the queer art of failure

"The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which i would like to map a few detours. Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia, as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy. Training of any kind, in fact, is a way of refusing a kind of benjaminian relation to knowing, a stroll down uncharted streets in the “wrong” direction; it is precisely about staying in well-lit territories and about knowing exactly which way to go before you set out. Like many others before me, i propose that instead the goal is to lose one’s way, and indeed to be prepared to lose more than one’s way. Losing, we may agree with elizabeth bishop, is an art, and one “that is not too hard to master / though it may look like a disaster."