Making it worse: productive failure as global common sense

This paper examines how our collective responses to global challenges like war, migration, and climate change are being shaped by the desire to transform failure into a productive experience. It argues that productive failure has become a powerful formation of ‘global common sense’ that is prefiguring the intractable problems of global political life as always solvable. In a context of late liberalism, this formation is very difficult to contest because it instrumentalises ‘learning from failure’ as both an imperative and a universal moral good (indeed, how could you be against learning from failure?) The paper traces how productive failure works through a circuit of restorative, preventive and redemptive arcs – an apparatus that constantly disavows failure’s difficulties and turns them into something productive. In considering the limitations of that circuit, the paper reconfigures failure’s ‘toxic positivity’ through its constitutive unruliness and follows it into the wastelands – the ruined ground of bodies, socialities and life-worlds that have been jettisoned from, or barred entry into, the normative infrastructure of productivity. Drawing on an archive of the already-failed, the paper proposes ideas of endurance and muddling through to make sense of everyday practices that are not prefigured by the lures of improvement.