The Failed Individual Dr. Katharina Motyl is a research fellow in American Studies at the Collaborative Research Center “Threatened Order. Societies under Stress” of the University of Tübingen, Germany. Dr. Regina Schober is Assistant Professor at the American Studies Department of the University of Mannheim, Germany. Katharina Motyl, Regina Schober (eds.) The Failed Individual

Amid Exclusion, Resistance, and the Pleasure of Non-Conformity

Campus Verlag Frankfurt/New York Printed with support from the research group “Transformations of Subjectivity” at the Research and Study Centre of the University of Mannheim.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ...... 9

Introduction: The Failed Individual ...... 11 Susanne Hamscha, Katharina Motyl, and Regina Schober

I. Theoretical Perspectives on Failure

Sometimes You Just Fail: Protest and the Policing of Bad Feeling ...... 31 Christopher Taylor

The Primordial Failure: A Cultural-Philosophical Analysis ...... 53 Bina Nir

Failure in Economics: A Black-Box ...... 73 Hannes Lang and Eva Lang

II. Determinants of Failure: Structures, Normativity, and Power

Destined to Fail: Cosmetic Surgery, Female Body Images, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark” ...... 99 Johannes Fehrle

Disability Aesthetics and Vandalism in American Visual Culture ...... 119 Susanne Hamscha 6 T HE F AILED I NDIVIDUAL

Wohnkultur and Zombification: Trying to Unfail the Homeless Individual...... 139 Wibke Schniedermann

Failed by the Criminal Justice System: The Hyperincarceration of the Black Urban Poor in the “War on Drugsˮ ...... 163 Katharina Motyl

III. Failure as Resistance / Failure as Pleasure

“Hanging onˮ: Mohawk Sovereignty and the Art of Failure ...... 189 Astrid M. Fellner

The Addict’s Ethics of Failure: Resistance to Ambition in the Photographic Work of Larry Clark ...... 205 Florian Zappe

“Here is the trash heap, nothing there except a muted wailingˮ: Dithering in Negativity and the Failure to Move on ...... 223 Marius Henderson

Failure as an Ethical Choice: Academic Resistance against Authoritarian Academic Systems ...... 245 Mahmoud Arghavan

IV. Failure in American Literary History

Surviving on Wrecked Ships: The Failing Individual in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) ...... 267 Dietmar Meinel

Naturalism and the Aesthetics of Failure ...... 287 James Dorson CONTENTS 7

Productively Failing to Accelerate: Mary Borden’s Alternative Vision of Existing Successfully in Modern America ...... 305 Svenja Fehlhaber

The Failed Individual and the Biopolitics of Climate Catastrophe in Edan Lepucki’s California (2014) ...... 329 Susanne Leikam

V. Failure and the Digital Subject

Narcissus Confirmed: Technologies of the Minimal Selfie ...... 347 Geert Lovink

Failing by Design: Self-Tracking and the Failed Individual ...... 357 James Dyer

Failure Blogs and the Confessional Self ...... 375 Regina Schober

Contributors ...... 393

Acknowledgments

Producing this book has been a remarkable pleasure and a stellar example of collaborating in solidarity, despite experiencing occasional moments of failure along the way. The considerable academic and media interest in this project has proven that thinking about the failed individual is by no means a failed endeavor. We are extremely grateful for the individual and institutional support that has made this project possible. We want to thank, above all, the contributors for engaging so productively in this exciting field of research. We also express our gratitude to the research group “Transformations of Subjectivityˮ at the Research and Study Centre of the University of Mannheim, the Collaborative Research Center 923 “Threatened Order. Societies under Stressˮ at the University of Tübingen as well as the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University for supporting a conference held in November 2015, out of which this book has emerged, and for enabling the publication of this book. Ulfried Reichardt and Astrid Franke lent us their support at crucial moments in time. We thank our editor Isabell Trommer at Campus Verlag for her extraordinary help in the publication process. We also thank everyone who participated in and helped organize the conference, above all Hanna Hellmuth, Stefan Benz, and Nicolai Romanowski, as well as Hanna Bozenhardt, Viktoria Bunzel, Jasmin Hayn, Tamara Koch, and particularly Marcel Pichal for their proficient assistance in the editorial process. This book would not exist in its current trajectory without Susanne Hamscha’s vision and inspiration. Last but not least, we wish to thank Clara, Émile, Julian, Francis, and Mahmoud for their patience and for reminding us, every day, of the joys that come with living beyond the binary of success and failure.

