Vol. 16 - Fail Prof. (a very special episode)
Failure is a performance art and baby, it's showtime.
My promotion to full prof. was denied.
But this is not what I want to talk about. First, because although I had high hopes, I understood this to be a dry run; and second, because I really don’t want to talk about it, thank you very much.
What I do want to talk about is all the performativeness that surrounds failing, and failure.
I have been thinking about this since I stumbled upon the concept of a “shadow CV”, that lists all the rejections, rather than the successes. And all shadow CVs have one thing in common: they are maintained by people who are, overwhelmingly, also maintaining an actual CV, and are still active academics. That we do not see the shadow CVs of people who left is pure survivorship bias: it is easier to talk openly about failure from a place of relative success.
Or privilege.
I try to be open about failing because I’m a white man with tenure. People will react to this openness the way they reacted to my taking several months of paternity leave: “oh, this is so brave”. For a lot of my colleagues from different demographics, the same openness may be met with insinuations that maybe they are not quite cut out for this line of work.
This is where failure must be performative: it must be normalized, and to be normalized, it must be performed by those of us who can afford it. Keeping failure private while publicizing success feeds everyone’s imposter syndrome, and so it feels important to proclaim loudly, I fucked up a pretty big professional milestone, and if you believe in yourself, you can do it too!
A few years in my position, I was having lunch with a colleague, and sharing how I worked to become comfortable at failing; they replied something that stayed with me: “I hope I’ll never be as comfortable with failure as you are”.
With several years of hindsight, I think they were onto something. What I was trying to do (and it is a work in progress) is not to find failure enjoyable per se; it was to be able to acknowledge it, in a way that can be turned into a lesson to learn. This includes, obviously, what Jean-Luc Picard put best, that it is “possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life”.
There are shots we take that are almost fully outside our control, and they are still worth taking. This is another way in which failure is a performance art: sometimes, the fact that we can afford to fail means that we can afford to take risks.
Failing, and discussing it openly, is the very brightly pigmented feathers we wear because we are well-fed in a stable habitat. It’s not a fully honest signal. When I was facing the prospect of not being admitted to any grad school after my B.Sc., the last thing I would have done would have been to share this fact. Because it was existential. But after several years at it, most failures become situational, temporary setbacks that are easier to put into perspective. It gets easier to talk about them because the risks feel less overwhelming.
And with all that said, stay tuned for Vol. 17 next week, for a discussion of collaborative writing, and how to make it great. For real, this time.