Introduction: Writing failure: knowledge production, temporalities, ethics and traces

Abstract

This volume follows failures out into the world exploring how they unfold ethnographically. Taking a longer view shows how objects, narratives and diagnoses of failures may be crafted, acted on, suffered, resisted—unmade or recomposed. Thus while tropes and diagnoses of failure can temporarily (re)organize, narrate and stabilize the world, the kinds of failures explored here also indicate a mode of uncontainable excess that refuses the boundedness of knowledge objects, temporalities and spaces. This volume offer three main interventions. The first concerns knowledge production: how objects of failure are crafted through selective ways of knowing that occludes both other modes of apprehension at different scales plus failure’s many affective valences. The second thinks through the knotted temporalities—whether pasts, futures, suspended presents or repetition and sedimentation—that make and are made by failure. Finally, writing about unfurling failures requires careful attention to the non-linear reverberations, traces, open-endedness, and mobile narratives that produce different social and material effects.