doubting the system
it is not that i have not had encounters with doubt lately, perhaps it is just that i am spread a little too thinly across a number of online (and off) writing spaces. too many projects, the procrastinator’s dream.
and so i throw this little pebble into the doubt pool, because (typos aside, and i am all for typos) i like that it demonstrates - quite clearly - how doubt is useful in the context of programming. i also like their mantra: we want to trust the system. we do not want to believe in the system.
amen!
richard shriff : doubt (routledge 2007)
i stole this link from an email i shouldn’t have received.
thanks simpat!
the editors of doubt2.org are hoping to get a review lined up soon.
one minute of doubt: carsten holler
is on tank.tv at the moment: click on carsten holler and enjoy!
your responses in comments on this post please?
doubt zine
one of my projects at the moment is to write a zine about two people i know who were/are artists who stopped making work for a period of time. this project has a distinct relationship to the doubt project, because the power of doubt (both positive and negative) seems to have had a role to play in these decisions, and more importantly, knowing these two people has greatly influneced my thinking about doubt.
last night i think i found the epigraph for the zine: my bedtime reading at the moment is gertrude stein’s ‘everybody’s autobiography’, and in it she says of a period after the publiction of ‘the autobiography of alice b toklas’ and its success:
“all this time i did no writing. i had written and was writing nothing. nothing inside me needed to be written. nothing needed any word and there was no word inside me that could not be spoken and so there was no word inside me. and i was not writing. i began to worry about identity. i had always been i because i had words that had to be written inside me and now any word i had inside me could be spoken it did not need to be written. i am i because my little dog knows me. but was i i when i had no written word inside me. it was very bothersome. i sometimes thought i would try but to try is to die and so i did not really try. i was not doing any writing” (49-50).
a million penguins
penguin publishing has launched a wiki in which anyone can contribute to the composition of the novel. the methodological underpinnings sound interesting - wondering whether the ideas of ‘networking’ can be applied to artistic creation - but the doubting literary critic in me takes a deep breath.
thanks to typing with bandaids for the tip off
from a press release for ‘i am future meloncholic’
Challenging, doubt-inducing and transformative aspects of ‘the future’ can
be perceived in Vito Acconci’s repetitive acts, recorded in a super8 film
‘Break-Through’ or in Philippe Meste’s detonative video ‘LHRB’. Rachel
Reupke’s ‘Infrastructure’ is born of a fascination with movie special
effects and narrative devices. And Carsten Höller’s ‘One minute of doubt’
and ‘Punktefilm’ induct a representation of our ‘timeless everyday’, and
magically echo the playful nature of his present turbine hall insta llation.
Laurent Montaron shows us a fictive exploration of time and travel through
his `Readings’, while Matthieu Laurette’s impressive cocktail of celebrity
lookalikes brings us into confusion at a blured vision of the limits between
performance and observation. Mai Yamashita and Naoto Kobayashi’s star, in
‘When I wish Upon a Star’ gives us time we need to wish upon.
website here.
When one sees a car spasmodically breaking during the rush hours on the streets of Antwerp while spreading a message of doubt (Carsten Höller’s “One Minute of Doubt”) one gets perplexed because what one sees is really strange and not what one expects. But after a few days, or even hours or minutes, the reality experience changes into an art experience. The gap between art and life is in these examples both open and closed, although not for the same person, just for different persons at the same time.
thoughts / description from 16beaver.
doubt-inducing? spreading the message of doubt? sounds like a film worth seeing.
doubtful bloggers and the authority of experience
it has been some time between posts here. but there is something happening on unworking which relates to the doubt project: unworking is a project that seems to have been (marginally) resuscitated by the confession of doubt.
talking the other day, ephemera and i wondered whether doubt blogs needed to be password protected, to allow the exploration of doubt to occur in a ’secure’ space. this seems unnecessary as i would argue that we have our methodology to back us up. this discussion regarding exposure and anonymity seem to suggest indicate the presence of the risk associated with admitting to doubt. to openly share our doubt is to risk a great deal, especially in an environment as unstable as the internets, where identities are shielded and coded yet truth claims abound. these truth claims often rest on an assumption of the authority of experience which, like all authority, can become mighty slippery when we subject it to analysis.
