When trying to think about what I wanted to focus on in my reflection my mind kept going back to the discussion we had a few weeks ago about these reflections.  In particular, I remember that there was general agreement that we should focus on what we felt were the successes of the course, and not the failures.

I understand why we did.  Success, we are all told, is what we should be striving for.  To succeed, to achieve, to win, to be the best.  These are ‘good things’.  In terms of our academic endeavors (student and staff alike), success seems very clearly laid out as the point of why we are all here.

As students, we will go to classes, we will read, we will (occasionally) be permitted discussion on a topic, and we will then evidence our absorption of this knowledge once or twice a semester, and subsequently be judged on it.  Success in such a framework is clear: a high mark.

For the staff experience, I can only guess, but I imagine research grants gained, highly-rated and attended courses run, professional ‘advancement’, and as little complaining as possible are at least partly the parameters of success expected by the university.

But despite this focus on success, I can’t help myself from thinking about failure.  I am currently reading The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam, and even though I am only about a quarter of a way through (I may end up failing to finish it), I am drawn to her premise.  She states:

‘Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world’ (pg. 2)

‘failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods.  Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers.  And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life’ (pg. 3)

For Halberstam, embracing failure, ignorance, ‘low’ thought, not being taken seriously, frivolity, rejecting hierarchy, rejecting the academic instruction to be rigorous and serious, rejecting ‘disciplinary correctness’, can be valuable, indeed; it can be radical.

We have, of course, discussed radical/alternative pedagogical approaches in this course.  In her book, Halberstam reflects on a film, The Class, in which a moment of pedagogical failure seems to take place.  A student, having been asked by the teacher what she has learned on a course that was typified by alienation and misunderstanding between teacher and student, thinks carefully, before replying: ‘I didn’t learn anything’.  Halberstam sees this statement of apparent failure  – ‘I didn’t learn anything’ – as an endorsement of the premise of The Ignorant Schoolmaster and Rancier’s critique of the conventional, discipline-based pedagogical approach of the university, illustrating as it does the need for a pedagogy that ‘presumes and indeed demands equality rather than hierarchy’. (pg 13)

So why am I talking about this? Why am I focusing on the value of failure when reflecting on the year-long journey we’ve all been engaged in.  Do I think it was a failure?

No, I don’t.  But I do think that embracing failure has value when we reflect on the ‘success’ of the course.  That we have all singularly and collectively felt anxieties about achieving certain goals; our group projects, doing more readings, attempting different decision-making approaches, ensuring commitments have been met, that the course will ‘successfully’ run next year etc has been evident, and entirely understandable.  But if, in the course of our reflections, we assess ourselves collectively or individually to have failed in the tasks we set ourselves, perhaps we could view these failures through this alternative prism?

Perhaps our possible failures were our intuitive, collective rejection of the disciplining forces of the university at large?  Perhaps our indulgence in drawn-out decision making and lengthy discussion of process was not indicative of failure to be productive and efficient, but a demonstration of a desire to take our time and be engaged in the processes that affect us without the need to be endlessly ‘productive’?  And perhaps, at times, we did just fail, and if we did, so what?

One of my favourite Bjork lyrics reads:

Best way to start-a-new is to fail miserably

Fail at loving

and fail at giving

Fail at creating a flow

then realign the whole

And kick into the start hole

In failing we can learn.  We can learn to bear disappointment, and we can learn to reject paradigms of success that are anathema to us.  So I choose to embrace my and our failures, the times we wandered and got lost, to reject the disciplining, alienating impulses of academia and the world at large, and to view those failures as an opportunity not to see how I can be a ‘better’ person or student, but just to as an opportunity to ‘see’.

Halberstam advocates a method of enquiry, expression, and learning that I have indulged in in this reflection; one that encourages meandering and possibly disconnected trains of thought.  She concludes her introduction with a passage that feels eerily and happily reminiscent of my experience of this course, and highlights some of the things that I have valued most about it:

‘On behalf of such a detour around ‘proper’ knowledge . . . [we] will lose [our] way in the territories of failure, forgetfulness, stupidity, and negation.  We will wander, improvise, fall short, and move in circles.  We will lose our ways, our cars, our agenda, and possibly our minds, but in losing we will find another way of making meaning in which . . . no one gets left behind’. (pg. 25)

Thank-you to whoever is reading this, and to everyone for their involvement in the course; it’s been a real pleasure to take part in this experiment with you all!

On Failure / The future of our university by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0