The Material Culture of Failure

When Things Do Wrong

David Jeevendrampillai, Aaron Parkhurst, Timothy Carroll, Julie Shackelford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

What happens when objects behave unexpectedly or fail to do what they 'should'? Who defines failure? Is failure always bad? Rather than viewing concepts such as failure, incoherence or incompetence as antithetical to social life, this innovative new book examines the unexpected and surprising ways in which failure can lead to positive and creative results. Combining both theoretical and ethnographic approaches to failure, The Material Culture of Failure explores how failure manifests itself and operates in a variety of contexts. The editors present ten ethnographic encounters of failure – from areas as diverse as design, textiles, religion, beauty, and physical failure – covering Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Arabian Gulf. Identifying common themes such as interpersonal, national and religious articulations of power and identity, the book shows some of the underlying assumptions that are revealed when materials fail, designs crumble, or things develop unexpectedly.The first anthropological study dedicated to theorizing failure, this innovative collection offers fresh insights based on the latest scholarship. Destined to stimulate a new area of research, the book makes a vital contribution to material culture studies and related social science theory.

1 Introduction: Towards a general theory of failure

Timothy Carroll, David Jeevendrampillai and Aaron Parkhurst¹

Things sometimes misbehave. In fact, all things tend to behave, at some time or in some way, other than how ‘we’ – their owners, keepers, subjects – want them to behave. When things do wrong, when things fall apart, when systems collapse, it is common practice to move on. This ability to move on, to persevere and to recover, is important, and much academic work has been poured into understanding that aspect; in some places it is called resilience, or development. Natural sciences might consider perseverance in terms of adaptations or elasticity. Within social sciences it has been couched in terms of techniques of the self and autopoiesis.

However, this volume does not address these moments of resilience and recovery that so thoroughly pervade common discourse on failure – though at times some of this is mentioned. Rather, this volume dwells in the moments before recovery, the moments before what Roy Wagner (1981 [1975]) would term as cultural ‘invention’ (see below). It is in these small spaces, these interstices of breakage that this volume sits. This book dwells in the concept of failure, in order to give this mode of social living the respect it deserves. By taking failure seriously, and by making it paramount within the scope of investigation, not as the lesser brother of success, and not as a linguistic convention, but as a robust mode of living embedded within the ways in which people move through their world, the authors and their subjects demonstrate how failure exists as a rich space for the growth and development of new social relations.

¹ The ‘general theory of failure’, as it is presented in this chapter, draws upon the collaborative work of each of the co- editors of this volume, including Julie Shackelford, whose efforts and insights have helped shape this theory as it stands today. We acknowledge and thank her for her thoughts and ideas included in this chapter.

This volume is the culmination of several years of discussion, reading groups and conference panels. The four editors and the contributors have each fed into the project in different ways and the polyphonic quality of the discussions leading up to this volume are preserved within the pages here. This means that there is (we think productive) disagreement between how each author constitutes ‘failure’ and the theoretical frames upon which they draw in order to do so. There is, however, a general theory of failure that weaves through the discussion. This is the idea that ‘failure’ occurs when objectification ceases to adhere. This is to suggest that in the individual subject’s (or collective societal) project of inscribing themselves in the world, failure happens when the material and social stuff of that inscription behaves in ways other than intended. There is, implicitly, within this working definition a temporal and a moral aspect. Failure, as we understand it, is a moment of breakage between the reality of the present and the anticipated future. Furthermore, this breakage carries moral gravity as what ought to have happened, what should be the case, has not come to pass.

This volume is predicated on the recognition that these variously constructed definitions of failure are, themselves, profoundly reflective of the socialities that produce them. Constructs of failure are often overlooked in the social sciences – with work on ritual failure and mistakes in performance, such as by Edward Schieffelin (1996, 1997) and the contributors to the volume When Rituals go Wrong (edited by Ute Husken 2007) as notable exceptions. In much of the contemporary globalized context, failures are actively ignored by society at large in the ongoing drive towards ‘success’. In a sense, failure is the gap that follows the collapse of one mode of life and precedes the development of a new one.

With the publication of Charles Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species (1859), biological notions of evolution and progress were taken by early scholars within the social sciences, such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1877). Morgan’s schema of unilinear cultural evolution was, in turn, deeply influential on other scholars, such as Karl Marx (1996 [1867]), as well as the society at large. This more cultural line of evolutionary thought, human behaviour and even physicality was premised on Darwinian forms of evolutionary theory, emphasizing ‘survival of the fittest’ as the core dynamic of social life. These models serve to remind actors in society that what they ‘see’ is that which has ‘succeeded’. What ‘failure’ is, then, and how it behaves, becomes tied to this perception, where the ability to understand one’s place in the world is made coherent through the myriad disruption of all the paths that did not, or could not, work. For many people, failure, in its broadest sense, can only be made tolerable through its alignment with a certain type of intentionality, deeply intertwined with notions of duty, responsibility and blame (Weber 1998 [1930]).

