1The title of this article immediately echoes a famous statement by Ezra Pound in his ABC of Reading (1934): “literature is news that stays news”. Seductive as this echo may be, the relevance of putting together Pound and failure in popular culture is far from self-evident. Pound is not necessarily the first name that springs to mind in the context of popular culture. Moreover, his high modernist aesthetics is a problematic reference in our times of blurred boundaries between high and low, as exemplified by the rapidly institutionalizing field of the graphic novel, the specific domain that will be at the center of my analysis.
2At the same time, however, Pound’s life and work—for many a reader a blatant example of political failure, given his antisemitism and active sympathy for fascism, and an aesthetic dead end, given the frequent opacity of his work (for a discussion of these criticisms, see Redman’s Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism)—raise fundamental questions of cultural hierarchies, reception, and heritage, all questions deeply intertwined with questions of failure and success. From that point of view, beginning with a nod to Ezra Pound is perhaps the best possible warrant of eventually producing a meaning on what he called “kultcha”.
3But, rather than jumping to hasty conclusions, I will return shortly to the relationship. between failure and Modernism, as well as its continued relevance for popular culture studies First, I will try to define the very notion of failure, which is not just the unhappy flip side of success.
4It does not suffice to describe failure in such terms as a goal not reached or a target missed. This kind of failure is often very relative and in certain cases even very necessary. Serendipity, for instance, would not exist without failure and the same can be said of the design philosophy FFF—not meaning “form follows function” but “form follows failure”—, where initial failure paves the way to a more appropriate, that is socially accepted, realization. FFF is one of the keystones of much work in the field of science and technology studies or STS (for an excellent theoretical and methodological introduction and some stunning case studies, see Pinch, Bijker and Hughes and Bijker) and as such, highly influential in the strongly related actor-network theory, a branch of social theory whose frequent use as a methodological framework in literary and cultural analysis/studies owes much to Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (for a recent overview, see Hachmann).
5More generally speaking, one should also put on the table the—vanishing—belief in the idea of linear progress, in this case the idea that the emergence of some successful “after” not only supersedes a thus less successful “before” (this is one of the conventional tenets on remediation in the sense of Bolter and Grusin; for a critical rereading see Baetens, “La remédiatisation : formes, contextes, enjeux”), but even relegates that “before” to the pitiful category of failure. In practice, innovation is a very mixed bag, full of impurities, anachronisms and strange side-effects. Take for example the case of phrenology, an important “innovative” scientific—as well as ideological—method of the 19th century, which today is no longer taken seriously in academia. Yet phrenology, as convincingly argued by a great specialist of scientific innovation, Judith Schlanger, in Penser la bouche pleine, cannot be reduced to its scientific failure. It has had a positive impact in other or related fields, helping for instance to orient anthropology in more empirical directions while also pushing toward the development of new photographic techniques and applications: phrenology may have proved a dead end, yet in spite of its ethical and scientific issues its focus on the mathematical measuring of skulls has cleared the ground for a more “objective” take on anthropology, while also introducing the use of modern scientific tools and instruments (Schlanger 204). Here as well, it would be a mistake to narrow down our contemporary critical reading of Alphonse Bertillon’s archival mugshot photography to its use or abuse by the police and other ideological state apparatuses (Tagg).
