAntebi et al. (2007). Othinitiatives such as the2009 Zagreb PSiConference onMisperformance and TimEtchellss and AdrianHeathelds Institute of

Failure are indicative offailures recent currency

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : pp .1-8 ISSN 1352-8156 pr in t /1469-9990 on l ine

ht tp : / /dx .doi . org/10 .1080/13528165.2012.651857 2012 TAYLOR & FRANCIS


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2 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : ON FAILUREPERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 :

ON FAILURE

ironically, is central, and for which performance

itself may offer a set of valuable and practical

tools. An excellent and growing literature in the

discipline has established failure as an inherent

element of performance practice. Performances

methods of improvisation, rehearsal and

experiment assume an accretion of failures as

an integral part of the creative process. One

must continually make and continually fail

in order to create. If failure is the hallmark of

performance with its endless interruptions,

accidents, breakdowns, ops, misres, dead-

ends and surprises, moodiness and messiness

it is also its innate ontological condition:

its dening liveness and ephemerality marks

performances ultimate failure to perpetuate

itself. It becomes itself (to bawdlerize PeggyPhelan) through failing. Late-twentieth-

century avant-garde performances critique

of capital banks on this quality, deliberately

slipping the yoke of commoditization by failing

to achieve permanence, failing to offer the

bankable rewards of virtuosity or emotional

satisfaction. The contemporary experimental

tradition stemming from this (so ably

documented by Sara Jane Bailes, among others)

also strategically mobilizes failure to imagine

alternatives foreclosed by the normative

tyranny of success and expected outcomes.

This constellation of failure-artists collectivelyreimagines the role of performance in our

social, political and imaginative lives: they

conduct an emancipatory pedagogy of sorts,

pressing audiences to collaborate in acts of

conceptual invention prompted by their staging

of representations failure (Bailes 2011, Bottoms

2007, Power 2010).

This failure-driven reimagination, however, is

taking place within an institutional and political

climate ever more hostile to failures promise.

We cannot afford to forget although we often

conveniently do how mutually dependent are

the raried worlds of experimental performance

and the massive apparatus of academe, with

its work of publishing, teaching, producing

audiences and artists, circulating and valorizing

artists and their work. How might performances

evolving understanding and practice of failure

intervene in this scene, with which most of us

artists and scholars alike are entangled?

Progressive hopes and developmentalnarratives cluster around pedagogy, and the

recuperative drive associated with failure is

powerfully concentrated here. (Failure is OK

only if we learn from it, only if it leads us to

ultimate success). Higher education is animated

by its idealization of success and hope: this

much is well-established.2 Schooling of all kinds

rests on successful performances of authority

that are also performances of sanctioned,

normative knowledge, and that form the

ticket of admission (for teachers and students

alike) to the ranks of power and privilege,

hardening the lines of inclusion and exclusionin the process. Here, failure is an instrument

of structural violence to make successes

of students, schools must winnow out the

failures; a dilemma for performance instructors

2 Scholars of criticalpedagogy have addressedthis dominant affect ofhigher education, arguingboth for critical realismand for a hopefulpersistence in the face ofdismal odds what ErnstBloch called educated

hope (Giroux 2002 andDolan 2005).

2

Vtk Hovt: Parts Work,

2007. Coge o ppe (

set of 6). Images courtesy of

the artist.


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OGORMAN & WER- RY : ON FA IL URE

(ON PEDAGOGY)

for whom failure is critical to creative

experimentation. Schooling, furthermore,

suffers from a surfeit of hope. Education has

historically been the site for ameliorative social

projects (often ones compensating for failures

elsewhere in our systems), from combating

racism, to revitalizing industry or growing the

middle class by rescuing students from the

ignominy of social and economic failure. Yet in

pedagogy, as in performance, failure is endemic

they are, after all, both live arts, premised on

co-presence. Efforts misre. Opportunities are

missed. Communication goes awry. Ignorance is

exposed, change resisted, desire thwarted.