In the Euro-American tradition, failure has been located within the evolution of a rationalist drive for betterment, however the role of sentiment and belief – aspects that may be best seen as parts of an embedding framework used to make failure (and success) tolerable – is, as Maria Hovemyr (1998) shows, still a major factor in personal drive and self-appraisal. Following the work of Max Weber, and his understanding of the modern sociological aversion to failure, it is not difficult to see this relationship as embedded in the spirit of competitiveness derived from capitalism, premised on the legacies of Protestantism (Weber 1998 [1930]). This mentality extends from financial pursuits to intellectual endeavours and through to the essence of creativity and inventiveness. It is exemplified through the notoriously aggressive entrepreneurship in the manner of Thomas Edison (Sundwall, this volume) or San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll’s (2006) assertion that ‘failure is a good thing’. In its common usage, failure is aligned with processes of learning and discovery. As such, failure is made a living practice in research labs across the world, where Aristotelian models of hypothesis and deduction (discussed at length in his Prior Analytics II), adapted into scientific pragmatism (most notably in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey), have led to ‘the scientific method’ being affectionately called, by many who work in scientific labs, ‘the art of failure’. This way of thinking partly defines modern pragmatism and science through a binarism between success and failure, that is, hypothesis cum theory/ fact is induced from that which does and cannot work in a system, illuminating that which does and can. But the ‘art of failure’ can be a dangerous art, and the term can take radically different meanings. It can take the meaning of striving for something better, but can also do so with the ironic pity of society’s well to do – as seen in Oscar Wilde’s quip: ‘ambition is the last refuge of the failure’ (The Chameleon, December 1984). Part of the problem, at least analytically, with investigating ‘failure’ is that, as Sarah Lewis (2014: 18) points out:

The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it’s hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else – a learning experience, a trial, a reinvention – no longer the static concept of failure.

This is the slippage apparent in Edison’s and J. Carroll’s respective forms of optimism. And while it is socially productive to allow, and even foster that slippage, analytically the careful framing of an event as it moves across categories is important.

There is also another aspect to this school of pragmatism that is pertinent to the study of failure, particularly in terms of its futurity. In Dewey’s own words, ‘When we take the point of view of pragmatism we see that general ideas have a very different role to play than that of reporting and registering past experiences. They are the bases for organizing future observations and experiences’ (in Cherryholmes 1992: 13). By investigating these ideas, and particularly the contestations as they play out in the field, following in this pragmatic line of thought pushes us to not simply ask ‘how did this failure happen’, but ‘how will this failure be shaping society to come’. It is not surprising, then, that many of the chapters in this volume play on the border between explaining how these moments of failure arise and casting an eye forward to what these interstices indicate about the ongoing shaping of society.

Before outlining the contributing factors in this constitution of failure, however, it is important to highlight one other guiding principle of each chapter. From the outset, our goal has been to have the volume ethnographically driven. As such, each of the nine main chapters draws heavily upon original ethnography coming from the diverse areas of the authors’ respective areas of research. Arising out of this panoply of ethnographic accounts is also the productive dialogue between ‘failure’ as an analytical trope and ‘failure’ as an ethnographic fact (cf. Brubaker and Cooper (2000) on ‘categories of practice’). The authors are cautious to not apply the term ‘failure’ to their fieldsites, as accusing informants of ‘failure’ is a moral accusation (see below) unbecoming of anthropological work. However, in thinking through what failure is as a normative category, and working through the idea of the cessation of objectification, a conceptual framework is afforded through which a greater sense of what ‘failure’ (as an etic, analytical category) actually is (as an emic, lived reality) can come to be seen. In this way, the polyvocality of the volume is not only the product of the participation of its contributing authors, but also a product of the ethnographic witness offering voice to the local articulations, paraphrases and avoidances of things doing the unexpected or undesired.

So, while the ethnographic contributions in this volume are drawn from a wide range of diverse contexts, each chapter works through failure ethnographically, focusing on moments of breakage and disjuncture that most accounts of society tend to gloss over. These seemingly inconsequential moments of breakdown can have a very profound influence on human experience and the lived world. It is the overriding argument of the volume that failure affects the human experience, often quite deeply, and often does so in a highly productive way.