Katharina Motyl and Regina Schober, July 2017

Introduction: The Failed Individual

Susanne Hamscha, Katharina Motyl, and Regina Schober

“If there is one thing in this world that I hate, it’s losers. I despise them,” then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared to a group of high school students, expressing a firm belief in success and failure as the results of in- dividual action and ambition (cf. Halberstam 2011, 5). Himself embodying the American Dream as an immigrant who “made it big in America,” Schwarzenegger demeaned the worth of individuals he perceived to be “losers,” and thus echoed an attitude prevalent in contemporary Western neoliberal politics that glorifies success as the only valuable way of being in the world and as the ultimate goal of one’s existence. Those who fail, the cultural myth goes, lack the determination and the will to work harder, run faster, and jump higher than those who succeed. This crude simplification of success and failure veils the fact that “winning” and “losing” do not merely depend on individual action or choice, but are actually enabled by an intricate web of power dynamics and regulatory regimes. Yet, the media strategy that the 45th U.S. president Donald J. Trump deployed during the 2016 GOP primaries and general election campaign attests to the political and cultural purchase that the winner– vs. loser-narrative holds for a significant part of the U.S. populace: a critical analysis of Trump’s tweets and campaign speeches reveals that he leveled the term loser at anyone who had dared critique him (the list includes political opponents such as Ted Cruz, media outlets such as The Huffington Post, and public personae such as Rosie O’Donnell),1 which from a constructivist perspective attests to the contingent nature of the success/failure-binary. Yet, many of his voters apparently bought into his self-stylization as a successful businessman, who had the right to demean others as “losers,” the ultimate proof of the latters’ failure being their diminutive wealth when compared to Trump’s vast fortune. —————— 1 For a comprehensive compilation of those Trump has branded “losers” in tweets, see Estepa 2017. 12 H AMSCHA/MOTYL/SCHOBER

The significance of the individual in the political culture and value sys- tem of the United States is historically and globally unparalleled. It is hardly surprising that the nation whose master narrative, the American Dream, professes a belief in the power of individual agency should have developed one of the most neoliberal economic orders in the world. However, the belief in the nexus of ambition and success entails that those who fail are seen as responsible for their lot—they must not have worked hard enough, the logic goes. This view, of course, obscures that a set of social structures, hegemonic norms, and discursive strategies influences whether an individ- ual will attain success or fail, or even be defined as a winner or a loser. But the economic is merely one stage on which individuals may fail, since fail- ure, which originally meant breaking in business, came to signify a deficient self as capitalism developed over the course of the nineteenth century, thus becoming an identity (Sandage 2005, 10–17). This book aims at scrutinizing the many ways in which individuals fail economically, politically, socially, physically, or culturally, as well as the often contradictory discourses that have arisen around individual failure. It thus provides revealing insights into the power of hegemonic structures and discourses and the pressure to meet normative ideals, the various hu- man and non-human actors involved in what we usually consider “human failure,” but also into the productive potential and the pleasures failure has to offer. The volume is testimony to and part of an emerging interest in failure in both media and academic discourses, reflecting a growing unease many of us feel in view of the pressures and cost of our performance cul- ture. Recent years have seen an increase in attempts to demystify the taboo and stigma attached to individual failure. Most noticeably, perhaps, American entrepreneurial culture started celebrating business failures in so- called “Fuckup Nights,” a trend that was rapidly adopted on the other side of the Atlantic, as well—however, in conforming with neoliberal discourse, the emphasis of these events is on how failure has been overcome and turned into an asset for future success (cf. Goodson 2015; Hägler 2015). At the same time, scholarly attention has recently turned to failure as a critical category from a variety of perspectives, shedding light on the historical, political, and social circumstances that render individual failure a contingent concept generated, maintained, and negotiated through (conflicting) cultural narratives. The fact that we often associate failure with economic loss, for exam- ple, is rooted in a specific Western narrative of individual accountability. In INTRODUCTION 13

Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2005), Scott A. Sandage traces the genesis of failure as a denominator of a deficient self back to the con- solidation of capitalism in the nineteenth century. Arguing that failure is the foundation of the American Dream, rather than its dark side, he delin- eates how entrepreneurship became the primary model of American identi- ty and how the notion of the “self-made man” suggested that the individ- ual could be managed like a business that is run by risk, investment, profit, and loss. Prior to the nineteenth century, failure had referred to sinful behavior and other mistakes. Failure was “an incident, not an identity,” nothing that would make or unmake a man (Sandage 2005, 11). Sandage draws on Max Weber, who famously stated that striving for success was a compulsory virtue—if not a sacred duty—in American culture. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Weber cites from the writings of Benjamin Franklin to illustrate that Puritan ethics and ideas influenced the development of capitalism and that a capitalist spirit had existed in the United States long before a capitalist economic order had been established. In his analysis of Franklin’s writings, Weber concludes that the former’s moral attitudes and virtuousness are colored with utilitarianism: “Honesty is useful, because it assures credit; so are punctuality, industry, frugality, and that is the reason they are virtues” (Weber 1992, 52). Virtues are only virtues when they benefit the individual; it would be simplifying matters, however, to assume that Franklin’s utilitarianism was an expression of egotism and egocentrism. As a Calvinist, Franklin believed that the acquisition of money was “the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling,” Weber notes, and “this peculiar idea … is what is most characteristic of the social ethic of capitalist culture, and is in a sense the fundamental basis of it. It is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the content of his professional activity” (1992, 54). In Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that ambition was the universal feeling in America and that the necessity not to sink in the world pervaded the young republic (730). Tocqueville’s assessment points to a capitalist ethos which the individual was born into, as Weber would later note, and which presented itself to the individual as “an unalterable order of things in which he must live” (Weber 1992, 54). As a result, Sandage states, “life, ambition, and the pursuit of happiness” became the guiding principles of men in the nineteenth century, the “striv- er’s ethic” considered to be “the best of all possible freedoms” (2005, 14). 14 H AMSCHA/MOTYL/SCHOBER

