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
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.
Nightmare 2
Imagine one was to see the world through technocratic goggles of failure analysis. Backed up by the comforting environments of Structuralist certainty, this is actually pretty simple. One would start an analysis by determining both the mechanism and the root cause of failure in order to implement a corrective action. Therefore, one can proportionally raise the track-record of ‘success’ over time.
The culture of success
In contemporary social structures, we think of success as always good because it has become linked to prosperity. In MacCabe’s words “success dominates because of its part in the global evaluation of the good life in terms of money”. Hence, failure has become the unthinkable, the semantic confirmation of poverty.
Looking at the current production of space and, indeed, the art world, one contentedly realises that creative production and failure come along as an inseparable couple. That might be true of almost any industry or economy, of course, but it seems that, at least in current cultural discourse, the value of failure is being put forward as an alternative idea of success. Now, within such regime of production, one might argue that the realisation of ‘failure as the fundamental condition of surprise’ is of course nothing new, but an interesting one to build upon. Today, the primary issue that needs to be stressed is the fact that we have moved away, at least in creative production, from the reference-model of the final product; fortunately, such notion is often replaced by cultural laboratories in which the proto-product–in other words the process towards X–and its failure is valued as knowledge production and embodies precisely the laboratory for experiment that provides challenging work. If one was to understand experiment as a vital ingredient that contributed to the cultural gravitas of spatial production, one has to coercively admit to the value of failure. Hence, the societal norm of success as the only way forward needs to be reviewed.
The Violence of Participation
Spatial planning is often considered as the management of spatial conflicts. Cities and institutions exist as social and spatial conflict zones, re-negotiating their limits through constant transformation. To deal with conflicts, critical decision-making must evolve. Such decision-making is often pre-supposed as a process whose ultimate goal is consensus. Instead, one could think of a model that fosters conflict and micro-political participation in the production of space and asks how one can contribute to fields of knowledge, professions or discourses from the point of view of “space”. Through cyclical specialisation, the future spatial practitioner could be understood as an outsider who–instead of trying to set up or sustain common denominators of consensus–enters existing situations or projects by instigating conflict-zones between often-delineated fields of knowledge.
Think about Thinking
Thinking about failure and conflict from the point of view of process, the most infertile situation that can occur is to let the fear of failure prevent one from ever doing anything. It is the act of production that allows us to revise, tweak, rethink and change. Along the lines of re-inventing oneself, it also opens a space of uncertainty that often produces knowledge and content by surprise. If one’s priority is to resist failure at all costs, the potential of surprise is never played out. This is why the results of certain investigations and inventions in many fields and disciplines have become predictable and the outcome of a vast majority of creative and artistic output is both conventional and mediocre. To take a risk means not being able to pre-empt the outcome of an investigation. Consciously allowing processing to fail will open up the window of surprise, the moment where conflictual involvement and non-loyal participation produce new knowledge and produce political politics .
Markus Miessen
Markus,
A couple of points. Firstly you appear to adhere to the idea that ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are universally agreed notions, true for all times and places. That because ‘success’ is associated with the world of finance, it is unilinear and therefore ‘bad’, and that to counter this we should invest in ‘failure’, which will create new modalities/knowledges etc.
But that method would only concretise and further embed the idea that these procedures/results are in some way owned, and that we must accept those designations as they are. Indeed your proposal of negating ‘success’ by embracing ‘failure’ sounds like the rebellious act of not wearing your uniform to school — that is, rather limited. I would argue that although already enclosed by the space in which they exist — ‘failure’ is only possible as it is not ‘success’ and vice versa – we can investigate the ground which allows that meaning, and thereby contest those taken for granted notions.
Secondly, you suggest that an professionalised creative and their knowledge are best placed to either create consensus, or as you advocate, conflict — ‘Through cyclical specialisation, the future spatial practitioner could be understood as an outsider who–instead of trying to set up or sustain common denominators of consensus–enters existing situations or projects by instigating conflict-zones between often-delineated fields of knowledge.’
I will reiterate a comment I made in a previous L/L discussion — the solution you have offered emerges from a specific knowledge base, one that is limited (like all disciplines) and consistently fails to take in the concerns of the end-user. More often than not, they (the audience) are seen as an obstacle, obstructing the path of creative potential. That ‘frustration’ appears to induce a further retreat into the abyss of design rather than the ‘conflict and micro-political participation’ you yourself propose for others. That is not to dismiss the agonistic space you wish to build, but the creation of that should not be decided by an outsider, but rather by the users of that field themselves — that is a truly radical act. Indeed, I would argue that we, as a party interested in creative potential, need to begin to see our practice as part of the problem of communication and stop the fetishising the attitude of design as a great resolver. All disciplines are servants (either to domination or to resistance), and we therefore need to locate whom we serve with each new proposal.
/Marcus Leis Allion 21/03/2007