What has upped the stakes in this absurd

drama is the cultural dominance of hope and

success in a neoliberal age, now the mandate,measure and mantra of the corporatizing

university. We live in the depressive ruins of

the university, an entity dedicated to the rabid

pursuit of illusory success when any substantive

mission that might give that success substance

has long since been mortgaged to market values

(see Readings 1996 and Werry and OGorman

2009). The fetishization of excellence and

outcomes, the prevalence of audit culture

(Strathern 2000) and prevailing instrumentalism

and vocationalism, all institutionalize, codify

and restigmatize failure. Now the encompassing

regime of the test eclipses all other ways ofunderstanding and valuing schooling: through

standardized testing, student evaluations and

bureaucratic measures of school performance,

the threat of failure is the dening condition

under which we (not just students but also

teachers and institutions) operate. In these

contexts, accidental failure is perilous, and the

strategic, emancipatory or experimental use

of failure however much it is still necessary

is freighted with risk, danger and difculty.

The right to fail (with all its promise of

inclusiveness, generosity, freedom) can only be

claimed at an ever-mounting cost.

The pedagogy of public art as recent

literature on relational aesthetics and

established Freirian and Boalian work on

theatre for social change attests also carries

an ameliorative and developmental charge,

yoking artistic ventures to teleological

narratives of hope, aspiration and social

transformation. And it is likewise entwined withlegitimating institutions (such as the academy)

wedded to success. In public art projects,

failure is often disavowed and internalized,

mired in blame and shame, and papered over

in the next hopeful grant proposal. Yet clearly,

most such projects fail most of the time; fail

to democratize, raise visibility, transform

understandings or experiences or even gain the

understanding and support of those they claim

to aid. And no wonder: performance is a weapon

of the weak aimed at mighty fortresses. We

balance impossibly titanic political hopes

conict-resolution, community-building, anti-racism on the precarious foundation of an art

premised on failure. Such marginal efforts are

often lodged in defensive postures, continually

having to justify their existence with missionary


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4 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : ON FAILURE

zeal: they become good at talking about goals

and strategies, less good at dwelling on their

often disappointing outcomes and what they

reveal about the process by which people

and things change, learn, revert, resist, stall

and change again, or about the catastrophes

and collapses that attend any attempt at true

dialogue across social difference. What would

it mean to legitimate the continued practice

of public art not in spite of but because ofits

inevitable failure?

Dwelling on and in failure, it follows, offers

not only a tool of critique or a diagnostic

of neo-liberal enterprise, but also a way to

remodel the theoretical premises of activist

work in our discipline, querying the trajectories

and temporalities of change enacted inperformance. Performance practice teaches

us how to live with and as failures, nding

possibility in predicament and embracing

the vulnerability of moments of failure that

may also be moments of profound discovery

in which we remain open to what transpires,

rather than measure it against our intentions.

Failure focuses progressive hopes not on future

transcendence but in the interstices of present

quotidian struggle and in the alternatives and

possibilities for ethical action for thinking and

feeling otherwise which that struggle makes

available to us. It stands against the imperialismof hope, generates a reexive understanding

of the inherently agonistic space of learning

and change a space in which aspirations,

resistances, prejudices and passions constantly

clash, feelings run high and stumbling

and ailing are a productive inevitability.3

Performance attunes us to this.

Such a recalibration of the political posture

of the discipline demands new tools. To look

squarely at failure, we need methods designed

not to capture the xities of representation or

identity but to help us navigate the slippery,

fugitive terrain of process and affect. We might

look, for example, to the immanent materialists

such as Bergson and Whitehead, Deleuze

or Connolly philosophers of becoming

who challenge us to set our analytic sights on

moments of openness and uncertainty (where

time is not purposive or linear, events not

causal). These moments of fecund duration, in

which emergence of the unthought can occur,are often occasions of failure of the known,

stable or systemically enduring, requiring

a response to which old habits, ideas or rules

are not adequate, and for which we as subjects

are not adequately prepared. They are acute

experiences of the limits of human mastery,

exceeding conscious awareness. Failure, we

suggest, inaugurates such moments. It is a kind

of freedom for which performance is a kind

of practice, in which you dwell creatively in

uncertain situations (Connolly 2008).