The subsequent sections of this introduction outline major aspects, themes and contributing theories that have helped shape the development of this volume and our general theory of failure. As the volume is situated broadly within discussions of material culture, this introduction starts by grounding the discussion in material culture theory and then moves through wider literature related to failure. It then addresses some key theoretical background that helped shape the discussions held in this volume, and then offers a brief description of the narrative arc moving through each chapter.

Material failure and the materiality of failure

By suggesting that failure happens when things do wrong, we highlight the place of things in the human experience of expectation and anticipation. While there is some difference in how these key terms are applied throughout the individual chapters, it is useful at this stage to clarify – even if only in general terms – what words like ‘material’ and ‘materiality’ mean.

As we understand it, ‘material’ is inherently social. The physical, mechanical, ‘actual’ thing in the world becomes ‘material’ when it enters into social relations. ‘Materiality’, then, is the social impact of the ‘material’. In asserting this, we are following Christopher Tilley’s (2007) excellent elucidation of these terms. Tilley offers the parallel such that material: materiality:: social: sociality. That is to say – using the example of stones carried through a longer conversation (Tilley 2004; Ingold 2007) – that ‘the concept of materiality is one that needfully addresses the ‘social lives’ of stones in relation to the social lives of persons’ (Tilley 2007: 17). Drawing out the relation between ‘material’ and ‘materiality’ also opens up a useful distinction between ‘material failure’ and the ‘materiality of failure’.

The difference here is a distinction between the constitutive substance of the failure and the analytical frame of investigation. In this sense, a ‘material failure’ is something that goes wrong. ‘Material failure’ is when the thing, object or artefact fails to behave correctly. Fernando Dominguez Rubio’s (2016) discussion of the immense infrastructure that is required to maintain the Mona Lisa as the object it is held to be, f or example, outlines the inevitability of materials – as changing things – to, as he puts it, ‘slide’ from their object position. Things change. Objects, however, are held in specific relationships to specific subjects. Artefacts, that is, things which are made and endure through time, that should be one thing, but become something else, trespass upon the boundaries of their object position. This is socially dangerous. It would be a catastrophic failure, for example, to lose the Mona Lisa. Such a loss would be a failure of the magnitude Michael Thompson (1979) calls ‘impossible’, not because it cannot exist in reality, but because it is a social aberration. This same sort of thing happens regularly on smaller scales: a kitchen appliance breaks, a beauty product does not do its job, a pair of trousers rips or fades. Whether this is by design (such as in planned obsolescence) or by the simple fact of the degeneration of matter, things fail.

Sometimes, however, the cessation of objectification does not rest on, or in, the material thing. When infrastructures fail, when democracy fails, the ‘things’ that fail are not artefacts in the strictest sense of a unique item of material culture. Nonetheless, failures of state are no less inscribed in material forms. In this way, social failures can be investigated through careful attention to the materials involved, and their social implications – in other words, the materiality of failure.

Within this collection, there are a range of material culture approaches to failure: some specifically on material failure, some on the materiality of failure, some that touch on both, as failures on one scale ricochet ‘up’, as it were, into larger social spheres. When things go wrong, we tend to shift the blame to other people (as discussed by Kasstan and Shackelford) or things (as discussed by Antohin) or simply ignore the problem (as discussed by Jeevendrampillai). This blaming, and the specific articulation of who or what failed, is inherently political.

It is in this aspect of the wider social and political implications of failure that the material culture approach offers particular advantages. Many, but not all, of the contributors to this volume are trained in material culture studies within anthropology. Two of us writing this introduction have led tutorials in the Ethnographic Collection, held in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. The objects in the collection, such as the Admiralty Island obsidian dagger seen on the cover of this volume, come from around the world and each have a unique biography. In teaching students how to assess an artefact, one of the key places of investigation is any scratches, fissures, cracks or wear seen on the surface. It is in these places of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword: Failure and fragility: Towards a material culture of the end of the world as we knew it
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Towards a general theory of failure
• 2 Miracles and crushed dreams: Material disillusions in the design industry
• 3 When Krishna wore a kimono: Deity clothing as rupture and inefficacy
• 4 Whitened anxiety: Bottled identity in the Emirates
• 5 Holy water, healing and the sacredness of knowledge
• 6 Haredi (material) cultures of health at the 'hard to reach' margins of the state
• 7 Failure as constructive participation? Being stupid in the suburbs
• 8 Destruction of locality: On heritage and failure in 'crisis Syria'
• 9 Axis of incoherence: Engagement and failure between two material regimes of Christianity
• 10 The materiality of silence: Assembling the absence of sound and the memory of 9/11
• Afterword: Failure
• Index