Beyond Failure

New Essays on the Cultural History of Failure in Theatre and Performance

Tony Fisher, Eve Katsouraki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351247719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

In setting foot on stage, every performer risks the possiblity of failure. Indeed, the very performance of any human action is inextricable from its potential not to succeed. This inherent potential has become a key critical trope in contemporary theatre, performance studies, and scholarship around visual cultures. Beyond Failure explores what it means for our understanding not just of theatrical practice but of human social and cultural activity more broadly.

The essays in this volume tackle contemporary debates around the theory and poetics of failure, suggesting that in the absence of success can be found a defiance and hopefulness that points to new ways of knowing and being in the world.

Beyond Failure offers a unique and engaging approach for students and practitioners interested not only in the impact of failure on the stage, but what it means for wider social and cultural debates.

1

Introduction

Knowing failure

Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki

Revolutions have brought us nothing but defeat till now, but these ­unavoidable defeats are only heaping guarantee upon guarantee of the coming final triumph. On one condition, of course! The question arises, under which circumstances each respective defeat was suffered.

Rosa Luxemburg, Order Reigns in Berlin (1919)

When there’s no future

How can there be sin

We’re the flowers in the dustbin

We’re the poison in your human machine

We’re the future your future …

The Sex Pistols, God Save the Queen (1977)¹

Failure administers the most painful of lessons. To know failure is to learn something about ourselves and about our limitations; about the nature of human finitude and about the confines of what is possible for us in the world. It is also to learn about nothing in the quite literal sense of that which renders action null and void. Thus, at its most extreme, failure can be thought as the pedagogy of futility. We get to ‘know’ failure through agonising and negative experiences; it brings with it neither reward nor solace, only the bitter taste of defeat and personal disappointment. Failure breeds resentment, antipathy, and despair. And yet failure can also produce knowledge. With that knowledge can come an appreciation of having acquired intense insight; an exhilarating sense of intuiting the depths – de profundis, as Oscar Wilde once put it. When Rosa Luxemburg reflected on the failure of the Spartacist revolt in Berlin, in 1919, she wrote not in the mood of defeatism or resignation or despondency, but with a degree of defiance that transfigured that defeat into an article of faith. For Luxemburg, defeat belonged to a revolutionary theology in which repeated failure would add ‘guarantee upon guarantee’ of the ‘coming final triumph’ (2004: 377). But defeat that produces knowledge is also ambiguous. For Luxemburg, it is given (by failure) but it is not a given (of failure) – it is not to be taken for granted. Failure’s lesson places a stark demand upon the knower: to have faith in the future is to know that, in order to meet historical destiny, one must face and endure the fiasco of the present. But what guarantees ‘the guarantee’ in a time where, at least according to some, our faith in futurity is all but lost? What if there is ‘no future’ – as the Sex Pistols later proclaimed in their punk anthem, God Save the Queen? Here, a different lesson can be drawn from the historical experience of failure – one that announces the arrival of that ‘uncanniest of all guests,’ as Nietzsche once put it, ‘nihilism’ (1968: 8). With nihilism, Nietzsche wrote, the entire ‘table of values’ by which we had previously oriented ourselves, and which once lent certainty and credibility to our actions, has collapsed.² Nietzsche demanded a ‘new table of values,’ but what remains clear – over a century later – is that we are still waiting for someone to write it; just as we still have not escaped the spectre of nihilism, which – like the ghost of Hamlet’s father – immobilises the very possibility for future action even as it concurrently commands it.

What we have described in this opening paragraph might be thought as offering two radically different responses to the problem of failure. On the one hand, failure leads to an almost messianic faith in the power of futurity – to the knowledge that present failures will be redeemed in a time yet to come; on the other hand, with the arrival of nihilism, we have a drastic disavowal of futurity, where the knowledge of failure produces a bleak assessment of the impossibility of salvation or redemption, and with it the very refusal of the future. Accordingly, what failure and its discourse leads to, when viewed in light of these two opposed approaches, is something of a conceptual and historical impasse. Nevertheless, within that impasse there is also, we suggest, an important kind of historical knowledge to be gleaned – that of inherent contradiction. It shows that the very thing that compels action, at the same time leads to, or can end up in, inaction, incapacitation, and breakdown. In failure, in other words, one experiences the contradiction of action and of the subject who acts: failure is both knowledge of one’s passivity – to fail is to experience failure, not to ‘will’ it (even if, in daring to act, one ‘tempts’ failure); and at the same time (at least if one is attuned to it) one experiences the radical acceptance of failure’s lesson – thus one indeed wills failure, embraces it. In short, to accept failure is to be caught up in the terms of a paradox. It is an action that defeats the possibility of action; or rather, it is an action that will refuse the possibility that an efficacious or coherent result would resolve the contradiction. Failure – understood in the radical dialectical sense of being a constitutive possibility of any action whatsoever – goes ‘all the way down.’ In the ‘event’ of failure, we encounter the very dynamic of our own historicity, in which our own subjectivity is entrapped; in this sense, the event of failure is also an ontological event in which one discovers that built into the nature of things – as well as our actions and deeds – is disunity, incommensurability, and discord: failure points to a void in the fabric of the world. Employing theatrical terms, we might say that what constitutes this peculiar and disturbing dynamic of failure is performance’s simultaneous ‘doing and undoing.’ And it is this historical dynamic, this disturbing paradox, and this subjective impasse that provides the starting point for this book. The question we wish to raise in relation to these phenomena can be stated in simple terms as follows: ‘what – if anything – lies beyond failure’s lesson?’ Of course, there is nothing simple about this question, and folded into it are a number of concerns and further questions that the contributors to this volume explore in various ways. But before we get to discover what those questions are, we first want to touch on – however briefly – some of the existing controversies around theatre/performance and the problem of failure that will enable us to better frame them.

