Learning to Fail: Mad Men and Failure as a Mode of Curriculum Thought

• In Event: Maddening Lessons: Critical Engagements With Mad Men and Curriculum Thought

Abstract

Failure is a powerful critical idiom demanding attention from scholars and educators across fields and disciplines, ranging from queer theory to literary theory, performance studies to educational studies (Halberstam, 2011; Le Feuvre, 2010; Ngai, 2005; Probyn, 2005; Sedgwick, 2003). Failure has also appeared as a productive concept within educational studies over the past few years (Carr, 2013; Fouché, 2013; Saltman, 2014; Stoller, 2013). This scholarship suggests, in differing ways, that a cultural dominance of hope and success in our neoliberal age has given way to a fetishization of excellence and outcomes, a prevailing instrumentalism and vocationalism that institutionalizes, codifies and restigmatizes failure (Berlant, 2011). In these contexts, accidental failure is perilous, and the strategic, emancipatory or experimental use of failure (however much it is still necessary) can be loaded with risk, danger and difficulty. The right to fail (with all its promise of inclusiveness, generosity, freedom) appears to us in schools and other contexts as a condition only be claimed at an ever-mounting cost, from the assault on academic freedom in universities to the fate of the advertising representatives in the fictional companies of Mad Men.

This paper queries the curricular force of “failure” and considers how failure works in Mad Men to teach viewers not tragic lessons of missed opportunities, but instead on failure’s intimate pedagogical relationship with creativity. Curriculum studies can utilize contemporary scholarship on failure and the way in which failure works in Mad Men to unravel hardened truisms in curriculum thought about knowledge, competence, and normativity in education. While the lessons of the show include issues of precarity, temptation, difference, and bigotry, the theme of failure repeats and reverberates from season to season, episode to episode, perhaps most present in the show’s opening title sequence with the animated display of a man falling out of his office and tumbling down a city skyscraper.

I assemble key moments from the Mad Men series to demonstrate how the characters of Don Draper, Betty Draper, Lane Pryce, and Freddy Rumsen use failure to teach viewers salient lessons on the empty promises of progress and betterment that dominate educational discourses today. Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to assert that curriculum scholars must claim an urgency to theorize and own failure in ways not dissimilar to recent work in curriculum thought that has theorized ignorance (Garrett & Segall, 2013; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012; Malewski & Jaramillo, 2011) and trauma (Simon, 2014; Spear, 2013; Zembylas, 2008, 2009). My objective, then, is to examine how Mad Men pedagogically positions object lessons on how failure saturates our lives, shapes our experience and delineates the contours of our institutions. Mad Men appeared to educate an audience to engage in self-education and self-reflection, indeed up through the closing scene in the final episode. Mad Men’s use of characters’ storylines tap the analytic power of failure to chart a cultural terrain in which failure is taught as neither a dead end nor a pit stop on the path to success but as a generative, unsettling and revelatory force.

Author

• Mark Helmsing, University of Wyoming