The flipside of the coin is, of course, that the duty of economic success, as Weber argues, “forces the individual … to conform to capitalistic rules of action” and that those who act counter to those rules will “inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene” and “thrown into the streets without a job” (1992, 54–55). In other words: they will fail. As success became mythically embodied in the American Dream and Manifest Destiny ideologies, implying an immediate link between ambition and reward, or between moral rectitude and monetary fortune, failure came to signify a depraved and shameful existence, which, crucially, had been self-inflicted. For most people, to use J. Jack Halberstam’s words, recog- nizing that “success is the outcome of the tilted scales of race, class, and gender” (2011, 3) is much harder to do than giving in to the “mass delusion” that success is a matter of attitude and that there really is no good excuse for an individual to fail (Ehrenreich 2009, 13). The fallacy of such a blind subscription to the Western success ideology is what Lauren Berlant in her eponymous study (2011) has called the “cruel optimism” of our attachment “to conventional good-life fantasies—say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work—when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds” (2). Berlant diagnoses a growing gap between “postwar optimism for democratic access to the good life” and the increasingly fray- ing fantasies of “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy” (3) in Western post-1945 culture. The ensuing affect of “cruel optimism” thus potentially involves the invisible failure to achieve what one desires as well as the visible failure of coherent experience. “So what is the alternative?” Halberstam asks in The Queer Art of Failure (2011) in consideration of such a perceived dilemma between cynical resignation and naïve optimism towards the dictate of “success in a heteronormative, capitalist society that equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” (2011, 2). Borrowing from queer theory, Halberstam dismantles the normative impli- cations of the binary of success and failure. If the pursuit of a supposedly successful life is too wearing so as to become a curse, we may rather want to ask: “What kinds of reward can failure offer us?” (3). “Under certain circumstances,” Halberstam suggests, “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2–3). Failure can INTRODUCTION 15 thus become a field not only of evading “the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development” but of active resistance against heteropatriarchy, the capitalist imperative to accumulate, and other forms of disciplinary power. Failure, seen in this light, can become a “counterintuitive mode […] of knowing” (Halberstam 2011, 11), a “refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and […] a counterhegemonic discourse of losing” (12). While failure has often been neglected in the American success narra- tive, it is perhaps for exactly that reason that it has always had a firm place in the American cultural imaginary. In Failure and the American Writer (2014), Gavin Jones demonstrates that failure has emerged as one of the major tropes in American fiction. “If the New England jeremiad was America’s ‘first distinctive literary genre’,” Jones asserts, “then we can say that Ameri- can literary identity was born from an overwhelming sense of decline” (12). In discussing failure as both “a kind of aesthetic practice and literary identi- ty,” Jones shows how American literature, especially since the nineteenth century, has been fundamentally shaped by the rhetoric of and a growing discourse surrounding failure, ranging from anxieties concerning religious and moral failure to exceptionalist ideologies of freedom, economic success, and social integrity. In American literature, Jones argues, failure has developed into “a process of thinking, knowing, feeling, and being,” and “becomes essential to an understanding of what makes us human— both within and beyond the pressures of social context” (13). The present collection of essays is a comprehensive endeavor to pro- vide an interdisciplinary and systematic exploration of the significance and meanings of individual failure in U.S. cultural history. In addition, by ex- ploring failure through the lens of the individual, the essays in this collec- tion show the complex and often contradictory ways in which discourses and mechanisms of failure affect individual experience, and highlight the ambivalences of individualism, and thus, of a central tenet of U.S. political culture and modern Western value systems. The book brings into conversation the theoretical approaches of critical race theory, queer studies, and disability studies with posthumanist and new media theory. By combining the former theoretical fields’ attention to particular vulnerabilities (“Which structures disadvantage individuals with certain subject positions?”) with the universalist concerns of posthumanism (“Which developments and circumstances impact every individual’s 16 H AMSCHA/MOTYL/SCHOBER agency?ˮ), this collection is able to explore individual failure as embedded in diverse cultural, historical, and narrative contexts, thus emphasizing the contingent and ultimately transient nature of this abstract and loaded concept. This book’s first objective is to historicize, denaturalize, and decon- struct the rhetoric that underlies the success/failure-binary. The essays in the collection critically examine the norms, structures, and media dis- positifs that function as stepping stone for some individuals while acting as glass ceiling for others (e.g. structural racism, heteronormativity, or net- work access). Moreover, since in the zero-sum game of capitalism some- one’s success depends on someone else’s failure, it seems all too necessary to ask how the failed individual is framed, disqualified, and punished for the sake of maintaining order and cultural legibility. At the same time, American concepts of failure have been adopted across the globe. Neoliberal tenets of self-responsibility have spread far beyond the U.S., while advances in digital and biotechnology have rendered the U.S. an allegory for the “modern.” A second objective of the essay collection, thus, is to investigate how individuals’ agency and subjec- tivity are impacted by an increasing technologization of life (e.g. surveil- lance, digital self-tracking, etc.), and by the global hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, which has resulted in variants of labor exploitation and precari- ousness in both the West and the Global South. Critical posthumanism has refigured the human subject as only one node in a complex network of technological, economic, political, cultural, and historical influences instead of regarding it as a self-contained entity. The posthumanist shift brought about by reconceptualizations of the subject in response to information theory and cybernetics, as well as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and cognitive science, urges us to rethink notions of individual responsibility. Posthumanism radically challenges the idea of the autonomous individual in control, since, as N. Katherine Hayles states, “the very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted” (2008, 288). An increased awareness of distributed cognition, object agency (Latour 2005), and human-machine interdependencies prompts us to rethink the success/failure-binary as well as its conditions. In an age in which knowledge and agency are increasingly contingent on digital data and machine operations, traditional beliefs in the individual’s INTRODUCTION 17 free will (and thus, the ascription of success and failure to conscious choice) become more and more unstable. As posthumanism has given rise to new models of subjectivity, it also affects the ways in which we conceptualize individual failure. Technology has always produced a success/failure-dialectic with respect to individual freedom. It has both fostered new anxieties regarding technodeterminist views that regard digital technology as totalizing and dehumanizing as well as yielded utopian projections of the new media as democratizing and liberating. For Herbert Marcuse, technological progress has produced a new form of “technological rationality” that is in accord with the impera- tive values of economic success: productivity, efficiency, and expediency (Marcuse 1982, 140–41). Our current new media environment raises press- ing concerns regarding the freedom (and obligation) to succeed, not least because of the ever-growing demands of information management and social networking, an often elusive algorithmic agency, the potentials of “dataveillance” (Clarke 1988), and an increasingly centralized corporate control of the Internet. At the same time, there are more optimistic visions of resistance to hegemonic practices and modes of participation that the new media may offer. New modes of online subjectivity include concepts of the “fluid self” (Turkle 1995) as open to constant reinvention, decen- tered modes of subjectivity that constitute subjects as “unstable, multiple and diffuse” (Poster 2001, 81) as well as the “quantified self” with its promises (and normative pressures) of self-optimization (Lupton 2016). However, this essay collection not only addresses the limiting and op- pressive facets of failure; rather, its third objective is to inquire into the spaces of resistance, chaos, and pleasure failure opens up. As queer theory and disability studies have shown, failing to meet the norms of heterosex- ual reproduction and bodily productivity, respectively, liberates allegedly “failedˮ individuals from complying with the behavioral protocols dictated by these norms. Lee Edelman and others have argued polemically that queers have no future because their inability to biologically reproduce ex- cludes them from national fantasies of striving for progress and improve- ment. Heteronormative societies are pervaded by a “repro ideology” (Warner 1991, 10), which denotes both a duty and a seemingly natural drive to reproduce so as to secure a future and guarantee that the body politic will survive. In this logic of reproductivity, queers are stigmatized as those who are not contributing to society’s future but rather embody the “social order’s death drive” (Edelman 2004, 3). 18 H AMSCHA/MOTYL/SCHOBER

