Opening Invocation
What fabulous failure I am.
These past months I have been struggling and, quite miserably, failing—frequently, publicly, without grace. Progress slowed. Plans collapsed. Energy disappeared. The schedule did not care. Productivity certainly didn’t. Deadlines marched forward in straight lines while I lay diagonally.
Somewhere in that diagonal position something shifted.
Because failure, when it stops being a verdict and starts being a condition, behaves differently. It softens rooms. It rearranges hierarchies. It invites witnesses. It produces conversations that success has no reason to host. Success isolates; failure gathers. Success is efficient; failure is porous. Success speaks in bullet points; failure stutters, repeats, digresses, forgets what it was saying and remembers something else instead.
This research does not ask how to overcome failure.
It asks what failure does.
Specifically: how failure and non-mastery might function as methods for building trust, meaning, and connection in a society trained to optimize everything—time, bodies, output, attention, even care. We are taught to smooth rough edges, to polish drafts, to present results rather than processes. We are trained to hide the moment before something works. But that hidden moment—the awkward, unresolved, unstable one—is precisely where relation happens.
I began to suspect that failure might not be the opposite of knowledge, but one of its conditions.
Not knowing invites others. Knowing dismisses them.
This suspicion did not emerge from theory first. It emerged from interruption: disrupted routines, limited capacity, unfinished attempts, asking for help when I did not want to, accepting slowness when I wanted velocity. Only later did theory arrive, almost smugly, as if it had been waiting backstage all along, clearing its throat: non-mastery, queer failure, trickster logic, performativity. Words for something I had already stumbled into bodily.
So this document proceeds the same way failure does—sideways. It moves through fragments, performances, workshops, walking routes, voice notes, video stills, citations, and slips. It does not argue in a straight line. It accumulates evidence the way dust accumulates on a shelf: gradually, relationally, without announcement.
I may be inconsistent, excessive at points and fully half-aware. You may call me embarrassing. Not fully human. Not fully animal. Definitely responsible.
We do not stand outside the system. We live inside it.
It slips. It trips. And hopefully falls.
I am standing in an office. Unmoving. Doing nothing. The glitch to expose the rules of this room.
Smashing windows with a flower. Too soft to be violent. Too violent to be soft. You don’t understand? You feel it.
If success is about control, then failure might be about contact.
And if that is true, then failure is not a collapse.
It is an opening.
Now the cat is out of the backpack.
There lies a treacherous journey ahead of us, with many sticks and stones. Participation is a risk. I understand that you are scared. You should continue now.
Or don’t.
That would also make sense.
The World That Fears Failure
We live inside a culture that edits itself in real time.
Mistakes are deleted before they are seen. Drafts are replaced by outcomes. Glitches are smoothed into transitions. Even our hesitations have begun to feel unprofessional. The demand is not simply to succeed, but to appear as if success required no effort—as if nothing trembled before it stabilized. In such a climate, failure is not merely discouraged: it is rendered illegible. It is treated as noise in a system designed for signal.
Optimization has become an aesthetic as much as an ideology. Smoothness signals competence. Speed signals intelligence. Clarity signals authority. Friction, meanwhile, reads as error. The messy middle is hidden not because it lacks value, but because it reveals process—and process exposes vulnerability. To witness someone in the midst of not knowing is to encounter them without armor. Contemporary culture prefers armor.
Design culture, too, often participates in this logic. Professionalism is frequently measured through polish: clean grids, resolved concepts, finished artifacts. Yet the figure of the designer as seamless problem-solver conceals how much uncertainty actually underlies any act of making. The myth of mastery persists precisely because the traces of non-mastery are edited out. The sketch is hidden; the prototype discarded; the failed iteration quietly forgotten. What remains is the illusion that things arrive whole.
But the whole is always composed of fragments.
What interests me is not the finished object but the unstable moment before it coheres—when meaning is still negotiating with itself. That moment, fragile and unresolved, is where relation becomes possible. When something is unfinished, others can enter it. When something is certain, there is nowhere to stand except outside it.
This is why failure can feel socially dangerous: it redistributes authority. If no one fully knows, then knowledge must circulate. If no one is fully in control, then control becomes collective. Failure interrupts the fantasy of the self-sufficient individual and replaces it with a scene of interdependence. It exposes the fact that making has never been solitary—only narrated that way.
To take failure seriously, then, is not to romanticize collapse. It is to question the conditions that demand seamlessness in the first place. What kinds of worlds require constant optimization? Who benefits from uninterrupted productivity? And what forms of relation become possible if we refuse the demand to function flawlessly?
Theory That Refuses to Sit Still
The classroom door swings open. No one agrees on where to sit.
Michael Taussig is already talking, chalk dust on his sleeves, insisting that mastery is suspicious. He proposes instead the strange authority of hesitation—that understanding often appears precisely when certainty loosens its grip. Knowledge, he suggests, is not a monument but a leak. Control it too tightly and it dries up.
Before this can settle, Jack Halberstam interrupts from the back row, feet on the table, delighted: failure, he says, is not merely something to analyze but something to practice. Failure refuses the timelines of capitalism, the metrics of respectability, the demand that life must add up neatly. To fail, in this sense, is to step sideways out of scripts that were never written for you anyway.
