Lecture by Sven Dupré on ‘The Poetics of Failure and the Imperfections of Knowledge’, Université Laval, Québec, 16 October

Artisanal textual practices are strategies to deal with the uncertainty of artisanal processes and the whims of materials. Confronted with the precarious nature of artisanal knowledge, variation had always been the most important strategy of error management. Following the dissatisfaction with ways of writing down knowledge hiding the imperfection of the process of knowledge production and in response to the limits of language in articulating skills, the codification of error emerged as a new strategy in the seventeenth century, pointing to a new conception of the epistemic value of failure and error in the early modern arts and sciences.