Issue Editors: Eve Katsouraki and Dan Watt
By ‘bodies of failure’ we refer to any notions of embodied experience that entail restriction, limit, accident, or obstruction, and whichbind corporeality to labour, value and representation from a wide social, political and cultural context. Taking Beckett’s famous lines, “fail again, fail better,” the aim of this edition is to explore the radical properties of failure and invite a rethink of ‘failure’ as a trope or mode of human embodied activity.
In western culture, the discourse of failure stands as the counter part to the ideas of progress and victory which simultaneously dominate the narratives of this history. Failure implies disapproval, dissatisfaction, rejection. As an evaluative judgement of an outcome, failure invites disappointment, at worst, becomes stigma. The body perceived as a failed corporeality reduced of any value is at the centre of a series of traumatic events reaching its climax with the Holocaust and continuing to today through any type of imposed physical torture in a political or social setting. But failure also exerts an existential dimension that reshapes and redefines lived experience through its difference. Its representation or experience through artistic and sociopolitical settings violates normative conventions of the production of meaning (e.g. hegemonic ideology and its system of value) and asserts an anti-conformist ideology, a poetics of upheaval through difference. Failure indexes, in other words, a moment in which the other, or otherness, is present and brings meaning to be viewed as contingent, a thing to be made or arranged, “posited,” but as easily abandoned, revised, or renegotiated. Thus as an embodied experience, failure, as Sara Jane Bailes points out, can be seen to challenge the cultural dominance of instrumental rationality and the fictions of continuity that connect the way we imagine and manufacture the world.
This special edition on ‘Bodies of failure’ will focus, in particular, in exploring failure in artistic and cultural practices as a function of doing. When we do we also invent the horizon for the capacity to fail. But if the capacity to fail also entails the capacity to sustain desire even as it thwarts it, the aspect of ‘hope,’ as Ernst Bloch suggests, exposes embodied failure as the economy of value and exchange through which new conceptions of virtuosity and mastery become possible. Can failure, therefore, as a performative technique within the context of an economy of representation, function as a socially transformative mode of production intrinsically linked to ideology, politics, and to the production of value through meaning? And would it be possible to find a poetics of failure as a practice of resistance or, perhaps, as Adorno puts it, as a negative aesthetic – a technique of negation that functions as a critical interstice in an otherwise instrumental world? What is failure after all? Can it function as an alternative to counteract against the prevalence of notions of dominance and progress?
On this basis we will seek to question failure as an activity or praxis of involving “bodies” as fundamentally inter-corporeal, (trans)formative and ethico-political. By “bodies” we mean the ontic, physical corporality as well as the bodies as “dominant narratives” whose failure renegotiates the relation of the ontic body to the embodiment of spaces we inhabit, our political and cultural practices.
Some questions (but not only) that might be addressed:
- · What kind of social and political implications does the condition of failure as a performative and cultural technique involve?
- · Can failure provide a way of testing the terms and edges of established cultural and political meaning and its limitations?
- · Can failure actually work and act as a generative event that produces in a roguish, subversive manner?
- · What are the social and political implications that the condition of failure (and accident) evidence?
- · Can failure indicate the disillusionment of the subject matter conveyed by a fictional or factual embodied narrative?
- · How does failure in artistic practices challenge or even oppose the stability or fulfilment of agreed principles and conventions?
- · How can failure act as a calculated shift of embodied intention and operate as a confrontational stand or even political activism?
- · How radical can failure become as an embodied practice?
- · What happens when grand narratives reflected through artistic practices that act as “bodies” fail to take material shape or re-shape into an undesired “soma” or anomaly?
- · What happens to the subject and its somatic entity that embodies such failures?
- · The symbolic failure of democracy and the more tangible failures of the communist political regimes are only two such examples, yet in what ways can such embodiment of failure challenge the boundaries with which we perceive and understand ourselves as individuals?
Deadlines are as follows:
Proposals: 25 March 2012
Completed articles: September 2012
Publication date: February 2013
ALL proposals and general enquiries should be sent direct to:
Eve Katsouraki: e.katsouraki@uel.ac.uk and/or Dan Watt: D.P.Watt@lboro.ac.uk
Proposals will be accepted by email and should not exceed one A4 side.
