This article was downloaded by: [Panteion University] On: 15 February 2012, At: 06:44 Publisher: Routledge Informa

Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20

On Failure (On Pedagogy): Editorial Introduction

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

To cite this article: Risn O'Gorman & Margaret Werry (2012): On Failure (On Pedagogy): Editorial Introduction, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17:1, 1-8 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2012.651857

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

On Failure (On Pedagogy)

Editorial Introduction
RISN OGORMAN & MARGARET WERRY

Failure is all of a sudden quite trendy. Glossy feature articles everywhere from the New York Times to the Harvard Business Review instruct 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 must learn 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 flurry of scholarship from queer studies, art criticism and especially performance studies has also focused on failures intimate relationship with creativity.1 These 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 it should 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 to anatomize 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-reflection. 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 reflections tap the analytic power 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 sense of 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,

Downloaded by [Panteion University] at 06:44 15 February 2012

1 For just four of the most prominent recent publications, see Le Feuvre (2010), Halberstam (2011), Bailes (2011) and Antebi et al. (2007). Other initiatives such as the 2009 Zagreb PSi Conference on Misperformance and Tim Etchellss and Adrian Heathfields Institute of Failure are indicative of failures recent currency.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : pp.1-8 http: //dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2012.651857

ISSN 1352-8156 print/1469-9990 online 2012 TAYLOR & FRANCIS

Downloaded by [Panteion University] at 06:44 15 February 2012

2 Scholars of critical pedagogy have addressed this dominant affect of higher education, arguing both for critical realism and for a hopeful persistence in the face of dismal odds what Ernst Bloch called educated hope (Giroux 2002 and Dolan 2005).

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, flops, misfires, deadends and surprises, moodiness and messiness it is also its innate ontological condition: its defining liveness and ephemerality marks performances ultimate failure to perpetuate itself. It becomes itself (to bawdlerize Peggy Phelan) through failing. Late-twentiethcentury 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 collectively reimagines 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 rarified 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 developmental narratives 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 exclusion in 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

Vlatka Horvat: Parts Work, 2007. Collage on paper (a set of 6). Images courtesy of the artist.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : ON FAILURE ON FAILURE

RESEARCH 171 :

Downloaded by [Panteion University] at 06:44 15 February 2012

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 misfire. 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 of understanding and valuing schooling: through standardized testing, student evaluations and bureaucratic measures of school performance, the threat of failure is the defining 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 difficulty. 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 with legitimating 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 conflict-resolution, community-building, antiracism 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

OGORMAN & WER(ON PEDAGOGY)

RY : ON FAILURE

On the imperialism of hope, see Edelman (2004).

3

Downloaded by [Panteion University] at 06:44 15 February 2012

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 of its 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 in performance. Performance practice teaches us how to live with and as failures, finding 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 imperialism of hope, generates a reflexive 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 flailing 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 fixities 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 comes laced 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

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : ON FAILURE

Downloaded by [Panteion University] at 06:44 15 February 2012

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 significant 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 imagine that 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 benefits 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 momentum withstand the inevitability of failure, as they confront intractable conflicts, historical or structurally entrenched injustices? How do we keep going? How do we remember that keeping going is worth doing?
On FaIlurE

In the first section of this issue, performance practitioners reflect on the complex relationship of performance to failure from the fallout when bubbles burst and projects dont go as planned, to the tedious, gruelling, productive encounter with failure in any creative process. Jools Gilson reflects on how failure maps the contours of social power, resisting the transformative possibilities of public art

Downloaded by [Panteion University] at 06:44 15 February 2012

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 us into the rehearsal room with his performance company, Forced Entertainment. Their process is a landscape of difficult beginnings, deadends, 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 failures painful 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 finds 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 performance pedagogy 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 figure 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 student consumer, knowledge commodity and the masters charged with delivering it, and inviting them to rebel by imagining new configurations of power and knowledge.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : ON FAILURE

Downloaded by [Panteion University] at 06:44 15 February 2012

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 confines 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 of deixis, or pointing, then what can an example like Ionescos The Chairs, which stages the ultimate failure of deixis, tell us about 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 reflects on his experience as a life-long artist making the transition from the failurecentred 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 reflections. 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 final 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 conflict 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 by kinetic 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 space of 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

Downloaded by [Panteion University] at 06:44 15 February 2012

finally 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 reflects 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 reflexive 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 collages and 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 and refracts the seeming givens of our reality.
rEFErEnCES
Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, New York: Routledge. Antebi, Nicole, Dickey, Colin and Herbst, Robby (2007) Failure! Experiments in aesthetic and social practices, Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press. Berlant, Lauren (2008) The Female Complaint: The unfinished 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 Poetics of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, London and New York: Routledge. Bottoms, Stephen and Goulish, Matthew (2007) Small Acts of Repair: Performance, ecology and Goat Island, London and 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, accessed 14 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 utopian performative, Theatre Journal 53(3): 45579. Dolan, Jill (2005) Utopia in Performance: Finding hope at the theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Edelman, Lee (2004) No Future: Queer theory and the death drive, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Giroux, Henry (2002) Educated hope in an age of privatized visions, Cultural Studies / Critical Methodologies 2(93): 93112. Halberstam, Judith (2007) Notes on Failure, in Klaus Benesch 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: Duke University Press. Le Feuvre, Lisa, ed. (2010) Failure (Documents of Contemporary Art), London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Ngai, Sianne (2005) Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Power, Cormac (2010) Performing to fail: Perspectives on failure in performance and philosophy, in Daniel Meyer-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: Duke University 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) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the social, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Werry, Margaret and OGorman, Risn (2009) Under the seat of knowledge: A photo essay on failure, Transformations XX 1: 4777.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 171 : ON FAILURE