Uncertainty, of course, is a painful state to

inhabit. Failure hurts. Failure haunts. It comeslaced with shame, anger, despair, abjection,

guilt, frustration affects we usually wish away

or hide. Thinking with failure means making

affect an object of our curiosity rather than

3 On the imperialism ofhope, see Edelman (2004).

4


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knowledges irrelevant remainder. We need

to slow failures ugly feelings down (Ngai

2005), ask them: What are you doing here?

Performance-sensitive work by theorists such as

Berlant (2011, 2008), Tincineto Clough (2007),

Ahmed (2004), Sedgwick (2003), Halberstam

(2011) or Probyn (2005) has exposed the

normative or coercive role that positive affect

has often played in socio-political processes and

worked to recuperate negative feelings as the

site of emergence of alternative communities

and alternative political imaginaries. (The role

of shame in the solidarity of queer communities

is a signicant example.) Turning too swiftly

away from the abyssal affect of failure risks

capitulating to its isolating, freezing effects;

dwelling on it, by contrast, allows us to imaginethat failures misery can be, perversely, what

unites us. It allows us to imagine ourselves

as members of response-able communities:

individuals in a state of openness to moving and

being moved by others. As Judith Halberstam

has succinctly phrased it: Failure loves

company (2007: 89).

Failures timely challenge inspired our

contributors to address a range of questions.

How and why can performance be understood

to have failed? What is the analytic power of

failure to reveal the limits of the (currently)

possible? How does it map what is thinkable,acceptable, appropriate, normal, desirable?

What is the quality of failure as an aesthetic

and as an affective experience? To what extent

might that experience also be a political

one? What are the pedagogical benets of

theorizing and practising failure? Can failure

help us to shift the entrenched equation of

power, knowledge and authority that structures

schooling? What is the relationship between

failure and change? How does failure prompt

us to rethink the progressive transformation

imagined by performance? What are the risks

of valorizing failure in the way these questions

imply? What does such a project stand to learn

from those who are set up to fail, doomed to fail

or dismissed as failures? We yoke movements

for change, or the desire for a more just

society, to heroic narratives of future success,

but how sustainable is a politics based in

hope, transcendence and self-assertion? How

can energy, hope, curiosity and momentumwithstand the inevitability of failure, as they

confront intractable conicts, historical or

structurally entrenched injustices? How do we

keep going? How do we remember that keeping

going is worth doing?

O n F a I l u r E

In the rst section of this issue, performance

practitioners reect on the complex relationship

of performance to failure from the fallout

when bubbles burst and projects dont go as

planned, to the tedious, gruelling, productiveencounter with failure in any creative process.

Jools Gilson reects on how failure maps

the contours of social power, resisting the

transformative possibilities of public art


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6 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : ON FAILURE

practice. In half-angels year-long project

The Knitting Map, the hostile response of the

local media and some community members

signalled, by one measure, the projects failure;

by another, it was a barometer of the deep

disturbance that the work created when it

addressed the political, economic and civic value

of womens work and the disavowed historical

entanglement of mapping with colonialism and

capitalism. In their experimental letter-writing

project, Matthew Goulish and Abhay Ghiara

discuss teaching, performance and economics.

They write with and through failure, using

performance to think a new economics based on

the dignity value of experience rather than the

brute rule of the bottom line, which has already

failed us so spectacularly. Tim Etchells takes usinto the rehearsal room with his performance

company, Forced Entertainment. Their process

is a landscape of difcult beginnings, dead-

ends, stuckness and faltering progress, a space

where it appears that nothing is happening,

nothing will happen and, if it did, it would

come to nothing. Etchells shows us that making

performance demands dwelling in not knowing,

encountering failure with dogged persistence

and stubborn courage.

