No Failure, No Try

“Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’.” Yoda’s philosophy really is rubbish; terrible pedagogy (as discussed here, the Sith are much better teachers) and terrible advice in general. Manifestly, his power is not infinite (there’s a great calculation of Yoda’s energy output by Randall Munroe of xkcd), so – for all his “that is why you fail” smugness – it’s clear that his approach amounts to attempting only things he already knows are within his capacity, and avoiding anything else. It’s the Force equivalent of research funding applications that define all their intended outcomes in advance, confining them to things that are definitely doable (if not already done and ready to be reported) – which is to say, the majority of research funding applications. Yes, research funding bodies are probably all run by Jedi: tradition-bound, results- rather than process-orientated, and smugly opaque and mysterious.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading Shawn Graham’s fascinating and provocative Failing Gloriously, an academic memoir of misadventures in digital humanities and archaeology – highly recommended to all. In place of Yoda, we get Batman – or rather Batman’s dad: “Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” How we learn, without trying something that we don’t know whether we can do or not? How can we do anything new, without accepting the possibility that it won’t work? It’s the philosophy that drives the journal Shawn founded, Epoiesen – including the abandonment of traditional peer review (which tends to promote risk aversion and conservatism, and the strict policing of other people’s attempts at adventure) in favour of public responses where the reviewer, too, is encouraged to throw off their shackles for a bit. Try, fail, try again, fail better…

Now, I would have to confess that I have a terrible fear of failure and embarrassment – it’s one of the main sources of my frequent issues with writer’s block – and hence a tendency to stick to things that I know I can manage. I can keep scribbling things for this blog even when struggling to finish what should be a perfectly straightforward academic piece, precisely because it’s a kind of safe space – if blogging did actually ‘count’ in some sort of professional academic metric, I imagine my brain would freeze. But it’s also the case that most of my writing here is all too safe; I get words onto the page, which is better than nothing, but they are rarely risk-taking or important words, just snide takedowns of Thucydides misattributions or self-deprecating commentaries. Which is why I can get them written, but why perhaps this isn’t such an achievement after all.

And if I wasn’t already feeling slightly ashamed at my pusillanimity, at the same time as reading Shawn’s book, I caught up with Foluke Adebisi’s We dream, we write…

I think sometimes we write to fulfil certain visions of the world – academics write what will get them promoted, get them the job, get them tenure. We do what is expected. Professional writers write words that they know will sell, because those words sold before. And so we lose the transformational power of words, because we play it safe. We put chains on our words and so put chains on our world. We hold back and do not send our words on errands into the darkness. 

“We do what’s expected”; certainly true, and it’s clear that one of the inhibitions affecting what we do is that demand: don’t try, do, and according to these external expectations. It’s about product, not process – and sometimes the uncontrollable impact of the product: not my teaching, but whether or not students I’ve taught get well-paid jobs; not my research, but whether someone else decides my research is useful in a quantifiable manner. But it is (also) about the chains we choose to put on ourselves – the way that we internalise and prioritise these expectations.

The word I immediately associate with the stuff in Epoiesen is ‘play’: unconstrained experimentation, for pleasure or just to see what happens, the process as an end in itself, rather than everything directed towards a specific goal. That doesn’t mean it isn’t serious and productive, but it does away with the fear of failure – failure would be having a miserable rather than enjoyable time, and in that case you just do something else. The closer research or writing can come to play, the fewer the chains – or at least the lighter they may seem?

Now, there are reasons why we might feel nervous about breaking down the barriers between ‘work’ and ‘play’ this side of a post-scarcity utopia – the capacity of ‘do what you love, love what you do’ to become an instrument of exploitation within capitalism, the colonisation of all our waking hours by work (the justified ridicule aimed recently at that “how baking muffins makes me a better marine biologist” article). But this should be about the transformation of the work space rather than the colonisation of the leisure space, both changing the attitude with which we approach work, and trying to remove (or at least ignore) some of the things that make it feel like drudgery and inhibit our creativity and willingness to take risks.

Teaching as play: not the stale communication of information, or the aggressive power games of the Socratic Method, or the desperate attempts at imparting employability skills, but the collective exploration of ideas and debates in a way that develops knowledge and skills as a by-product. Research as play, whether cooperative or competitive (in the right spirit) or the quiet pleasure of solitary puzzle-solving, without the constant anxiety that it might turn out to be a bad or fruitless idea; trying new games, trying to get better at existing games, modifying the rules or developing completely new ones. And recognising that the negative reactions of some people may just be that they prefer chess to Call of Cthulhu…

Postscript: It’s an odd coincidence that I’m also in the middle of re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which is all about these issues (among other things): the fact, most obviously, that on the anarchist planet Anarres ‘work’ and ‘play’ are the same word, with the individual free to choose how to occupy their time but making that choice in full, unavoidable consciousness of what their society needs of them. Pursuing the life of the mind in the middle of a famine, as the central character does, is always a problematic choice; especially when the results cannot be predicted or guaranteed, let alone easily put to use. The alternative, on Urras, is equally uninviting and inhibiting, even if at first apparently more conducive to research: science in the service of an authoritarian state with a very clear idea of what the results need to be.

The central character eventually returns to Anarres with a better sense of its virtues, and of why he belongs there, than before; it is home. But he doesn’t return alone; he’s accompanied by a character who appears only in the final chapter, an alien from a far older civilisation than either Urras or Anarres, who wants to take the risk of exploring this society: “We have tried everything… But I have not tried it.” As good a motto as any.