Someone laughs.
From somewhere indeterminate—podium? ceiling? inside the desk?—emerges Carl Jung’s archetypal mischief-maker, the figure who disrupts order not to destroy it but to expose its seams. The trickster trips systems so we can see how they balance. He tells jokes at solemn moments. He misuses tools. He asks the wrong question and reveals the real one. If the hero stabilizes the world, the trickster destabilizes it just enough that we notice it was never stable to begin with.
A chair screeches. A new voice enters.
Judith Butler clears their throat and reminds the room that identity itself is performative—not a fixed truth but something rehearsed into being through repetition. If identity is performed, then so is competence. So is authority. So is success. Which means failure, too, is performative: a visible break in the script that reveals the script was there all along.
Someone drops their notes. No one picks them up.
Near the window, Ruben Pater flips through a book and shrugs. The designer as amateur, he suggests, may be more honest than the designer as expert. The amateur admits uncertainty. The amateur shows process. The amateur tries things that might not work. Professionalism often hides this condition, but hiding is not the same as eliminating. The mess remains; only its visibility changes.
Everyone is speaking at once. Their words overlap until they stop behaving like terms and start behaving like verbs.
No single theory wins the argument.
Because what begins to emerge from this noisy seminar is not a unified doctrine but a shared orientation: all of these thinkers, in different languages, distrust seamlessness. Each of them points—sometimes gently, sometimes gleefully—toward the generative potential of disruption, uncertainty, and misalignment. None of them treat failure as a dead end. They treat it as an opening, a method, a condition under which something unexpected might occur.
The lecture dissolves. The classroom remains.
On the board, someone has written:
If knowledge requires certainty, only the confident can know.
If knowledge requires vulnerability, anyone can begin.
No one remembers who wrote it.
End of Beginning
You are invited.
Not to witness perfection. Not to consume knowledge as product. Not to applaud competence. You are invited to step into the cracks, the gaps, the stutters, the accidental rehearsals. You are invited to follow the falling scissors, the delayed subtitles, the smudged lipstick, the missing voice notes, the laughter that refuses timing.
This is not a demonstration. This is a rehearsal.
If you stay long enough, you may notice something: trust accumulates in the unpolished corners. Attention gathers around what refuses to be contained. Care emerges where control loosens. Stories form from missteps, pauses, and the multiplicity of attempts. Presence itself becomes a medium, a method, a small act of generosity.
We cannot conclude. Not here. Not yet. Because failure, when taken seriously, refuses closure. It continues sideways, in a spiral, it circulates, it hums underneath, it lingers in the body and the room. It multiplies in collective encounters.
So sit, stand, shift. Cut something crooked. Ask for help. Leave a note on the desk. Trace your fingers along unfinished lines. Speak your fragments aloud.
The work is not finished. The world is not finished. And you—if you wish—are part of it. This is document is written in loops. A research essay that bends, stumbles, and performs its own uncertainty.
It does not answer all the questions. It opens them.
And it invites you to fail fabulously alongside it.
Voices (in my Head)
C.G. Jung—The Psychology of the Trickster Figure, 1954. On mischief, disruption, and how subversion reveals hidden systems.
Judith Butler—Gender Trouble, 1990 (and related essays on performativity). On how identity, competence, and social norms are enacted through repetition—foundational to understanding failure as performative.
Pipilotti Rist—Ever is Over All, 1997. On soft disruption, poetic violence, and the pleasure of misalignment: where tenderness and destruction blur, and confusion opens space for feeling over understanding.
Michael Taussig—The Mastery of Non-Mastery, 2003. On practicing uncertainty, embracing the fragment, learning through repeated imperfection.
Jack Halberstam—The Queer Art of Failure, 2011. On failure as methodology, sideways thinking, and resisting normative success.
Meg-John Barker & Jules Scheele—Queer: A Graphic History, 2016. On queering as an active verb: a practice of undoing norms, shifting perspectives, and reworking what is taken for granted through playful, critical, and lived intervention.
Pilvi Takala—The Stroker, 2018. On social awkwardness as method: using over-performance and misplaced care to expose invisible rules, productivity norms, and the discomfort of unscripted interaction.
Ruben Prater—Caps Lock (The Designer as Amateur), 2019. On embracing experimentation, process, and imperfection in design culture.
Be Oakley—Publishing Now: A Working Class Guide to Making a Living Off Small and Self Publishing, 2023. On inviting failure in as a collaborator, treating mistakes as companions in the process, where publishing becomes a space of ongoing negotiation, imperfection, and trust rather than polished outcome.
Post-Precarity Autumn Camp, ongoing initiative. On collective experimentation beyond precarity: creating temporary spaces where uncertainty, shared vulnerability, and not-knowing become conditions for learning, unlearning, and building trust through doing together.
Queer & alternative archives (IHLIA, Amsterdam). Inspiration for queering collective knowledge and material practices.
Workshops, publications, and video collages produced collaboratively with Miron—explorations of play, zine-making, and no-expectation participatory practice.