This post is adapted from [Im]Possible Business, a zine exploring radical business alternatives. Learn more and download the publication here. Read the first post in this series: On the Limits of What a Business Can do.
Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. A market economy must have winners and losers, gamblers and risk takers, con men and dupes;
— Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
We tend to think of businesses as enterprises that need to last, sustain, grow, and grow some more. If you view a business as an asset—an entity that can grow and sustain value, with a primary purpose of building wealth—then it’s impossible to square temporality or failure as positive possibilities. But if the purpose and logic is defiantly not about the creation of a wealth building asset, then can we reorient around a more temporal, experimental, and ultimately failure oriented model of business?
By failure-oriented I mean businesses that are around while they make sense. While they bring joy. While they create community. While they serve their (non-capitalist) purpose. And then, when they no longer serve a joyful purpose, turn into compost to feed something new.
Some readers will recognize the title as a crib on Jack Halberstam’s book The Queer Art of Failure, where he explores ways of being that exist beyond “cynical resignation on the one hand and sunny optimism on the other,” and ultimately show pathways for living life as otherwise.
Halberstam helps us think about businesses that are not legible as “businesses”, or at least as business that work or make sense. In this way, a business that doesn’t work, far from being a loser business, exists by “refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique.”
For those who are sick of Hustle Culture, Halberstam entreats: “If success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards.”
To be clear, I’m not writing of failure in the John C. Maxwell, Lean Startup sense; obviously, the mantra to fail early and often still points towards ultimately winning and succeeding. Fail a little bit, in a not terribly consequential way, that ultimately helps you win might be a better way of putting it.
I mean failure in the sense of businesses that defy logic, that build no long term assets, that subversively refuse to play by the rules of winning.
Fox Market opened in 2021 outside of Montpelier, Vermont. Half market/half gay bar selling all sorts of specialty foods; magnificent cheeses; and one of the best wine selections in 100 miles. And it’s resolutely, visibly, unapologetically queer.
For all the normalcy of the products—like, it’s a nice wine and cheese shop—there’s dick art on the walls. Customers can pick up a gay kink zine alongside their morning scone. The bathroom sign communicates that more than a threesome would be a body too far. My girlfriend and I met some friends there one night for drag karaoke ( Because we live in rural Vermont, we knew half the people. It’s hard to describe the feeling of comfort and home when inhabiting a thoroughly queer space in a rural area, IYKYN.) The karaoke was terrible in the way most karaoke is terrible, there was a strange child dressed as Wednesday Adams who muttered “Monster Mash” alongside an adult dressed as Spider Man. We cheered everyone while ringing up a ridiculous tab on bottle after bottle of under priced natural wine.
The wine might seem too cheep, not that I’m complaining, but of course I can never turn off the consultant part of my brain that is always running a “how does this even work” financial ticker tape in the background of my daily life. Sometimes the glasses, an eclectic mix of jars and thrift store crystal, aren’t quite washed as much as one might wish they were.
It’s not that these quirks spell certain failure in the “this business is doomed sense.” I ascribe the occasionally foggy glasses to two owners that never seem to leave a business that is open from morning till late, and still operating in its first year or so. My more fastidious gf claims a more calculated stance on cleanliness that maps to a particular queer aesthetic. But restaurant alcohol markups are notoriously high, that’s how food businesses usually offset otherwise dodgy margins. And Fox Market is not marking up their bottles the way other wine shops do. They also cultivate a sense of deep care for community and their workers: tips are distributed to local causes, and workers are paid so that they don’t need to rely on tips for income.
So, I mean failure as in defying normative business. Failure in embracing the campy, odd, silly, childlike, and messy rather than acquiescing to the seriousness of business as usual. As in, it might not last forever because some of the choices defy business logic, because these choices are designed to privilege community above asset building.
In the initial months of the pandemic shutdown Tunde Wey, a multi-hyphenate who ” “uses food to talk about important shit”, published an essay via Instagram (and later in his newsletter), the thesis of which was that the restaurant industry was a system so beyond repair that rather than save it, as far more famous public figures were arguing, the best outcome of the pandemic-wrought crisis was in fact to let the entire industry crumble.
In Wey’s essay, he writes of post-Katrina New Orleans, where the storm damage kept many restaurants closed for years, and the bounce back a decade later: a resurgence of tourism, restaurants, and a confirmation that “everything equilibrates back to inequality in the United States” as Black workers in the restaurant industry largely remain in low wage jobs. Wey writes that the federal aid to restaurants only serves to reinforce the existing system:
An industry where labor is segregated by race and gender, underpaid and uninsured. An industry fed largely by an industrial agricultural system that either extracts profits from the environment with little consequences, or offers ethically sourced produce to just a few for a lot. Let it die. An industry where on the higher end is great food at fat prices in spaces that drive up real estate values, pushing property prices higher and poorer people further. And on the lower scale, working poor people, making barely enough to keep them going, serve low nutrition meals to other working poor people, who can’t afford quality housing because of predatory development. Let it die.
If what makes the restaurant industry “work” is something inherently toxic and exploitative, then inviting failure and uncertainty might be exactly what we need to weave something different. Fox Market could hike up their wine margins and in the process alienate and exclude the very community they opened to serve and be a part of; to celebrate and even expand.
If we only ever choose failure in the Maxwell sense, in an effort to ultimately win…then what game are we really playing? Can we be more interested in the “other rewards” that failure at business as usual might offer?
Success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation.
— Jack Halberstam
I was speaking with my friend Jeff about the art of queer failure over dinner recently, and he reminded me about the Minneapolis queer art space Madame, run by a collective for a brief couple of years as a community art space/club/den of frequent drag performances, and experiment in collective governance. I only went once or twice, as it opened after I moved away.
In remembering Madame, and other queer havens we’ve frequented over the years, we started talking about the importance of myth making to these spaces. There are always stories: that time so-and-so’s boyfriend made out with someone in the bathroom. The time that one queen stole the door cash from the drag show. The legendary pizza wrestling party*. Jeff and I spoke about “myth making, not minutes,” and the idea that for Madame to adopt more organizationally legible and professional norms (symbolized by Jeff and me as meeting minutes), it would risk losing something of its messy queer spirit, as well as the purpose of the space. Formalization might have invited hierarchy, or made the space legible to more normative culture, and ultimately to commodification.
I can’t write of temporary queer spaces, without weaving in the anarchist concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone: “a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.”
A TAZ is a small pocket of revolution and change, designed to melt away before being noticed or subsumed by the powers that be. In a similar way, failure as a business practice opens space for rebellion, possibility, and experimentation while ensuring interventions are not commodified as Capitalist success.
**Because the grody carpets needed to be ripped up anyway, one of the first events in the new space was a night of pizza wrestling. Unfortunately it then took many weeks to actually rip up the even more grody, now pizza soaked, carpets. This is heresay, I wasn’t there.