Analogous to the inability of queers to conform to normative patterns of desire and reproduction, the disabled seemingly fail to meet the standards of physical productivity and thus fundamentally challenge teleological, future-oriented conceptions of “success.” In Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), Alison Kafer describes the general sentiment that disability needs to be avoided or at least tried to be cured as a sign that, in most people’s imagination, a life with disability is a life with no future. The value of a disability-free future seems self-evident, while the benefit of integrating disability into visions of a good, successful future is less so. Kafer suggests that a politics of “crip futurity” needs to insist that disabled lives are sustainable and needs to imagine disability as a valuable and integral human condition (3). Too often, our obedience to the future results in the framing of disability as failure, Kafer notes, whether it is in the context of institutionalizing individuals with disabilities, experimenting with bone-lengthening surgeries and growth attenuation, or other efforts to fix bodies and minds on the grounds that the disabled person and their community will enjoy a better future (29). Queer and crip futurities seek to challenge heteronormative and ableist visions of the future by carving out the value of lives that seem to be situ- ated outside a social order organized around re/productivity. The negative effects associated with failure—disappointment, pain, disillusionment, anxiety, despair—may form a productive counter-discourse to the ideology of positivity rampant in societies with a neoliberal economic order. Their supposedly bleak futures encourage queers and the disabled to forge alli- ances in the here and now, and to find meaning in their existence beyond the dictate of re/productivity. Already “doomed” to be failures, queers and the disabled may try to dislodge their existence from the normative regimes that govern individuals who subscribe to the narrative of futurity. Refusing the future altogether may grant queers and the disabled a greater degree of self-determination and agency than attempting to conform to dominant ideals. Moreover, as select contributions will demonstrate, individuals may strategically deploy failure as a means of resistance to exploitative struc- tures; for instance, subcultural identities such as drug addict or punk may be read as expressions of resistance to the neoliberal imperative for productiv- ity. In short, individuals who strategically fail to comply with exploitative structures may enjoy a greater degree of individuality than those governing themselves according to the norms that these regimes dictate. INTRODUCTION 19