6The element I would like to stress here is the extreme context-sensitivity of failure. The dichotomy of failure versus success is indeed highly relative due to criteria of time and space as well as criteria of production aesthetics and reception aesthetics. In the former case, the question is: what do producers want? In the latter case, it is: what do receivers want? Both aspects, time and space on the one hand, aesthetic considerations on the other hand, are directly related to one another. Production and reception codes are never culturally homogeneous; they change over time and depend on a specific context of communication. It may be useful here to remember Raymond Williams’s ideas on “structures of feeling,” as elaborated in The Long Revolution (1961):
[…] structure of feeling: it is as firm and definite as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and tangible parts of our activity. In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization. And it is in this respect that the arts of a period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of major importance. For here, if anywhere, this characteristic is likely to be expressed […]. (48)
7Yet this structure is never totally homogeneous:
According to Williams, structures of feeling shape cultural patterns and forms reflecting a particular spirit of the time or atmosphere of the age. Consisting of two words, “structure” and “feeling”, contradictory at first glance, this metaphoric concept looks at both collective (structure) and individual (feeling) experiences. In his theory of culture, Williams suggests a dialectical relationship between structure and feeling that opens an opportunity to examine not only culture but also everyday life in its diverse manifestations. (Vanke)
8The concept of structures of feeling is meant to facilitate a historical understanding of affective elements of consciousness and relationships in societies characterized by social networking, ubiquitous media and a public sphere permeated by commodities and advertisement culture. Williams distinguishes three basic structures: 1) residual, 2) dominant or hegemonic, and 3) emergent, all diversely mingled and permanently shifting in contemporary societies. Vintage fashion or skeuomorphism, for instance, are not only an expression of some residual culture within a new dominant culture, but also elements that point toward the limits of that dominant culture and the possible emergence of something else. Cultural studies have helped us develop a great awareness of these issues, which have considerable impact on the perception of failure. Avant-garde or simply ambitious producers may feel “happy” when noticing that their work is a commercial failure, for instance, according to the now integrated Romantic belief that real artists must begin as failures before being accepted as geniuses (failure is then a necessary intermediate step on the path to glory; on the Van Gogh case, see Heinich). They also may feel they have failed when noticing their commercial success—Henry James had already quite some things to say on these dilemmas, see for instance his 1892 novella The Private Life, an inquiry into the conflict between public persona (and success or failure) and private qualities.
9With all these criteria success here can mean failure there, and vice versa, and that success now can be failure later, although neither success nor failure are ever absolute or definitive (for a broader cultural view of this question, see the cultural “success” of politically and militarily defeated nations in Schivelbusch). The question of boredom is a good case in point. In principle, boredom is the ultimate proof of failure, at least in low culture, for in high culture one easily finds examples of praise of boredom. Think of Laurent Jullier’s reflections on “what is a good movie?”, which show that boredom can be part of an aesthetics of distinction, since only highbrow readers can claim to make sense of boredom in their reception of a movie. Think also of the highly original creative treatment of ordinary lives where nothing ever happens in the contemporary graphic novel as examined in depth in one of Chris Ware’s graphic novels (see Schneider). In Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Ware), a contemporary and historical storyline mixing today’s Chicago and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, loneliness, lack of communication, and problematic child/parents relationship increase the depressive feelings experienced by characters lost in a world of total immobility and endless repetition. Think also of what Christine Ross has called the aesthetics of “disengagement” in visual arts, more particularly in performance and media art with their “depressive enactments—an acting out of states of depression encompassing boredom, stillness, communicational rupture, loss of pleasure, withdrawal, the withering of one’s capacity to remember and project, to dream, desire, and fantasize” (Ross xv; in this book the author examines the works of Ugo Rondinone, Rosemarie Trockel, Ken Lum, John Pilson, Liza May Post, Vanessa Beecroft, and Douglas Gordon).
10However, while this has, for quite some time and in certain milieus, been the dominant structure of feeling as shown in art works (“it should be stressed here, to prevent overgeneralization, that all examples are taken from Western culture), there are signs that these ideas are becoming slightly residual in neoliberal times when failure in art is no longer an option, and any conflict between authorship and entrepreneurship has all but disappeared (Brouillette). This change is accompanied by the increased focus on the author rather than the work on the side of artistic reception, at least as far as its reception in the broad cultural domain is concerned. However, recent scholarly approaches to literature and arts, for instance in the field of book history, still tend to deemphasize the importance given to the author/auteur and to stress instead, as already mentioned above, the role of networks. Questions regarding the changing relationships between residual, dominant, and emergent “structures of feeling” are a vital part of all aesthetic debates and it should not come as a surprise that they are central to authors and critics trying to bridge the gap between the happy few and the unhappy crowd and to question the either aristocratic or simply snooty despisal for commercial success (Calvino), at least in the literary field, for in the cinematographic domain, film being both an art and an industry, there is a much milder reception of positive box office figures.
