Sucessful Attempts at Failure
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Megha Baikadi
985 archives and feelings
Dr Alexis Lothian
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Writing Assignment Four, 11/19/2013
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 What text from this course will you take forward with you into the development of your dissertation and future projects––or into your life in general? Choose a short passage from something we have read this semester and write an extended reflection on it. Explain what this passage means in the context of the text and course, and discuss how this idea has led or could lead you to think differently about your experience, research, and/or teaching. You can use something from any point in the course, but please don’t repeat your previous writings. [1000-2000 words.]
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¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Of the texts we covered in this course, there are so many of them that I liked, that made sense, that I find spoke to me and were relevant to my thinking. But out of all of them, I think Halberstam’s book was the one I’ll hang on to the hardest. The Queer Art of Failure had a lot in it that caught my attention, from the reversals and contradictions of valuing failure, to the silly archive and low culture. And, as we have also spent a lot of time looking backward, looking inward, and finding the ways we connect to our ideas, our histories, and our truths – I also have spent time piecing together some of the ways some ideas of a similar nature have been working in me for a while, which Halberstam’s book has brought forward and given words to.
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¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 “Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.”
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¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 I recall we discussed in class at that time, since this book was intended to be accessible to a non-academic audience, if this was a book we could imagine our non-academics reading. It had occurred to me, while reading, that there were a few people in my family that I might like to share the book with – and unlike those who mentioned the ‘queer’ aspect was likely to cause problems with certain people, I thought it likely that some of my people would be so busy having conniptions over ‘failure’ and, of all things, valuing the loss of success and to even notice. Just the idea that “The goal is to lose one’s way, and indeed to be prepared to lose more than one’s way” is quite alien to them, even as it has become something that I find quite valuable and meaningful. I’ve lost my way, I have dived off of ways headfirst that happened not to be what I wanted to be (although because these paths followed a happiness script, there were those who insisted they should be mine), I have wandered looking for secluded corners where that way might be quietly flipped out of a pocket to later be loudly claimed as lost. So it goes.
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Loss, and failure, and strange and twisted ways – these are something I’ve been dealing with for a long time. I cannot say with any truth that I’ve always dealt with this idea right, or with any degree of equanimity, but it remains. I have gotten to something of a point now, that I can value these experiences for what they are and not mourn them for what others, and even myself, sometimes thought they should have been. I have even gotten to a place where I can understand and honor these failures to be (what I “should”), where I can be so certain in my ideas because they are so deep rooted, so long lasting. It is not the case, and never has been, that I find a shiny new idea and adapt it to myself (as I have been accused of doing). And, oo, proof – generally speaking, I have a lag time (just about 15-20 years) between the time I was being, and noticing, and realizing the failure to be something, and finding a term or reason or idea to give it sense… and so can neither have been influenced by ideas I didn’t know, or be manipulating the proofs that are not only well past but known to so many others. I can value my failures as being true to myself, being unable to make compromises that could only be terrible, even when I was not in a position to understand and accept it, even when I would have compromised, and bent, just for my people, just for love.
¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 2 The passage I picked speaks so strongly to me because, I am now realizing, the difference between failure and success has often been to me one between children and adults – between who has the authority to say one way over being over another is right, or is normal (and not just “more common”). It has been the way that two arguments, well thought out but based on two different understandings of what the world should be or what has value, are not even allowed to be in conversation with each other, that one is automatically accepted and the other rejects because one speaker is taller than the other, is ‘older’, has the power to label adult and child, “experience” and “stubborn childishness”, has the power to just refuse to listen, refuse to understand.
¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 2 I suppose I might have done a number of things, at this point. Others likely have. But Halbertam’s quote fits what I think was the best of my ways of dealing with it – to oppose this with a commitment to “childish anarchy”, to value multiplicity and alternatives, to always, always hunger for more complex ground and more open possibilities, to reject for always and always the right of anyone else to say it must be “either this or that”, either what they say (always-right), or that thing (always-wrong). Reject that it is legitimate to define my argument as nothing more than the mindless opposite of theirs, or attach all of the multitudes of things they don’t mean to my argument, to refuse on grounds I wasn’t quite arguing anyway. I ended up wanting some chaos, something to shake up the binaries and bring change. I have considered myself a rabid anti-dichotomist from about the middle of highschool, wen I first came across the term, but I think I was trying so much earlier. I want third places, fourth ways, fifth alternatives, boths and neithers and sudden reversals into actually-we-were-really-arguing something else. This is, I think the thing Halberstam meant when saying the book “makes its peace with the possibility that alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal…into a more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing”. That tastes to me like the scrambling, twisty heap of things I’ve spent a long time trying to communicate.
Great thought. I can really see your analogy. Would you say we could apply the analogy to other relationships of power? Colonizer and colonized? Teacher and student?
Yes, I think it can be – or, perhaps, the metaphor of parent and child is what is there in the depths of so many relationships of power. It is not just an imbalance, but an imbalance with a story, a rationale, a built in defense.
I would see colonizer and colonized as cultural versions of this adult/child concept, colonized countries are termed third world, less developed, backward, young… while others are more developed, advanced, first world. Teacher and student is more of the same, emphasis on teaching, nurturing, giving lessons, all in loco parentis.
It seems to me to be very rare to have raw power differences at the heart of a conflict, without the stronger taking a parental rhetoric (“know what’s best”, “for your own good”, “you will learn” and so on). Because it is such a strong and versatile metaphor, because it justifies a relationship of tyranny that may be needed (or may not be, depending), and because it is designed to be unarguable (would you give a child something so dangerous? how could you!).