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Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts

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The Anatomy of Failure: An inventory

Margaret Werry & Risn O'Gorman Published online: 14 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Margaret Werry & Risn O'Gorman (2012): The Anatomy of Failure: An inventory, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17:1, 105-110 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2012.651872

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The Anatomy of Failure

An inventory
MARGARET WERRY & RISN OGORMAN

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Not all failure is the same. Failure comes in many species, some minor, some habitual, some incremental, some cataclysmic. Its sheer variety makes it seductive. Failure is paradoxical; it is an end and a beginning, a dissolution and a demarcation. Permanent and transitory, it inaugurates both decay and renewal. Failure is productive, because it demands redress. In failure we are forced to think critically, to reimagine, to make something new. (The logic of capital exploits and

abuses this capacity of failure: economies are driven by planned obsolescence, and landlls are bursting obscenely with failure's collateral damage.) Failure offers a reprieve and a refuge from the cycle of success. Success can be a trap of conformity, setting expectations, demanding repeat performances. Failure and nonconformity are intimates. Deliberate failure can be a strategy to prompt creativity, a tool to discover new forms, ideas, worlds.

I Photos Risn OGorman

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : pp.105-110 2012 TAYLOR & FRANCIS

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Failure can be dissent. It rebels against expertise, virtuosity, competence. Failure is a threshold. It is a limit point, a stoppage, a caesura: a moment in which the linear drive of progress, betterment, accomplishment grinds to a halt. Failure's threshold is also an opening, a crucial, often painful state of imagination. After the familiar, bleak, heavy vacancy, that bottom-punched-out-of-my-world emptiness recedes, something new happens. (Maybe). Failure is a point of transformation, when a goal, an outcome, a future, a subject, an institution becomes something other than itself. And when our intentions are exceeded, other agencies enter in and the unthought occurs. Failure is symptomatic of a current order. It maps what is thinkable, acceptable, appropriate, normal, desirable in any given set of conditions. Failure also points beyond, by marking the limit of what is possible at a particular time and place. It historicizes, denaturalizes, helps us reexively see the orders in which we are embedded. (If we look).

Failure makes visible the places where aspirations and material realities collide. But if failure is symptomatic, it is also diagnostic, pointing us to the thing we have to change. The thing we cannot bear any more. If failure reveals, it also exposes. And exposure is painful.

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The drive to disavow failure, to turn away from it, apologize it away, to convert failure into success (or into learning), is a symptom of this exposure. Failure marks how value is made and measured. Celebrating failure is the prerogative of the privileged; admitting failure is a risk for most. In the context of schooling, failure is a performative that invokes the authority of Law (I fail you). But it is also a performative that rebounds shamefully on the subject of enunciation (where I fail you also means I have failed you). Failure, as an accusation, abjects an other. If we dare to look at the ranks of those doomed to fail, set up to fail, condemned to failure, we see the narrowness of powers connes. Failure imperils a subjects claim to authority; it exposes the imsiness of power. To valorize failure, then, is a necessary but dangerous move.

If knowledge is power, and if power requires knowledges (continual) successful performance, the failure of this performance perturbs the whole delicate equation. Failure, it follows, is free to honour other ways of knowing, other construals of power. If failure has a power of its own, it is the power of refusal, the power of exodus from power. Intentional failure is tactical, never strategic: a guileful ruse (in de Certeaus terms) that cannot keep what it wins. Failure brings ugly feelings in its wake. It bears an affective load of shame, guilt, disgrace, embarrassment, pain, sorrow and loss. Failure breeds fear. And the primitive fear of failure is more destructive than failure itself. Fight, ight, freeze or faint: it gets us stuck in place. To face the fear of failure is to re-enter process. Cant go on, must go on. Failure can be a state of raw human beauty. When we fail we are vulnerable, fragile, unguarded, open. We are most utterly ourselves.

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 Failure can be joyous. It need not be a site of pain or sorrow. We can fail passionately, fail with commitment, excitement, daring, foolishness. Failure can be the most exhilarating freedom. Failure is funny. Failure is absurd. Anybody who plays, knows this. Failure is a natural condition of collaboration and relationality, and the contingency that these imply. In any collective project, some level of failure is inevitable. We can regulate the level of failure, but we can never eliminate it. Other people fuck us up. Failure unmakes selves, and makes them up again and again, revealing identity not as the monolith we often imagine it to be but as the uid process of reinventing ourselves in the face of circumstances and in the company of others. Failure ruptures temporality as a stabilizing, normalizing force. It gives us another kind of time time out, time out of joint, time to think, time to reimagine thinking, time to cheat Time.

Failure is an ending. And in our deathdenying culture, it confronts us with fallibility, mortality. Everything fails with time. Failure is time's promise. Failure is impermanence (de) carnate. Bodies fail. We register failure bodily. Failure is an argument for acceptance. To embrace failure is to surrender the will to control. Failure is a condition with ontological weight. It punctures the illusion of permanence lent by perception. Everything seemingly solid is in continual process: it fails to remain the same as itself, and we fail to grasp it before the moment of its change. Performances much vaunted ephemerality is only the most explicit example. Failure can be change by another name. Yet we often fail to change. More often still, we fail to recognize both. Although we often think of failure as an ending, there is in fact no end to failure and no end to its means.

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