Chapter Arts Centre is holding a ‘Festival
of Failure’ at the weekend, July 29th/30th, and I’ve been
asked to take part in an event organized by the arts collective Elbow Room, a roundtable discussion of unanswerable questions, or at least
questions people can never agree the answer to.
If, by the end of
the afternoon, we succeed in finding answers, the event will be a failure.
Hopefully we’ll all remain stymied.
But the
invitation set me thinking about the importance of failure. It’s valuable to
have the space to fail, and we can learn a great deal both from the experience
of failure and the fact of failure itself.
What if the Large
Hadron Collider at CERN fails, in the end, to find the Higgs Boson particle?
Would that be a catastrophe? Scientists would have learned a great deal from
the experience of building the collider, and the fact of failure may also tell
us something important about the nature of the universe – maybe the ‘God’
particle doesn’t exist?
When I taught
philosophy at various universities I always thought it important to give my
students the space to fail. We were looking at some of the fundamental
questions concerning the meaning of life – the existence of God, the mind/body
problem, the nature of morality.
Why study those
questions? Why study the answers philosophers have proposed throughout history
and try to see why they don’t work?
Socrates supplied
two good answers here. First, that the unexamined life is not worth living – we
have to ask these questions. Second, that true
wisdom lies in being aware of the limits of our knowledge – knowing how little
we know.
The fact was that
if great philosophers have failed to answer these questions satisfactorily,
undergraduate students didn’t stand a chance. But plunging in and trying to
puzzle them out taught them a centrally important human skill – how to think.
Many questions
can be answered by looking them up in a book or applying a formula or,
increasingly, consulting the internet. But that isn’t thinking. Thinking happens
when we have to try and work something out ourselves, hopefully with other
people sitting around a table laden with food and drink.
What is
increasingly scarce under the conditions of what some call late capitalism is
time to think. We need answers and we need them more or less immediately.
That attitude
affects all fields, including the arts and intellectual research. Those of us
who work in those areas, or any area these days, know that the key words are
‘impact’ and ‘outcome’. We need to state clearly what the outcome of our
project will be, and what impact it will have. Otherwise we won’t get funding.
We’re not allowed
to say: “I don’t know, why don’t we find out?” And we’re certainly not allowed
to say: “Well, we won’t find out for a while if there’ll be any outcome or any impact. But it’s
worth doing anyway.”
Teachers at all
levels of education will know about outcomes. In recent years I had to identify
the learning outcomes of all my lessons before my courses started.
Although I
obediently did the paperwork, I was always thinking to myself, and complaining
to colleagues, “I don’t know what the outcome of this lesson will be. Anything
could happen. And that’s the point.”
And so the Elbow
Room event is a radical intervention in the
capitalist rush to impact and outcomes. It’s the carving out of a space and
time where people can fail to find the answer or reach an artificial agreement
that lets some bureaucrat tick a box and say, “We’ve got a policy!”
So – no answers, no impact,
no outcomes. But we might just all learn something valuable.
