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- Convenors:
-
Adam Reed
(St. Andrews University)
Catherine Alexander (Durham University)
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- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
We are interested in organizational and personal mechanisms of accounting for failure. How do explanations of failure emerge? We welcome papers from diverse contexts, but with the expectation that they will ethnographically explore failure, responsibility and the relationship between the two.
Long Abstract:
This panel will explore the relationship between failure and responsibility. Rather than try to nail down failure (or indeed success) as an analytical term, our emphasis is on first, how failure is experienced as an emic category, and second, the kinds of explanations and responses that are generated by such apprehensions of failure. These may be standard cultural strategies for attributing responsibility for actions or new narratives generated by new kinds of failure. While organisational responses to perceived failures may be one aspect of this, we particularly want to explore how individuals within those organisations account for things falling apart, or indeed how individuals explain their own perceived failures to themselves. What sense of self and what kind of relationship between the self and the world is summoned in such narratives? To what extent are failures identified with a cause – and is that cause seen as systemic, circumstantial, malevolent intent, ineptitude, an artifact of new complexities, a failure of the self or something else entirely? Conversely, what does it mean to be identified as responsible by someone else for something going wrong? Thus while individuals may attribute blame to ‘the system’ along the lines of Herzfeld’s notion of a secular theodicy, is there a growing tendency for the figure of the individual to be held responsible for systemic failure or for systems failure to be held responsible for individual action, as Laidlaw points out with regard to new statistics measures of institutional irresponsibility?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
For orthodox Jewish practitioners of Buddhist-derived meditation, one is successful because in an important respect one has failed. Failing in a way that demonstrates success involves relenting some responsibility and ascribing it to others, thus revealing de-responsibilization's ethical potential.
Paper long abstract:
Recent anthropological writing has emphasized the constitutive roles senses of failure play in religious self-fashioning, associating failure’s productive ethical potential with people’s willingness to assume greater responsibility for various aspects of their lives. By contrast, among orthodox Jewish-Israeli practitioners of Buddhist-derived meditation, failure does not operate primarily as a means for future ethical accomplishment. Instead, one is successful precisely because in an important respect, one has failed. Moreover, among orthodox Jewish meditators, failing in a way that demonstrates that one is actually successful does not involve taking greater responsibility. Rather, it involves relenting some responsibility and ascribing it to God or to a tsaddik (righteous person). Indeed, orthodox meditators learn—to a significant extent, through meditative practice—to consider themselves responsible primarily for their efforts but less so for such efforts’ results, which are under other entities’ control. So, whereas a central academic analysis of mindfulness practices has been that they are neoliberal technologies of ‘responsibilization’, orthodox meditators’ approaches towards failure are ones of de-responsibilization. Buddhist-derived meditation practices may therefore operate as technologies in which meditators learn to take less responsibility for failure—though without impinging on their ability to inhabit the moral system or to experience success. De-responsibilization, then, can at times prove at least as ethically productive as responsibilization.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on a liberal movement for reform of the Ukrainian media who members perceive most Ukrainian journalists as failing the standards of good professionalism. I examine possible explanations for their ascriptions of systemic and individual failure.
Paper long abstract:
Exploring the role of failure in ethical change, I focus on a group of western-funded Ukrainian journalists who embraced a vision of liberal, 'Europeanising' professional reform as a project of moral transformation. Seeking to re-organise news reporting around the ideals of balanced objectivity and impartiality, they perceive most Ukrainian media as failing such standards. I argue that their own experiences of professional failure, foundational to their activism, lead them to interpret journalistic malpractice as a matter of individual lack of virtue. Such declarations of systemic ethical-professional failure, in turn, fuel divisive claims to moral distinction and conflict within the profession.
Paper short abstract:
Along the Peruvian coast, fog capture sets out to respond to the lack of large-scale infrastructural provisioning. When fog catchers themselves fail, they bring into view a set of relations that not only renegotiate failure as spatiotemporally distributed, but ultimately help obviating failure away.
Paper long abstract:
In Lima and along the Peruvian coast more broadly, NGOs, scientists, and civil society associations engage in experiments with fog catchers. These sieve-like material assemblages have the capacity to conjure notably large volumes of water by trapping and condensing tiny water droplets suspended in the air. Accordingly, they are viewed as humanitarian technologies that provide quick and impactful responses to the absence of State induced, large-scale infrastructural provisioning. However, the particular grip on the atmosphere afforded by fog catchers often proves fleeting, and fog quickly slips into ephemerality again. Except for eye-catching reports in national and international media, what remains of many such initiatives are often mere remnants, sometimes repurposed and integrated into other auto-construction projects. In this paper I discuss what happens when relations of capture fail to hold. While disappointing, such material failures throw the materiality of failure into relief. They bring into view a set of relational excesses and absences which are deemed to require reconfiguration for fog capture to successfully happen; the relations of disconnection entailed by ‘off-the-grid’ demand a set of concomitant relations of connection. Against this backdrop, I suggest that moments of failure can be productive of contexts, and I further show how such contexts, together with accusations about corruption, become resources for renegotiating failure itself as something that is spatiotemporally distributed and difficult to localise. Failure becomes renegotiated not by trying harder or learning from mistakes, but by retrodictively and speculatively obviating failure away.
Paper short abstract:
Faced with the responsibility of reducing airborne pollution, Chinese carbon experts encounter contradictions between economic growth and ecological priorities, resulting in failures that they enfold into ambitions for continuous experimentation with sustainable solutions.
Paper long abstract:
Faced with unprecedented health risks from airborne particulate, Chinese citizens place responsibility for this failure at the feet of the state, and demand pragmatic solutions. To address concerns of atmospheric pollution and climate change, President Xi Jinping has made the construction of a future “ecological civilisation” central to his state agenda, with aims of reducing “carbon” emissions at their core. Those in charge of conceptualising and implementing these decarbonisation policy goals, namely carbon bureaucrats, consultants, and developers, face contradictions in terms of economic growth and environmental sustainability. Many perceive the so-called sustainable solutions to market failures, especially emissions exchanges and green bonds, as themselves failures in delivering on sustainable promises, even when they are deemed a policy success. These carbon experts navigate a performative, even constructivist, field of “the economy” by upholding pragmatist self-images of responsibility towards their fellow citizens. While these feelings of personal responsibility for fulfilling institutional goals make them vulnerable to continuous failure, this solution-oriented pragmatism allows carbon experts to soldier on, withstand denial, switch priorities, or imagine a future planet saved by techno-utopian fixes. Although the environmental responsibility that drives them is pressing and disturbing, it simultaneously enfolds failure into ambitions for continuous experimentation with sustainable solutions.