Debates around what Sara Jane Bailes has termed ‘the poetics of failure’ are now well and truly established in theatre and performance scholarship. This is hardly surprising: in many respects the discourse of failure can be seen as a response to the development of ‘post-dramatic’ performance practices, insofar as failure is deployed in post-dramatic performance to unsettle theatre’s own conditions of production, spectatorship, and representation; just as those practices, which forefront ‘failure’ as a theatrical strategy, emerged historically in the wake of Beckett’s theatre and the performance turn of the 1960s (see Bailes, 2011). But it is perhaps worth noting – even if only in passing – that (as recent as the interest in making thematic theatre’s own relationship to failure may be) theatre’s relationship with failure is as ancient as the theatre itself. Arguably, it is failure that constitutes one of the central motifs of Greek tragedy, if by ‘failure’ we have in mind the catastrophic consequences of man’s Promethean efforts to usurp the powers of the Gods. In Aristotle’s Poetics, tragedy is defined as a cathartic act in which the community of spectators experiences a collective anagorisis (or ‘recognition’) that is the result of the protagonist’s hubris – the failure that comes with the transgressive defiance of human limitations. Failure is thus central to the very invention of theatre, but it is only with the development of modernity that failure takes on a reflexive modality in which theatrical experience begins to be reflected back to itself on the stage. Where in Greek theatre failure is embedded in its mimetic display of human fallibility, by the early modern period, theatre itself – its mechanisms, its artifices, its ploys – came to embody failure. When Walter Benjamin described the Baroque tragedy or ‘mourning play,’ for instance, with its emphatic embrace of melancholic loss, its aesthetic of ruins and remnants, he pictured it set against the collapsed Christian ‘world view’ of the Middle Ages.³ As that experience of historical loss then transformed itself, with the progressivist narratives of modernity, into the material gains of expropriated wealth – so theatre, as if under a compulsion to represent the shadowy underside of those advances of scientific and enlightenment rationality, came increasingly to reflect modernity’s disquieting consequences: the violence of its challenge to the human sensorium. At its most radical, theatre satirised modernity’s conventional forms, as well as its social and political hypocrisy – notable here is Alfred Jarry’s grotesque and subversive burlesque, Ubu Roi (1896), which targeted the crassness and baseness of bourgeois life. Failure now becomes celebrated in scandalous and scatological forms of representation.

What those forms did, however, was not to simply rejoice in juvenile acts of iconoclasm; they engendered a crisis at the level of representation itself – something that shows up in the ‘scepticism’ that united theatre-makers as different from one another as Pirandello and Edward Gordon Craig. Their scepticism was directed, as Hans-Thies Lehmann puts it, ‘towards the sheer compatibility of drama and theatre.’ Early modernist stages recognised that theatre ‘has its own different roots, preconditions and premises, which are even hostile to dramatic literature’ (2006: 49) – a new scenic theatre arose that both sprang from, as much as it proclaimed, a ‘crisis’ of the old dramatic and representational theatre of previous centuries, from which it effectuated a break. It is in this sense that the failure of dramatic representation finally becomes fully seized upon in the theatre of Brecht, Artaud, and Beckett, as a radical critique of what went before; although it is no less true to say that the failure of representation will be central to the avant-garde as such in all its aesthetic forms.

