Description
This paper contests the dominant account of ‘failing better’ currently shaping the organizational structures of global politics. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs producing life-enhancing technology; military strategists pursuing ‘clean’ wars; humanitarian actors managing complex disasters; and activists sounding the alarm on climate change – all are keen to harness the productive energies of past failures in order to produce long-term success. ‘Failing better’ has become a highly efficient form of reflexivity driven by conditions of urgency: the stakes (i.e. securing life; reducing casualties; protecting civilians; ensuring the survival of the species) are simply too high to fail. This paper critiques the linear pedagogy underscoring this framework in order to expose how only particular failures become useful for organizations operating under conditions of urgency. In other words, it is possible to be open and reflexive about specific historical failures so long as they can be arranged into a linear story about failure learning adaptation success. This paper asks what is excluded by this pre-ordained pathway: what life-worlds get eradicated by claims of urgency, what experiences of failure are deemed unproductive, and what forms of violence are reproduced in the name of learning. What happens if we approach failure not as something to be made useful in conditions of urgency (and therefore ultimately eradicated), but rather as a variegated and deeply unruly experience known and felt through its stubborn durability? What happens if we lift failure out of the calculus determined by urgency, and look instead at its persistence, endurance and ongoingness?
