Writing for Failure?

Coming from dinner tonight with a visiting guest speaker, Danny Snelson, who's in town for the UW Humanities Summit. Talk turned to Danny's work on Grand Theft Eco, a project that uses Grand Theft Auto to create videos imagining LA in 2050. When I first read about and viewed the project, my affective response was to feel daunted, intimidated by the extensive digital skills needed to create the project. This is often my response to new systems and platforms (even relatively intuitive and friendly ones), and I realize that part of the response comes from an aversion to failure. Back in the 1900s, when I was a computer science major for 2 years, I remember the frustration of failing to code something right, failing to trace out some syntax or logic error after hours of testing, hating that feeling of not getting it right. 

Which makes me wonder whether there exists already some kind of composition guidebook, a kind of "practices in failing" book that includes activities where the goal is failing. Or, maybe not the goal, but at least part of the intentional process. Where some intentional attention is given to crashing and burning, and then picking up the pieces and moving on. Writing into unworking/unworkable texts. Pushing up against the limits of comprehensibility. Breaking grammars. (Jason says this way of engaging with writing is a component of creative writing. I need to take a CW workshop.)

Danny and the others at dinner talked about the ways that failing is much more naturalized in gaming; Raya talked about how her husband happily returns to his last saved safe point after getting destroyed in one of the games he plays, and Nichole talked about how sharing a class montage of student in-game deaths became a community-building moment. Similarly, Danny said that, in his intro to comics course, sharing students' horribly drawn hands creates an opportunity to celebrate failure. 

There is also a mindset or disposition aspect here, though. In motivational pyschology terms this is, I think, the difference between mastery orientation and failure avoidance. But I wonder if the dispositional element can be minimized if "failure" can be reframed. What grading/evaluation/reward structures can shift the definition of non-working solutions away from "failure"? I think I'm on one right track with labor- and time-based activities, where the doing can be separated from a quality metric. But there's more to think about here. Iteration, too--there is a difference between repeated effort that doesn't improve and repeated trials that develop knowledge and creativity. What kind of assignment guides students into productive iteration?

Some texts mentioned at dinner tonight.

Lynda Barry, Syllabus

Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure


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