The modern use of the English verb ‘to err’ seems to have lost all positive connotations. It no longer invokes wandering, rambling, or roaming, and is now mainly understood negatively in relation to a prescribed path or goal. To be sure, errors play an important role in the pursuit of knowledge and happiness, but usually only to the extent that their recognition allows for their elimination, correction, and avoidance. Deviations and failures thus confirm the norm and the proverb ‘errare humanum est’ does not imply a valourization of erring, but rather a humbling of humanity joined with the warning – which no longer needs to be stated explicitly – that to persevere in erring is a mark of stupidity, insanity, or evil.

And yet, the case can and has been made for a radical affirmation of erring as the necessary condition not only for humanity but for life and history. Michel Foucault, for instance, notes in reference to the epistemologist Georges Canguilhem, whom he calls a ‘philosopher of error’, that ‘life is what is capable of error’ and that ‘error is at the root of what makes human thought and its history’. An infallible adherence to norms and laws can indeed appear inhuman, like a lifeless mechanism incapable of any novelty. However, embracing error remains a challenging and paradoxical thought, unless one keeps the meaning of ‘erring’ as a directionless wandering governed by chance rather than efficient or final causes. This older meaning is still present in the notions of ‘errantry’ or ‘errance’ that Canguilhem in fact conjectures to be one with human error.

The notion of errantry relates to the kind of radical questioning, deconstruction, and making fluid of fixed norms, identities, and goals that – since the last third of the 20th century at least – has affirmed mobility, process, and becoming without aim or substance. It resonates, for instance,  with strategies of queering and with feminist figurations of nomadic subjects (Rosi Braidotti), and the term explicitly enters Édouard Glissant’s postcolonial interpretation of rhyzomatic thought for a philosophy and poetics of relations.

At the same time, affirming mere movement remains perhaps necessarily ambiguous when one asks about its causes and effects. How can one ascertain that erring does not remain tied to a preoccupation with lack, existential rootlessness, truth, or authentic being? To what extent does the possibility of utility or productivity by serendipity re-inscribe a normative teleology? While erring may have no goal, it may still find its end, which – rather than offering a viable incommensurable alternative – may get integrated in a history of progress or relegated to insignificance if not extinction. With hindsight, erring indeed seems all-too suited for the new norms of flexibility in post-Fordist neo-liberalism: it is consistent with a logic of trial and error, which promotes precarious errantry with the expectation that some will succeed and energize the economy, while the necessary failure of the many is absorbed through an ideology of hope and deferral or through (inner) emigration. Moreover, it is uncertain how well errantry can succeed in fully extricating itself from the logic not only of expansive exploration but also of colonization and its consequences of forced displacement and hybridization.

The recent interest in affirming failure and negating the future can be understood as a response to these concerns: it points towards a more radical affirmation of error than via errantry. Keeping teleological norms in plain view and confronting them head-on safeguards against co-optation and feeding into cruel optimism (Lauren Berlant). However, to what extent does this produce a dead end without escape, foreclosing possibilities of chancing upon the unexpected or of valuing the very movement of erring?

Recognizing that a critique of ideals of productivity, success, goal-orientation, and determination is necessarily paradoxical, the first two years of the core project ERRANS has taken the shifting meanings of ‘erring’ – connoting the violation of norms as well as the activity of wandering – as a starting point to explore the critical potentials and risks of embracing error, randomness, failure, and non-teleological temporalities across different disciplines and discourses.

Related People


Rosa Barotsi
Errant Visions:
Slow Cinema and the Failures of Efficiency

S. Pearl Brilmyer
The Intimate Pulse of Reality:
Sciences of Character in Fiction and Philosophy, 1870-1920

James Burton
The Animation
of Error

Antonio Castore
Impossible Structure(s).
Incompleteness, Failure and Error in The Construction of The Work

Federico Dal Bo
The Sacrifice of Isaac
as Exodus from Law

Maria José De Abreu
Horizonless:
Ethnographies of Lived Impasse Among Portuguese Youth

Preciosa Regina de Joya
The Other Senses
of Philosophy

Walid El-Houri
The Meaning of Protest:
Spatial Practices and Tactics of Erring in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria

Ewa Majewska
Chasing Europe,
or on the Semi-Peripheral Publics

Clara Masnatta
Chromatic Canon:
The Erring Colors of Photography

Claire Nioche-Sibony
Wandering: An Ambiguous Lifeline.
Between Inventiveness and Destructivity

Zairong Xiang
The Ecological/Queer Penis:
A Decolonial Reading of I-Ching’s Body-of-Orifices



Related Events


Reconfiguring
Cultural Inquiry

29 Jun 1 Jul 2017

Middle of Where,
East of What?

14 Jul 2016

Weak
Resistance 2

8 Jul 2016

Harun Farocki and the
Notion of ‘Einfühlung’

4 Jul 2016

Psychoanalysis
and Science

1 Jul 2016

Aliyyah I.
Abdur-Rahman

20 Jun 2016

Visual
Noise

17 Jun 2016

The Ontology of
the Couple

9 10 Jun 2016

In Front of
the Factory

26 27 May 2016

Daisy
Tam

19 May 2016

Theft Economies and
Subtractive Ecologies

19 May 2016

Untying the
Mother Tongue

11 12 May 2016

Hélène
Cixous

12 May 2016

Daniel
Boyarin

11 May 2016

Filipa
César

29 Apr 2016

Recurrences
28 29 Apr 2016

James T.
Siegel

28 Apr 2016

The Literary
Absolute

1 Feb 2016

Confronting Gender
and Faith

10 11 Dec 2015

Catherine
Keller

10 Dec 2015

But I
Digress

8 Dec 2015

Along the
Lines

8 Dec 2015

Possibility
Matters

4 5 Dec 2015

Mary
Cappello

30 Nov 2015

Trickster Art: Celebrating Chaos, Challenging Misrule II
26 Nov 2015

Trickster Art: Celebrating Chaos, Challenging Misrule I
19 Nov 2015

Ming
Tiampo

9 Nov 2015

A Political
Life

29 Oct 2015

Annamarie
Jagose

26 Oct 2015

Errancy,
Contingency, Immanence

5 Oct 2015

Becoming
Post-Android

24 Sep 2015

Teresa
de Lauretis

2 Jul 2015

Margins
of Error

30 June 29 Jun 2015

Leo
Bersani

18 Jun 2015

The Invention
of Defect

11 12 Jun 2015

Peter
Hitchcock

8 Jun 2015

Weak
Resistance

27 May 2015

Jack
Halberstam

27 May 2015

Ilit
Ferber

11 May 2015

Donne in
dialogo

18 Mar 2015

Nikita
Dhawan

9 Feb 2015

Conatus und
Lebensnot

15 17 Jan 2015

Errant
Lines

10 Dec 2014

Burkhardt
Wolf

8 Dec 2014

Hillel
Schwartz

17 Nov 2014

Abandon
7 8 Nov 2014

Laurence
Rickels

7 Nov 2014

Rosi
Braidotti

7 Oct 2014

Adrift in
Pasolini’s Rome

25 Sep 2014