Failing to CODE

Failure

“We might read failure, for example as a refusal of master, a critique of the intuitive within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegmonic discourse of losing. Stupidity could refer not simple to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of knowing.” – Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

Halberstam argues that failure is a fertile space for challenging the logic of success within dominant systems of knowledge production. The maintenance of narrow forms of knowing upholds the economic and social pillars (such as colonialism and capitalism) that assembled the knowledge regions into disciplines as forms of control.

In this recipe I introduce “flavors” that characterize failure based on a reading of The Queer Art of Failure. These are characteristics of failure such as stupidity, losing, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, or not knowing or acts that are small, antimonumental, and irrelevant. I describe examples of how these flavors might be part of a learning experience – based on activities I have developed in my practice as an educator. I then go on to introduce some of the concepts that helped shape these flavors, and make some connections between failure, pedagogy and computing.

Stupidity

“Stupidity could refer not simply to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of knowing.” – Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

For Halberstam, failing to fit into knowledge disciplines through “losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing” is a way of offering “more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011:2). In this sense, failure is a paradoxical act that dismantles the monuments of the knowledge-power complex while also existing, full-bodied, and fully-being within this.

The potato print’s apparent stupidity demonstrates their failure as knowledge in the computing context. Potato printing resonates with not knowing in this space, with potential for further “detours, twists, and turns through knowing and confusion” (Halberstam, 2014). They are teaching us to know from unknowing ways, with humor.

Unmaking

“The queer art of failure dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live. Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” – Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

The contrast in materials between the pixels and the inky potato prints creates a messy and dynamic relationship with the computer – where the making and unmaking process shifts between the screen and paper. Learners print, then code, then remake print to work better with code, then remake code to work better with print. The pixels and ink are in dialogue, neither definite nor static. With the active process of printing, coding, imagining, making, and back to printing again, there was a constant adjustment between the analogue inky space and the digital pixely space.

Irrelevant

“I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies.” – Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

Failing to CODE is based on learning about computing in non-computational ways. Rather than having a mindset of “Computational Thinking” (such as abstraction, problem solving, automation or information), these objects lead us to explore coding through failing at computation. Instead, we think through tangible things, messiness, idiosyncrasies or textures. These failures of thinking like a computer are based in bringing the body into the learning space.

“The pleasure of teaching is an act of resistance countering the overwhelming boredom, uninterest, and apathy that so often characterize the way professors and students feel about teaching and learning, about the classroom experience.” – bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

In my practice I often experiment with materially active modes of participating. My aim is to develop ways of introducing code based on creative play – bringing in the body into the learning space in ways that are joyful and fun, without reducing experiences to algorithmic abstraction.

hooks argues that engaged pedagogies demand the full sense of being in the body in the teaching and learning process. Making space in the classroom for emotion is part of bringing the full body into the learning.

Key to both hooks and Halberstam’s viewpoint on knowing is that it is founded on ways of being in the world. In a similar light to hooks’ engaged pedagogies, Halberstam critiques static knowledge practices and argues that queer failures bring about ways of ambulatory knowing – where knowledge is based on mode, process or action. The Queer Art of Failure goes on to discuss how vulnerabilities and multiplicities of failure can work to erode hierarchical knowledge.

One of the reasons I started exploring this idea of failure is to help think about some of the issues with computing knowledge. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2004) questions the foundation of computing knowledge, and deconstructs software through revisiting the history from a material perspective. She refers to programmers as “users” to illustrate that they are constructed by the conventions of programming languages, rather than possessing the agency that is commonly perceived coding has.

The conditions in which programming developed have shaped it to how it is now. Chun threads the stories of machine materiality, gendered languages of control, and hierarchical social interactions, to re-position the history of computing as an entanglement of these (rather than a static, linier discipline). Based on this historic materialism, Chun illuminates the limitations of the computing discipline, and argues that software is ideology.

Learning about coding technologies from queer perspectives on failure brings into question some of the capitalist structures that uphold coding technologies, such as the concept of binary, solution based approaches, hierarchies or individualism. The role of Failing to CODE is to use learning objects to question the foundations of computing knowledge, as a way to cut through the ideological construct that has been developed from the entanglement of material conditions of its production. Bringing objects of failure to the centre of learning is a full body engagement in coding and computing.