Malfunction as the Crucial Mode of Experiment

Nightmare 1
In his memoir, Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, the American post-modern novelist Paul Auster clarifies his understanding of failure by stating that in his late twenties and early thirties, he went through a period of several years when everything he touched turned to failure .

Temporary relief
As Colin MacCabe noted at a conference titled “The Value of Failure” in June 2005, “success has become one of the key terms by which people evaluate their own and other lives”. When MacCabe refers to failure, he posits it as a crucial component of both the development of knowledge in science and of creative experimentation in the arts. He ends on the question to which degree contemporary society demands success and what happens when, in contemporary Britain (and indeed Europe), both public and private funding for projects in the cultural and educational sectors becomes increasingly success oriented.
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