The essays in this volume provide an interdisciplinary panorama of the philosophical underpinnings, complex dynamics, historical developments, aesthetic negotiations, and popular representations of individual failure in U.S. culture and in Western cultures at large. The essays in the first section, “Theoretical Perspectives on Failure,” examine some of the philosophical, cultural, and economic foundations of the ways in which the failed individual is framed and has emerged as a historically contingent concept, a product of cultural and political practice, as well as a theoretical concept. Christopher Taylor, in “Sometimes You Just Fail: Protest and the Policing of Bad Feeling,” addresses the contemporary depathologization and normalization of failure as a mode of governing populations through the Long Crisis. Emptying failure of its pathos, Taylor argues, is functional for the containment of populations exposed to diminished life expectations and tendential expulsion from the circuits of capital. In his critical assessment of protest movements like Occupy Wall Street and the accompanying apparatuses of policing failed subjects, Taylor diagnoses a systemic flattening of the subjects’ affective response to failure, while call- ing for a new political activism that re-imbues failure with its devastating affect. While Taylor’s analysis deploys a Marxist framework in which the eco- nomic constitutes the base and the realm of culture forms the superstruc- ture, Bina Nir’s essay “The Primordial Failure: A Cultural-Philosophical Analysis” examines the “Western pursuit of successˮ in terms of its geneal- ogy beyond the advent of capitalist consumer culture. Nir argues that Western conceptions of success and failure are cultural constructs deeply embedded in the roots of Western culture—in the Hebrew Bible/Old Tes- tament—and are not merely aftereffects or by-products of capitalist con- sumer culture. Theory has also played a constitutive role in both challenging as well as confirming the ideologies and structural circumstances that govern definitions of individual success and failure. Hannes Lang and Eva Lang, in “Failure in Economics: A Black-Box,” critically examine neoclassical eco- nomic theory’s lack of engagement with failure as an analytical category. The recent financial crisis, they argue, has once more led to the questioning of current mainstream economic theories and its corresponding policies. However, not only have these theories failed to protect against or even predict the crisis, the concept of failure has still been largely neglected in economics. Lang and Lang show how economic theory has installed a 20 H AMSCHA/MOTYL/SCHOBER system that makes itself immune to the idea of failure in its overreliance on the concept of the homo economicus. They then demonstrate how this immunization can be disrupted by developing a new economic paradigm that takes into account political structures and the latest research in emerging fields such as behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. The essays in the next section, “Determinants of Failure: Structures, Normativity, and Power,” further challenge the exclusive ascription of fail- ure to individual responsibility by unraveling such political, normative, and ideological structures that have functioned as more or less invisible power laws in defining individual failure. In “Destined to Fail: Cosmetic Surgery, Female Body Images, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Birth-mark’,” Johannes Fehrle re-reads the American Renaissance author’s short story “The Birth-mark” in light of the death of the pornographic actress known as “Sexy Cora.” Both Hawthorne’s protagonist and Carolin Wosnitza, Fehrle argues, unconsciously submit to what Pierre Bourdieu describes as the symbolic violence of a society structured by masculine domination. In his comparative reading, he provides an account of how relational dynamics obscure the creation of women as “failed individuals” through social expectations (e.g. physical perfection) that are at once constructed as a conditio sine qua non and at the same time unattainable. By setting even the most “perfectˮ women up as (eventual) failures, these structures are a concealed layer of oppression of the patriarchal order. The normative regulation of the body is also central in Susanne Hamscha’s reading of disabled bodies through the lens of vandalism in “Disability Aesthetics and Vandalism in American Visual Culture.” Drawing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual representations of disabled bodies, Hamscha shows how disabled bodies have historically been perceived as vandalized objects in the flesh, as bodies that have been “robbed” of their intended form and that seem to be failures because of their inability to meet cultural standards of productivity and beauty. Disabled bodies, she argues, trouble the (able-bodied) beholder precisely because he or she has been socialized in a world that sharply differentiates between “normal,” “functional,” able-bodied individuals that can fully participate in public life, and “abnormal,” “dysfunctional,” disabled individuals that fail to do so. Yet, vandalism can also function as a form of productive disturbance, defying what the beholder is accustomed to see and wants to see, a disturbance that may trigger visceral and sometimes even violent reactions. INTRODUCTION 21