11But let me go back to Pound, more precisely to the encounter of high modernism and popular culture and the supposed gap between them. More than by Pound’s maxim on the news that stays news, Modernism—at least in the continental take on it, where Modernism rhymes with avant-garde and the idea of pushing the boundaries of what can be said and thought (see the scholarly EAM network of European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, which defends a take on Modernism and Modernity that is more radical than what is usually understood by the narrow definition of Modernism as the “new” writing in English between 1910 and 1930)—can be summarized by the no less famous Samuel Beckett mantra from Worstward Ho: “Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” And it is not only artists who have embraced Beckett’s famous words. Art critics as well have adopted it as a shortcut to anything serious. Here, for instance, is the presentation of Hal Foster’s new collection, Fail better (2025), on the publisher’s website:
Taking his title from Beckett—“try again, fail again, fail better”—Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his “reckonings” he turns his own long history of criticism to account, and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades. (“Fail Better” n.p.)
12Even here, caution is necessary and context continues to prevail. The “fail better” mantra can be used for neoliberal purposes, for instance in praise of the start-up ideology—not to mention its appropriation by a Belgian insurance company, which recently made it the baseline of a publicity campaign: “Fail Better, parce qu’on apprend toujours de ses erreurs” (Ethias).
13If we try to read the “fail better” idea in line with Beckett’s work, the imperative sentence is undoubtedly a symbol of the cult of failure. But which failure? Not failure as a springboard to success, as something that can be remediated in order to produce a brighter future, but as the only possible horizon and outcome of all human endeavors (and this is also the way I would like to invite you to read my title). Beckett’s paradoxically positive reading of failure’s negativity is ubiquitous in Modernist and avant-garde culture, as typically shown by the influential studies of Maurice Blanchot on the experience of loss, death and deprivation in writing. It is also far from being anything but new. In what follows are some very general illustrations of this view.
14The most elementary example is of course that of the still hegemonic position of the antihero figure in fiction today (literary fiction, but not only, obviously). A “good” hero is an antihero, an underdog, a rebel, a misfit, in short, a loser, and his or her final defeat is not seen as an aesthetic failure, quite the contrary (the “happy ending” being seen as the prototypical example of what must/ should be avoided in serious writing). The cultural roots of this widespread sympathy for the loser and the fictional script of loss and failure are twofold. On the one hand, this sympathy can be explained by the decline of heroism as a culturally as well as ideologically valued model—a decline that has become more visible since the end of the 19th century, as convincingly shown and studied by Jean-Marie Apostolidès, who insists on the increasing rejection of heroic, patriarchal as well as nationalistic values after the military and ideological defeats of France in 1870 (Franco-Prussian war) and 1914-1918 (First World War). On the other hand, it is impossible to separate this sympathy from the parallel rise of victim culture, which to a certain extent further twists the nature of the antihero, who ceases to be a picaro, a rebel with agency, and morphs into a victim, whose possibilities of agency are strongly jeopardized.
15This collapse of heroism is accompanied—I dare not say reflected, for this as well is a two-way process—by an important shift in style. It is not necessary to stress the increasing importance of “anti-styles” like primitivism, art brut, the unconventional languages of the convicted, madmen, children etc., all defended first in the name of the refusal of narrow and crippling canons (such as the “dead white men” literary canon), and second in the name of authenticity, spontaneity, sincerity, in short truth (currently dominant, while beauty is seen as residual, at least in high culture, for in popular culture the key values are quite different: the zany, the interesting, the cute, all criteria having to do with our feelings [Ngai]). As the author claims at the opening of her work:
This book makes a simple argument about the zany, the interesting, and the cute: that these three artistic categories, for all their marginality to aesthetic theory and to genealogies of postmodernism, are the ones in our current repertoire best suited for grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated performance-driven conditions of late capitalism. (1)
16I think however that it is more correct to link the craving for anti-styles with the notion of deskilling (John Roberts), that is the challenging of the traditional emphasis on craftsmanship in the post-Duchamp age and, at the same time, the growing importance of other dimensions of art—such as conceptualism as social and institutional critique, for instance. One no longer needs to be a technically skilled artist to be an “artist”. The skills one needs/ requires are different: networking, active presence in social media, theoretical knowledge, the capacity to produce a metadiscourse on one’s own work, etc.
