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Paper short abstract

The ethnographic study of so called "Fuckup Nights" sheds light on cultural transformation and new ways of dealing with failure and performing resilience.

Paper long abstract

Over the past decade, public representations of failure have taken on positive connotations. Beyond simple optimism, failure thereby is paradoxically framed as productive, detached from shame. Endeavours towards such ‘good failure’ become evident in ‘Fuckup Nights’ (FUN), the empirical base of my ethnographic study (Veit 2024). FUN are globally organized talk- and networking-event-series claiming to celebrate failures. They lend narrative authority to failed speakers who publicly share their stories with applauding audiences. By that, FUN encourage individual’s passages from failed to reinvigorating self and even aspire to foster cultural transformation.

An analysis of the stories, the “sayings” (Schatzki 1996, p. 89) alone, invites readings of FUN as yet another neoliberal technique of self-optimization. However, I argue, investigating the “doings” (ibid.) of the bodily and material practice of sharing failure in a stage-performance, highlights the role of performativity in the formation of an emotional and moral community in the framework of the event. By dealing with failure in this format, FUN allow individual “emotion work” (Hochschild 1979) through playful and celebratory “emotional practices” (Scheer 2012, 2016) of temporal order, flow, community, exposure, subjectivity, etc. However, despite their ritual-like transformative power (Fischer-Lichte 2012) FUN exemplify an emergent, yet fragile, cultural practice: While the event-format creates visibility and is broadly acknowledgeable considering its emotional, joyful style (compared i.e. to protests (cf. Gould 2009)), its accessibility, its mundane, noncommittal character and entanglement with market logics and affective capitalism limits their effects and renders their claims rejectable.