Where artistic practice creates spaces to

encounter and inhabit failure, the classroom

provides a site of confrontation with failurespainful and paradoxical nature. The next three

essays encounter failure in the context of

progressive pedagogy, provoking new thinking

about the institutional cultures and mandates

of education. Jill Dolan nds herself ambushed

by a students overt expression of racism in

a classroom where a shared commitment to

social justice was the tacit premise. Confronted

by a failure both inevitable and uninhabitable,

Dolan explores the diagnostic capacity of

failure to reveal the blind spots of progressive

pedagogy, which must embody authority and

yet unmake hierarchical structures. Jocelyn

McKinnon and Sean Lowry address these

themes in a very different setting at their

regional satellite campus of an Australian state

university, where the neoliberal, vocational

mandate of the institution presumes to rescue

students from economic and social failure. In

their report from the margins, they describe

leading their students through a performancepedagogy that demands that they risk failure in

the classroom, entertaining ways of knowing in

and through performance that run counter to

their Universitys base instrumentalism. Ricardo

Dominguez, in another corporate university,

embraces the paradox of his position as an

authority gure faced with teaching radically

anti-authoritarian performance art to a large

lecture class. Revelling in his own failure, he

creates a hyperbolic performance of authority

that gradually implodes, sucking the hapless

students into a vortex of confusion that reveals

the unspoken contract between studentconsumer, knowledge commodity and the

masters charged with delivering it, and inviting

them to rebel by imagining new congurations

of power and knowledge.

6


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Our next section deliberates further on

the tactical potential of failure to puncture

autocratic systems. For Johanna Linsley, the

deliberate failures of performance artists using

the lecture form produce non-knowledges,

ways of refusing the closure of learning

such as stupidity, paranoia, wonder that

resonate beyond the authoritative connes

of traditional pedagogys promise. Cormac

Power discusses the aesthetics of failure in the

context of traditional theatrical representation.

If traditional theatres pedagogy (teaching

an audience how to perceive and interpret

an imagined world) operates through the

mechanism ofdeixis, or pointing, then what

can an example like Ionescos The Chairs, which

stages the ultimate failure ofdeixis, tell usabout the ways in which failure is embedded

at the core of theatres representational and

pedagogical equation? And how does such

an example reframe the claims made for the

radical pedagogy of post-dramatic theatre?

In the sketches that follow, Michael Sommers

reects on his experience as a life-long artist

making the transition from the failure-

centred process of the studio to teaching in

institutions in which failure is proscribed.

From the unpredictable dynamics of student

projects to the all-too-predictable obduracy of

institutional procedures, what morass of misery,humiliation and tribulation awaits the artist

who falls into the academic well? To inhabit,

own and elaborate incompetence, as Sommers

does, is a well-known art of the clown, also the

subject of Eric Weitzs reections. Focusing on

solo clown performance Weitz deliberates on

the tension between the monitory pedagogy

of clowning that enforces normative forms

of competence and an artistic form which

elaborates the beauty, wonder and essential

human qualities of failure.

The nal section of this issue looks at failure

in pedagogical projects aiming explicitly at

social transformation. Wesley Days and Sonja

Kuftinec both work with youth in intractable

conict situations and teach within the

academy. In their dialogue they discuss Dayss

methods as a Capoeira practitioner, which

deliberately induce systemic failure: where

participants enter with defended identities,

embattled in a carapace of ideology, secured bykinetic and relational habitus, his performative

interventions disturb long enough to produce

a moment of becoming-other in which new

relations can be experienced. However, this

emancipatory method runs up against new

challenges in the university classroom, making

visible the intractable conservatism of higher

educations internalized expectations and

processes. David Grant and J. M. Crossan

confront a similar tension between institutional

strictures and performances emancipatory

ideals. Their case study reveals how even the

attempt to stage a theatrical project in the spaceof a prison, an institution whose very purpose

is to crush autonomy and agency, is doomed

to fail if it succeeds and doomed to success if it

fails. So even as their project could be deemed


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8 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : ON FAILURE8