A different form of social invisibility is explored in Wibke Schniedermann’s essay, “Wohnkultur and Zombification: Trying to Unfail the Homeless Individual.” Examining two cultural negotiations of homelessness, Mark Singer’s documentary Dark Days and the “Night of the Living Homeless” episode of the TV series South Park, Schniedermann compares the ways in which the homeless are made visible and depicted as failed individuals. She argues that both examples challenge dominant notions of individual failure, specifically in the context of abject poverty and issues of housing, yet in diametrically opposed ways. Her reading aims to show how a shift in perspective away from the individual experience of homelessness can in its own way succeed in relieving the individual of the burden of failure. The question of systemic failure vs. individual choice, which Schniedermann engages regarding an economic issue comes into sharp focus with respect to racial discrimination in the final essay of this section. In “Failed by the Criminal Justice System: The Hyperincarceration of the Black Urban Poor in the ‘War on Drugs’,” Katharina Motyl shows that the policies entailed by the drug war, which was first implemented by the Nixon administration, have strongly conditioned lower-class African Americans for failure. Drawing on legal and sociological studies, Motyl argues that the targeting of the black (sub–) proletariat by drug war- induced carceral expansion is to be regarded both as the disciplining of a population segment who no longer fulfills any function in society under the neoliberal paradigm and as an instrument of racial control which allowed opponents of black civil rights to continue pursuing their agenda post-1964 under the rhetorically colorblind cloak of “law and order.” However, a broad public discussion addressing the decidedly disproportionate incarceration of African Americans has not occurred, since the public tends not to perceive the issue as a systemic failure, but as a result of “black criminality” and thus, of individual failure. Motyl closes by proposing that black experiences with the criminal justice system bespeak conditions of failed black individuality, failed black subjecthood, and fixation on black failure. The following section, “Failure as Resistance/Failure as Pleasure,” features essays that discuss how failure, as a form of counterhegemonic practice, can be seen as an act of empowerment. Astrid Fellner in “‘Hanging on’: Mohawk Sovereignty and the Art of Failure” reads the refusal of the Mohawks of Kahnawá:ke to become Canadian or American 22 H AMSCHA/MOTYL/SCHOBER citizens in terms of alternative forms of meaning-making and being in the world that settler colonialism has failed to erase. The Mohawks’ insistence upon their sovereignty, she argues, both highlights what Audra Simpson calls “colonialism’s ongoing existence and simultaneous failure” (2014, 7). In particular, she discusses two artistic expressions—Carla Hemlock’s quilt “Tribute to Mohawk Ironworkersˮ and Alan Michelson’s installation piece “Third Bank of the Riverˮ—that offer powerful examples of a politics of refusal, which reflect the Mohawks’ efforts to “hang on.” Visual art as a form of resistance is also the focus in Florian Zappe’s essay “The Addict’s Ethics of Failure: Resistance to Ambition in the Photographic Work of Larry Clark.” Zappe demonstrates how Larry Clark’s photographic depictions of the suburban teenage drug culture of late-capitalist America not only refuse to comply with the moral imperative to denounce his addicted protagonists as failed individuals, but also present their “failure” as a form of “ethical resistance” (David Couzens Hoy, 2004). Based on Hoy’s concept as well as Roland Barthes’ aesthetic theory of photography (1981), Zappe discusses how Clark’s portrayals of addiction evoke a notion of “heroic failure” as a form of life-affirming opposition against the seemingly overpowering and alienating normative forces of the middle-class paradigm of ambition and success. Artistic resistance to normative definitions of success is furthermore explored in Marius Henderson’s essay “‘Here is the trash heap, nothing there except a muted wailing’: Dithering in Negativity and the Failure to Move On.” Henderson conceptualizes contemporary politico-aesthetic and affective modalities which are invested in failing or purposefully resisting normative calls for “resilience,” as a quick recovery from crisis-induced damage. In discussing the poetry of Robert Fitterman and Dawn Lundy Martin and the performance art of M. Lamar, Henderson shows how these artistic practices remain attached to “negative” affective stances and do not strive for fast alleviation. His readings of different artistic strategies interact with renditions of negativity in queer-feminist theory, queer of color critique, black metal theory, and Afro-Pessimism, while being committed to the unfinished labor of what Jack J. Halberstam has called “low theory.” A self-referential move is made by the final essay in this section, which discusses academic failure as a form of political resistance. Mahmoud Arghavan, in “Failure as an Ethical Choice: Academic Resistance against Authoritarian Academic Systems,” explores the subversive failure of intellectuals to reproduce the state-sanctioned ideology in the authoritarian INTRODUCTION 23 regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Taking his cue from Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s distinction between “critical academic professionals” and “subversive intellectuals” (2013), Arghavan argues that failure may become an ethical choice to implicitly or explicitly resist repres- sive politics. Thus, in confronting a dominant ideology, counter-hegemonic intellectuals can reverse the inscriptions of failure and success, if resisting hegemonic power and committing to justice and human rights is regarded as a success, even though it will entail a failure to achieve the social and financial privileges that conforming to the dominant ideology would ensure. Failed individuals are ubiquitous in American literature, perhaps be- cause fiction, as a cultural practice, has always shaped social discourse and has functioned as observer and critical corrective to social norms and ta- boos. The next chapter, “Failure in American Literary History,” comprises essays that shed light on the sometimes contradictory negotiation of the failed individual in literary fiction from the nineteenth century until today. Against the backdrop of Sandage’s observation that concepts of individual- ity in American culture developed in close proximity to the fascination with success and the fear of (economic) failure in the nineteenth century as the United States transformed into a capitalist society, Dietmar Meinel’s essay “Surviving on Wrecked Ships: The Failing Individual in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)” examines the many failures of Arthur Gordon Pym as instances of individualization and of white privilege. Since the possibility to stay afloat amidst sinking vessels envisions a mobile individual at the moment when social and racial hierar- chies in America begin to transform, Meinel argues that Pym exemplifies not a failed individual but envisions (white) individuality through constant failing, thus challenging normative dimensions of failure at the time. Perhaps no other literary period is as much associated with and as merciless in its depiction of the failed individual as naturalism. In “Naturalism and the Aesthetics of Failure,” James Dorson argues that the failure of naturalist characters lies primarily in their inability to understand the overpowering laws that govern the forces that render them failed individuals. The only solution to such a problem, Dorson suggests, is outside intervention. Ironically, however, if an outside perspective on the struggle of naturalist characters is the only way that failure can conceivably be avoided, it is also the narrative detachment in naturalist fiction that has led critics to consider literary naturalism itself a failure in aesthetic terms. 24 H AMSCHA/MOTYL/SCHOBER

