AN INTRODUCTION ON FAILURE + PRIORITY LIST
“Take your protein pills and put your helmet on....”
An introduction on Failure.
Failure makes uncomfortable. Failure among our contemporaries has no space. No room for development. No room for address. Failure –in other words– should not exist, according to the present society. Do we in Critical Studies feel the same? We shouldn’t, of course. Theoretically each of us (at large, not only in the Critical Studies or in Academy) allows a margin of failure in life. But maybe not this time…
If we fail here (and now), we will jeopardize the future credibility. From where we stand it’s impossible to talk about failure in a positive sense, nor develop a notion of failure, without suspicion. We set our expectations on a high level, and we don’t even consider the possibility of not achieving them. Hence, what is important in programs like Critical Studies is to attempt to dispense with the error-phobia that envelope us in a perennial mist. Not only we are scared of failing, in physical and mental terms, sometimes we set up mechanisms of self-censorship. We don’t even allow ourselves to think we can fail, and things can go wrong. What does exactly mean things can go wrong?
When we expect something from someone else or some situation, we want to enjoy the most of it. We get ideas; we plan them, put to work and enjoy the results. Still, the possibility to fail is not harming anything. Failure is a precious space where we can stretch our boundaries and experiment with another dimension of living. At this point, most of you will feel the urge to ask why should we fail? It’s not that we should fail in order to live better. We should simply allow ourselves the space, the mental dimension, of failure. We live in a win-win society, where one cannot afford to step into something wrong. For instance, we cannot bear the thought to lose our time following someone or something, which in the end disappears and leave us alone. This can happen in love as well as business. In our deeds we invest feelings, time, money, and so –because it’s an investment– we expect something back. A return, some results. We cannot conceive an action freed from expected effects, freed from the obligation to avoid errors. It hurts us to see and to think about our failure. We can bear only someone else’s failure. And we don’t want to be that someone else.
There’s a school of thought arguing that there’s no right to fail, but a duty to experiment. Fine. Does it mean that an experiment cannot fail? Why do we take away the word ‘fail’? We fail in studies, jobs, loves. We fail permanently, as well as not. In writing these lines, we’re probably failing to communicate exactly our thoughts to you, completely or to some extent. The list of failure of the 2005/06 Critical Studies group can be read in this light. We failed, a lot, as well as not. And we failed sometimes because we were overly generating, and couldn’t fit everything in place. Other times because we weren’t able to carry out a commitment, or none of us felt like, and the project collapsed on itself for obvious lack of time and resources. Other times again, we failed because we initiated something already doubtful, and it went worse and worse. And in some occasions we managed to successfully complete something totally different from what we started. Is that a failure?
PRIORITY LIST
In connection with Normalization, Critical Studies present the project Priority List on Rooseum´s bill-board at Gasverksgatan. The project consists of a fragment from a so-called priority list ? a government directive as to the allocation of resources to different groups in society in case of a crisis. A priority list is based on suppositions of who is the most useful for the continued functioning of the rest of society. The project Priority List casts light on this hierarchy, focussing on those who are at the bottom of the ladder. Critical Studies: Kyongfa Che, Alfredo Cramerotti, Övül Durmusoglu, Minna Henriksson, Christian Hillesø, Jee-Eun Kim, Christian Schult.
