The Failure of Knowledge / Knowledges of Failure

• Applicant: Dr. Katharina Motyl
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 433134351

Failure and questions of knowledge are inextricably linked. The assumption that knowledge is socially constructed and that its circulation is inflected by power relations, gives rise to the question how and why we know that someone or something has failed. The concept of failure (and the self-identification as a ‘failed individual’) presupposes specific epistemologies that, in turn, were produced by social, cultural, political and economic processes. Thus, this network hypothesizes that knowledge has agency in the formation of 'failed individuals' and the rhetoric that underlies the success/failure binary. Knowledge can both prevent and facilitate failure – restricted access to knowledge can impact someone’s chances to participate socially and economically, while the very structures and systems of knowledge are instrumental in producing normative assumptions and hierarchies that disqualify certain subject positions as 'failed' (for example, heteronormativity). At the same time, the subversive knowledges of those considered / self-identifying as failed individuals afford particularly astute insights into a given hegemonic order, and also constitute potent repositories from which articulations of alternative futures to that very hegemonic order may draw. Recognizing oneself as failed can also open up spaces of resistance and pleasure. Subversive and subaltern knowledges, consequently, can productively challenge dominant discourses and social structures. The production of ‘knowledge from below’ often relies on social practices and medial genres that have traditionally not been regarded as generators of knowledge (e.g. popular culture or tacit knowledge). In addition to examining the agency of knowledge in the production of failure as well as the knowledges of 'failed individuals', this project also scrutinizes the failure of knowledge. The current historical moment is witnessing increased challenges from divergent political angles to the ideal of knowledge as rational and universal rooted in the European Enlightenment. The ascent of the Alt-Right, for instance, has helped usher in the so-called 'post-factual' age, in which expert knowledge / established modes of knowledge production are being ignored or denied (e.g. climate-change denial). Established modes of knowledge production, however, are also cast as failed by those who seek to decolonize Western epistemologies and institutions of knowledge production. The network will feature a self-reflexive dimension in that members will not exclusively present their research findings to academic audiences, but also to the interested public, in the spirit of the Public Humanities.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Regina Schober