17The analysis of deskilling is complex. There is definitely also a technological dimension having to do with the widespread use of reproduction techniques and devices, and the effects of such changes are often difficult to disentangle: personal computers may help us write by simple techniques of copy-paste, as shown in extreme forms by the “uncreative writing” movement (Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing), but even active users of this kind of writing technique are not always aware of the many procedures they perform, or that the machine performs for them, such as selecting layout and style sheet conventions, to give a very basic example. As explained by Franck Leibovici in ground-breaking research on this topic:
L’écriture n’est pas ici envisagée comme la production d’énoncés originaux par un sujet singulier, mais comme un ensemble d’activités incluant la production de documents, leur mise en circulation et leur efficace performative lorsqu’ils agissent en situation. en ce sens, les activités de compilation, d’archivage, d’édition—aussi bien au sens anglais de sélection, correction, montage, qu’au sens français de publication—ou de diffusion relèvent, d’une certaine façon, de l’écriture. (15; the quotation respects the non-use of capital letters by the author)
18Writing is not considered here as the production of original utterances by an individual subject, but as a set of activities that include the production of documents, their circulation as well as their performative efficiency when activated in specific situations. in this sense, the activities of compilation, archiving, editing—both in the English sense of selection, revision, montage and the French sense of publication—or distribution are in a way part of writing (my translation).
19Yet what matters in the larger debate on failure is the collusion of the formal and the semantic refusal of the traditional success values, that is deskilling and anti-heroism, as opposed to technical savoir-faire and the praise of all things heroic. Here are some examples of such a collusion, first in the world of comics: the work of Pierre La Police and his conscious sabotage of everything that is generally accepted or expected (Belloï and Leroy), or Pévé, La plus mauvaise bande dessinée du monde. These authors actively dismantle any concern for “originality,” “well-made” drawings, and even “communication,” adopting a poetics of willful and deliberate failure which aims at “failing better” in a sustained, continuous way: over the years, Pierre La Police and Pévé have produced a body of work that manages to endlessly avoid doing, or refuse to do, “well”.
20Nevertheless, it is possible to infer from this intention a very positive conclusion, namely that the more one wants to fail, the better the work produced might become. After all, Pierre La Police and Pévé are both considered important artists, each in their own way. This is also the twist that is given to “boredom” by Kenneth Goldsmith, the promoter of the already mentioned “uncreative writing”, who claimed in a 2004 lecture that intentionally produced boredom is a stimulus of/for active decoding of what is at stake in writing, while more generally stating that “uncreative” writing is much more inventive and thus aesthetically and ideologically successful than “creative” writing and its hopelessly old-fashioned attempt to eventually find personal expression through the manipulation of worn-out formulas of “good” writing (Goldsmith, “Being Boring”).
21Next to form and content, it is also possible to stress a third aspect of this anti-aesthetics of failure: theory. Deconstruction is an obvious example, which tries to play the text and the author off against one another, disclosing inevitable yet essential contradictions and thus failing to deliver a clear (i.e. non-self-contradictory) message.
22From an institutional perspective, one could add Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise (1938), a text that epitomizes the ambivalent relationships to culture: Connolly’s ambition is to draw a sharp line between the masterpieces and (all) the rest; therefore, he debunks any form of success that might prevent a young writer from exceeding his or her own limitations. Success is dangerous, because it encourages the author to stick to a successful formula instead of producing a real masterpiece, possibly a part of the new canon (Henry James lovers will not need to be reminded of his 1888 story “The Lesson of the Master”, where the old master cynically, at least according to his victim, teaches similar lessons to his young admirer).
23This brings us to the question: what about failure and pop culture, where heroes must be superheroes, where well-made stories remain unchallenged and where the ideology of profit and box office success are the practical and theoretical core of the whole business? Asking such a question, however, is a mistake, for it deceptively involves a gap between elite and popular culture in today’s media culture. And understandably so: distinctions and hierarchies between high and low are still there, perhaps even more powerfully than before, but it is no longer possible to frame them in these outdated dichotomist terms.