As any examination of failure is at once an examination of agency, by reading these two failures in naturalism together—the failure of characters and what critics have regarded as an aesthetic failure—Dorson concludes by discussing the way in which naturalism reconfigures human agency. If naturalism foregrounds failed individuals, modernist fiction is largely associated with notions of change and progress. One of the markers of the modernist progress narrative is its subscription to and naturalization of acceleration and speed. Svenja Fehlhaber’s essay “Productively Failing to Accelerate: Mary Borden’s Alternative Vision of Existing Successfully in Modern America” recovers a novel which contemporaries considered a failure because it refused to stylistically embrace velocity. Fehlhaber’s text reclaims an undeservedly forgotten facet of modern American literature, which devised intricate strategies to renegotiate the norm of unabated speed-up in the 1920s. She argues that while other authors conformed for self-validation, Flamingo strategically “failsˮ in contrast to mainstream modernist novels, which have been praised for fast textual forms, thus unmasking the normative dichotomy of “fast/successˮ and “slow/failureˮ as an ideological construct on the level of style and theme. Doing so, it carves out a critical literary space within the discourse of acceleration and, by combining fast experimental with slow traditional styles, productively imagines a combination of both experiences for a new equilibrium of modern existence. Susanne Leikam’s “The Failed Individual and the Biopolitics of Climate Catastrophe in Edan Lepucki’s California (2014)ˮ discusses a contemporary example of narrative engagement with the failed individual. Lepucki’s post- apocalyptic climate change narrative, Leikam claims, constructs individual failure in times of climate catastrophe not as the outcome of erroneous personal decisions but as the result of both the harmful direct ramifications of climate change and its indirect implications for larger cultural, economic, and political structures. In so doing, the novel provides a counternarrative to techno-scientific or financial discourses on climate change, making the human dimension of climate catastrophe accessible to readers, and thus urging them to pay attention to the structural implications of climate change. The final section of the book addresses some of the ways in which digi- tal technology and culture have produced new forms of and discourses on individual failure. Geert Lovink’s critical reading of selfie culture in “Narcissus Confirmed: Technologies of the Minimal Selfie” suggests that INTRODUCTION 25 the online self tries to hold on to a subjectivity that is in the process of falling apart. For Lovink, the selfie is located somewhere between a neolib- eral practice of self-promotion, a technological gesture, and an expression of what Christopher Lasch has called the “Minimal Self” (1984). Lovink asks how we can make a diagnosis that does not reduce users to addicts or failed individuals. Selfies, Lovink declares, are narcissist in that they demonstrate presence at a time in which selfhood has become a luxury. At the same time, we are increasingly aware of surveillance practices connected with posting selfies online. The selfie, Lovink claims, is first and foremost a technological gesture, produced by a specific hardware condition, threading through software and dispositions of being. He therefore concludes that we cannot talk about the selfie and remain silent about the “like economy,” the billion-dollar advertisement and surveillance market of people’s private data, in which the selfie and the likes it generates are traded behind the back of users’ smiles. Practices of self-promotion and –optimization have been given a boost by self-tracking devices in the context of the phenomenon that has become known as the “quantified self.” James Dyer, in “Failing by Design: Self- Tracking and the Failed Individual,” historicizes and theorizes self-tracking practices against the backdrop of master narratives of panoptic control and sousveillance, as well as chargings of optimistic transhumanism and tech- nological determinism. In his essay, he proposes an alternative reading of self-tracking as a practice of design, of intervention, argumentation, manip- ulation, and most importantly, failure. Self-tracking as design becomes performative, argumentative, relational, and contingent, operating affirmatively in the continuing presence of failure. The failed individual has become increasingly visible in online communities and platforms, yet especially in the blogosphere, failed individuals share the selfie’s dilemma of being located in a contested field of public self-disclosure and self-promotion. Regina Schober’s essay “Failure Blogs and the Confessional Self” critically examines the growing practice of blogging about failure. In these blogs, Schober identifies a problematic tendency toward reproducing the neoliberal dogma of positiv- ity and self-responsibility, according to which failure is framed as an obsta- cle to be overcome by personal effort. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism,” Jodi Dean’s definition of blogging as “communicative capitalism,” Geert Lovink’s provocative description of blogging as “creative nihilism,” as well as on Rita Raley’s elaborations on 26 H AMSCHA/MOTYL/SCHOBER

“tactical media,” Schober proposes that failure blogs are situated in a para- doxical field of on the one hand performing alternative disruptions of mainstream success doctrines while, through their media-specific frame- works, reinstalling hegemonic capitalist narratives of productivity and of self-optimization.

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I. Theoretical Perspectives on Failure