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Failure has been an implicit theme in the arts since at least the beginnings of the modernist era. More recently, cultural practices have made failure an explicit and positive theme whose expressions pivot on the contestation of both modernism's Utopian bid for a master aesthetics and post-modernism's optimistic investment in difference. Yet failure, like so many avant-garde artistic strategies of the twentieth century, has become blunted by its own satisfaction, its critical edge dulled by a belief that the transgression of expectations is sufficiently productive. In a sense, failure has failed. Failure in art is expected and so short-circuits its ways to success, leaving the irregular elements of experience that it stands for to go to weed. What then can be made of this "weed garden" that failure remainders? Or, how might one imagine an aesthetics of failure wherein hesitation, lack of concentration, duplicity and other markers of insufficiency are not simply recuperated as a kind of inverted success but are permitted to breed and proliferate in the slow creep of their own boring formless nonsense? In this dissertation I try to answer that question by looking at failure through contemporary experimental composition that takes its cues from preoccupations other than those characterized by the normative avant-garde gesture of (selfjreproach. Drawing on theoretical approaches to contemporary culture including Sianne Ngai's concept of the aesthetic "stuplime," Rei Terada's theory of "phenomenophilia," and Gilles Deleuze's theory of sense, I suggest that an aesthetics of failure resonates with a broader set of cultural logics that revolve around the mechanics of depression, distraction, and prevarication. I conclude that recent experimental compositions engage with failure not as a celebratory phenomenon but as a strategy for coping with the apparent horizonless vista of contemporary culture.

Boring formless nonsense : or on the aesthetics of failure in recent experimental composition