24Many observers agree on the fact that in a technology-driven media culture, high and low cultures are merged. The latter has been progressively integrated into the cultural system as a whole. Think for instance of the leap from the American comic-book series Classics Illustrated (published from the 1940s to the 1960s) to the hype around “serious” literary adaptations in the graphic novel, which for many is the lifebuoy to solve the decline of reading and give new prestige to literature. Jim Collins, in his Bring in the Books for Everybody (2010), and others, among them Bertrand Legendre, have studied the fundamental and perhaps irreversible shift from cultural gatekeeping to logarithmically determined forms of reviewing, which has led to popular culture now defining the rules of benchmarking (for the concern of distinction has of course not disappeared with the gradual blurring of boundaries between high and low in certain media, which are all hybrid and networked media today). One can easily go back to the Classics Illustrated versus Graphic Novel dichotomy, whose opposition should not be considered totally fixed: old-fashioned comics adaptations of literary material are open to new readings (Baetens, “Literary adaptations, or something else?”), whereas the rise of this kind of story in the graphic novel can easily be seen as a symptom of the decreasing vitality of this domain, whose novelty was not produced by some high-literary turn but by what Rancière would call another distribution of the sensible: the graphic novel made room for autobiography and documentary nonfiction in comics and the spread of “creative” literary adaptations, interesting as they may be, also hints at the difficulty of renewing the initial élan of the graphic novel, whose creative innovations of the late 1990s and early 2000S have now become rather mainstream and in certain cases even a little bit repetitive.
25A short example will help bring the various elements of this article together (antihero, antistyle, and antitext, to summarize) and point toward some form of conclusion. Linking the two notions of “failure” and “failing better,” I would like to briefly comment on the work of comics artist Daniel Clowes. I will look mainly at three works, exploring failure in three domains: visual arts (the short story “Art School Confidential”, 1991), ordinary life (Ghost World, 1997), and writing, more specifically, poetry writing (Ice Haven, 2005).
26At first sight, failure is the common thread of all these stories (actually, these are more than just three stories, for Ghost World contains many traces of its initial serialization, with relatively independent instalments, while Ice Haven is a choral narrative interweaving some ten different microstories). All the heroes in these stories are indeed antiheroes: the art school student who sees himself reflected in the former student, now an employee behind the counter of a junk food corner shop; the two teenage girls lost in Clowes’s presentation of America as nothing else than a big shopping mall and their miserable life of dreary consumerism; the unsuccessful and desperately isolated poet (actually a portrait à charge or caricature of John Ashbery), deadly jealous of his female neighbor, an old spinster whose bad rhymes are successfully published in the local newspaper. The frustrated high-literary poet kidnaps a child, forces him to listen to his poems and thus manages to have at least a more or less consenting reader.
27From the very start, it is clear that antiheroism is anything but glamorous. It is not the ideal that Clowes is defending against the capitalist myth of success: the representation of the loser is satirical, even sardonic. The former art student is less an antihero than a less than zero character. The girls, or at least one of them, will ultimately prove the same as the strange and empty characters they are judging all the time. The writer, finally, is a sorry misfit, but not one toward whom one can feel sympathy. In all cases, there is no demand for empathy: Clowes is not blaming society for the failure of his unfortunate creatures.
28This lack of empathy is definitely not in line with the modern sympathy for the loser. Moreover, the three works also provide counterexamples of success, which are not debunked as is often the case in contemporary aesthetics, suspicious of any form of triumph or simply happy ending. The satire of the Art School Confidential comic can be read as a praise of Clowes’s personal achievement, for the author has had the courage to continue his work in comics in spite of the negative attitude of his teachers, who unanimously despised this popular medium. In Ghost World, one of the girls, Enid, succeeds in escaping the dead end of small-town America by leaving for the city (after failing to enter college). Although the final panel does not promise a happy ending, there is at least an attempt to break loose from a depressing environment and frustrating social life. In Ice Haven, the pretentious babble of the comics critic, one of the several doubles of the poet’s figure, is opposed by the subtle visual and narrative techniques of Clowes himself, whose book is a brilliant refutation of the pompous jargon of the critic.