There was, of course, more to this break than a mere formalist quarrel with theatre’s mimetic and representationalist past. In Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2002), Susan Buck-Morss examines precisely these kinds of aesthetic developments as responses to the utopian impetus that animated modernity, and which – entrapping it in the logics of capitalist ‘dreamworlds’ – would lead to the social and political calamities of the twentieth century:

the dreamworlds of modernity – political, cultural and economic – are expressions of a utopian desire for social arrangements that transcend existing forms. But dreamworlds become dangerous when their enormous energy is used instrumentally by structures of power, mobilized as an instrument of force that turns against the very masses who were supposed to benefit [… ] And in fact, the most inspiring mass-utopian projects – mass sovereignty, mass production, mass culture – have left a history of disasters in their wake. The dream of mass sovereignty has led to world wars of nationalism and to revolutionary terror. The dream of industrial abundance has enabled the construction of global systems that exploit both human labor and natural environments. The dream of culture for the masses has created a panoply of phantasmagoric effects that aestheticize the violence of modernity and anaesthetize its victims.

(2002: xi)

Olga Taxidou, in her appraisal of Buck-Morss’s analysis of the catastrophe of modernity’s utopian projects, has argued, in particular, that the avant-garde’s embrace of formal and aesthetic experimentalism should be seen as nothing less than ‘failed/tragic attempts in reconciling politics and aesthetics’ – and as she goes on to write: ‘For an aesthetic immersed in catastrophe the concept of “­failure” is not in and of itself undesirable’ (2007: 210). If it is not undesirable, it is because, making a virtue out of the failure of representation, as Bailes has argued, ‘[theatre-makers such as Artaud, Brecht, and Beckett] offered an engaged mode of practical resistance and a route of critical discovery’ (2011: xix). It is at this point that we get to more fully understand what exactly is entailed by the term ‘poetics of failure,’ which is to say, notably for Bailes, failure’s poetics indicates a ‘politics’ – as she expresses it:

The discourse of failure as reflected in western art and literature seems to counter the very ideas of progress and victory that simultaneously dominate historical narratives. It undermines the perceived stability of mainstream capitalist ideology’s preferred aspiration to achieve, succeed, or win, and the accumulation of material wealth as proof and effect arranged by those aims. Failure challenges the cultural dominance of instrumental rationality and the fictions of continuity that bind the way we imagine and manufacture the world. Yet increasingly a discourse of failure in art practice has mapped a vibrant counter-cultural space of alternative and often critical articulation, in which conventional standards of virtuosity are challenged and methods of practice scrutinized and re-worked.

(2)

Not only does a poetics of failure provide a means to open up counter-cultural practices within art, theatre, and performance, but – for Bailes – it contains actual political and emancipatory potential: ‘[A]n economy of failure in performance theatre might be further understood as [… ] a socially transformative mode of production intrinsically linked to ideology, politics, and to the production of value through meaning’ (15).

By contrast, Nicholas Ridout’s Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (2006) offers a quite different interpretation of the politics of failure in theatre and performance. Rooted less in the attempt to discern the emancipatory potential of failure, Ridout’s approach, which might be called a critical ‘phenomenology’ of theatrical failure, targets theatre’s (and its audience’s) complicity with capitalist modes of consumption: ‘it is precisely in theatre’s failure, our discomfort with it, its embeddedness in capitalist leisure, its status as a bourgeois pastime that its political value is to be found. Theatre is a privileged place for the actual experience of a failure to evade or transcend capital’ (2006: 4). Discerning that political value, for Ridout, means encountering failure as being revealed through theatre’s accidents, such as the actor’s corpsing, or their stage fright, as well as other theatrical mishaps; but, more importantly, it is to show through these seemingly marginal theatrical epiphenomena that failure is ‘constitutive’ of the very possibility of theatre (69). Contrary to the Aristotelian emphasis placed on mimetic identification, for Ridout, theatre operates in the ‘space between representation and its failure’ (33). But why – we might ask – should ‘failure’ be seen as constitutive for the theatre, rather than being, say, a mere possibility whose risks can be mitigated through a dedicated regime of rehearsal and a mastery of technique provided by years of training and practice? Ridout points out that what is essential to theatrical experience is not in fact the mastery of mimetic representation, or the skilful coping of the actor, but the ‘face to face’ encounter that theatre stages – an ‘encounter that lies at the heart of the theatrical experience’ (32). But paradoxically, it is precisely the ‘face to face’ encounter that – at least for the mimetic stage – is constantly disavowed by theatre:

It is as though theatre depended for its life upon the success of that person up there in the light convincing you down there in the dark that they are someone else, and that something politically and socially important rests upon the success of this persuasion, while at the same time the very same process could only survive by acknowledging the fatal opposite of that success, the fact that the person up there is in [sic] not in fact someone else at all. You are both here, there’s no transport out for eith...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Knowing failure Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki
• PART I The cultural politics of failure
• PART II Failure and performance
• PART III Theatre’s philosophy of failure
• Index