nally successful on its own terms, their

recounting of it in this essay remains saturated

with the depressive affect of the myriad failures

encountered in the process of bringing it to

fruition. Rustom Bharuchas letter closes the

volume as he reects on a career in theatre and

performance for social change in and beyond

the Indian subcontinent. As a coda of sorts,

it troubles the presumptions of our collective

project, asking who gets to name failure and at

whose cost. As a reexive meditation on failure,

it acknowledges that there are some artistic

failures that dont yield easy lessons but that

attune us to political hopes ongoing state of

failure, demanding endurance and persistence

Cant go on. Must go on.

Throughout the issue, Vlatka Horvats collagesand photographic performances resonate with

failures affect. Imbued with a sense of dignity

and delicacy, of pathos and playfulness, they

bring us into the presence of failure, while

staging the failure of presence: a performer

trying, searching, hiding, coming undone,

coming apart, coming unhinged, becoming

other. Finally, we offer a partial inventory of

the forms and faces of failure. Inspired by the

contributions to this issue, as well as by the rich

scholarship on failure, pedagogy and affect,

this index or anatomy of failure aims to capture

failures breadth, as it shapes our lives andrefracts the seeming givens of our reality.

r E F E r E n C E S

Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, NewYork: Routledge.

Antebi, Nicole, Dickey, Colin and Herbst, Robby (2007)Failure! Experiments in aesthetic and social practices, LosAngeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press.

Berlant, Lauren (2008) The Female Complaint: Theunnished business of sentimentality in America, Durham,North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Berlant, Lauren (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, North

Carolina: Duke University Press.Bailes, Sara Jane (2011)Performance Theatre and the Poeticsof Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator

Repair Service, London and New York: Routledge.

Bottoms, Stephen and Goulish, Matthew (2007) Small Actsof Repair: Performance, ecology and Goat Island, Londonand New York: Routledge.

Connolly, William (2008) The Secular Age: Belief,spirituality and time, www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/04/17/belief-spirituality-and-time, accessed14 December 2011.

Dolan, Jill (2001a) Geographies of Learning: Theory

and practice, activism and performance, Middletown,Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.

Dolan, Jill (2001b) Performance, utopia and the utopianperformative,Theatre Journal 53(3): 45579.

Dolan, Jill (2005) Utopia in Performance: Finding hope at thetheater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Edelman, Lee (2004)No Future: Queer theory and the deathdrive, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Giroux, Henry (2002) Educated hope in an age ofprivatized visions, Cultural Studies / Critical Methodologies2(93): 93112.

Halberstam, Judith (2007) Notes on Failure, in KlausBenesch and Ulla Haselstein (eds) The Power and

Politics of the Aesthetic in American Culture, Heidelberg:

Universitatsverlag (Winter), pp. 6990.Halberstam, Judith (2011) The Queer Art of Failure,Durham, North Carolina, and London: DukeUniversity Press.

Le Feuvre, Lisa, ed. (2010)Failure (Documents ofContemporary Art), London: Whitechapel Gallery andCambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Ngai, Sianne (2005) Ugly Feelings, Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Power, Cormac (2010) Performing to fail: Perspectiveson failure in performance and philosophy, in DanielMeyer-Dinkgraffe and Daniel Watt (eds)Ethical Encounters:

Boundaries of theatre, performance and philosophy,Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Probyn, Elspeth (2005)Blush: Faces of shame, Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Readings, Bill (1996) The University in Ruins, Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect,pedagogy, performativity, Durham, North Carolina: DukeUniversity Press.

Strathern, Marilyn, ed. (2000)Audit Culture:Anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the

academy, London: Routledge.

Tincineto Clough, Patricia and Halley, Jean, eds (2007) TheAffective Turn: Theorizing the social, Durham and London:Duke University Press.

Werry, Margaret and OGorman, Risn (2009) Underthe seat of knowledge: A photo essay on failure,

Transformations XX 1: 4777.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : ON FAILURE