29This critical attitude toward the antihero ideology, which does not signify a return to the previously hegemonic world of conventional comics—superheroes are frequently displayed in Clowes’s work, but no less frequently mocked—, is also visible from a stylistic point of view.
30Contrary to most of his fellow comics innovators—including Chris Ware, Seth or Charles Burns, among others—Clowes is not looking for a new or innovative drawing style. Granted, Ware, Seth and Burns also start from a well-established tradition, but unlike Clowes they appropriate, restyle, reshape this tradition in order to displace it and elaborate a very personal style. Instead, Clowes aggressively aims at staying within the conventional comics world, whose forms and stereotypes are not overthrown. Clowes is both faithful to the comics world and highly critical of it. His sticking to the comics tradition signals a refusal of any form of gentrification of the medium and its attempt to distinguish itself as a new medium, in this case the graphic novel, radically different from comics, which are often considered to be for kids. Chris Pizzino cleverly analyzes this anti-graphic novel stance in his Arresting Development (2016), where he argues that some comics authors emphasize the “negative” features of the medium (ugliness and violence, for instance), transforming the refusal to upgrade, to raise the standards of comics storytelling as a way of maintaining the social and political power of comics as an anti-hegemonic and thus countercultural practice—not only in underground comics but in traditional comics in general. Actively pursued aesthetic failure is thus turned into a political weapon (successfully or not, but that is another question).
31This, I argue, is what Clowes is also doing. He exaggerates the typical features of conventional comics. One of his best critics, Ken Parille, insists for instance on the lasting impact of comics culture in Ghost World. This approach relates not only to drawing and storytelling, but also to publication format; it was some time before he considered shifting his Eightball series (1989-2004) from comic serial to book. And he did so to avoid the softening or even annihilation of the critical dimension of his work: Clowes maintains and even exaggerates the references to comics culture in order to stress the critical value of his work, which might go less noticed or be considered less important by the stylistic qualities of his drawings and the prestige of graphic novel book publication. Readers may admire Clowes’s satirical and sociological sharpness, but this sharpness cannot function without the continuing references to the pulp comics background and the creative dialogue with the related notions of heroism and skilled drawing, and this is exactly why the three works under scrutiny remain so disquieting.
32At the same time, commercially speaking, Clowes is also an extremely successful artist, carefully published, widely read and translated, who enjoys great critical acclaim. Does this contradict the sabotage ethics of his work on comics? Not really. On the one hand, it is perfectly compatible with his repudiation of antiheroism. On the other hand, it is a way of further exploring the critical dimension of his work, which is capable of surviving commercial success, therefore showing that it is not necessary to abandon comics in favor of the graphic novel to do what the graphic novel claims traditional comics are incapable of, namely articulating a critical stance towards mass culture.
33One may therefore think that failure in Clowes’s work is not real failure, but only a smokescreen hiding new forms of success. Things are, however, different if one links failure to “failing better,” since this discloses a different and very original form of failure. Unlike Beckett and many modern and postmodern creators, failing better is not seen by Clowes as a type of permanent self-destruction, that is a means of going beyond what is already known and practiced, but as a means of introducing and aggrandizing failure in a form and aesthetics that one always tries to enhance, to augment, in short to improve. Clowes’s work is truly different from that of his contemporaries: his stories are well-constructed, his artwork testifies to genuine skill, he avoids the stillness and lack of action of most of Chris Ware’s comics, he also stays away from Seth’s experiments with slowness and Charles Burns’s play with gruesome shock effects. At the same time, his heroes are antiheroes; his style accepts certain aspects of a kind of infra-stylistic treatment of what graphic novelists dare do today, and his global take on the world of comics and graphic novels is definitely critical (and in that sense slightly antitextual). This exciting mix explains why “failing better” is not a hollow slogan or a fashionable yet easy solution. Failure is not a strawman’s argument to quickly achieve some instant success. It is the index of the creative struggle of an important artist.
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