“it is important to theorise what we call experience because the narrator’s experience is the primary kind of evidence asserted in autobiographical acts, the basis on which readers are invited to consider the narrator a uniquely qualified authority. thus, a narrator’s investment in the “authority” of experience serves a variety of rhetorical purposes. it invites or compels the reader’s belief in the story and the veracity of the narrator; it presuades the reader of the narrative’s authenticity; it validates certain claims as truthful; and it justifies writing and publicising the life story” (smith & watson 27).
in the context of doubt blogs, this concept of authority resting on experience is particularly complex: we seek to claim a kind of theoretical insight by narrating, reflecting upon and deploying our experiences of doubt. that experience of doubt is the primary truth claim of our texts, and that which authorises our text. yet to claim authority / authorhip by owning up to an experience of doubt is also to allow for the possibility that that authority is ill-founded, unwarranted or impermanent. to ask the reader to listen precisely because we are unsure makes me wonder whether we are seeking to perform a kind of authorship without authority.
the poststructuralists do a little dance. the deconstructionists rub their hands together.
but what do we imagine compels our readers? or are we labouring under the presupposition that no one is reading? (a mistake made on unworking)
smith, sidonie & julia watson. reading autobiography: a guide for interpreting life narratives. minneapolis, london: university of minnesota press, 2001.
on reading ‘i love dick’
chris kraus should most certainly be invited to participate in the doubt2.org project. i would love to see her write a doubt manifesto. although to be honest, reading ‘i love dick’ is turning out to be far more unsettling than i expected. and it’s entirely possible that something as humble, and misguided, as our little investigation would not be interesting to her at all.
‘i love dick’ is certainly a brave work, but terribly claustrophobic. it is a text that is dripping with doubt - both the good kind, and the stultifying kind. kraus laments the failure of a film project with a stinging, begrudging acceptance. this gets me thinking about the relationship between doubt and failure - there’s a big one for the doubters on doubt2 to chew on — any thoughts dear reader? use of the comments box is mandatory upon reading this post.
perhaps its a chicken and egg situation? which comes first, the doubt or the failure?
i need a reading group. can we please form a doubt reading group in 2007?
“Who’s Chirs Kraus?” she screamed. “She’s no one! She’s Sylvere Lotringer’s wife! She’s his ‘Plus-One’!” No matter how many films she made or books she edited, she’d always keep being seen as no one by anyone who mattered so long as she was living with Sylvere.
“It’s not my fault!” Sylvere yelled back.
But she remembered all the times they’d worked together when her name had been omitted, how equivocal Sylvere’d been, how reluctant to offend anyone who paid them. She remembered the abortions, all the holidays she’d been told to leave the house so Sylvere could be alone with his daughter. In ten years, she’d erased herself (116-117).
notes on visiting the united states holocaust memorial museum
it is crowded. people are walking around, stunned, silent. the exhibit feeds the crowds through three floors - one way traffic. we are herded, we herd ourselves. is this intentional?
bus loads of teenagers on school excursions, two boys join me in looking at a pile of rusted scissors, taken from the prisoners of auschwitz-birkenau. “skissors” one says, and they move on. i stare at the tea strainers in the pile of ‘kitchen utensils’ the jews brought with them to the camps, told to prepare for a three or four day journey.
i feel
the presence of large numbers of american teenagers creates a radical disjuncture. american teenagers have faces like babies. plump, blank, innocent faces. they chew gum. their eyes are empty. they can’t see anything, there is a film over their pupils. they are forced to be here. they are bussed in. the irony of this is excrutiating.
on a wall covered by photographs of prisoners interned at auschwitz, a black and white photograph of a nameless teenager catches my eye. the photograph is taken in profile, and face to camera, a standard prisoner mug shot. she has the face of a baby too, but her eyes are not empty. she looks into the camera, and despite her roughly shaven head, she looks … ready. open.
the american teenagers herd past me. they are trying to be quiet. everyone else is quiet, and they try to respect that.
somewhere in the one-way walk, i turn a corner and there is a large collection of shoes of the victims of an extermination camp. the shoes are all grey, although some colour is still in the leather. the shoes are in a big mess, a pile, they are strewn over several meters, on top of each other, and the path i am on cleaves the shoe pile in two.
i cry
the teenagers walk past me. i take refuge in an out of the way part of the exhibition and cry. as i sit in a small concrete room - which seems to have no purpose but to give you a place to cry - american teenagers periodically peek through the doorway. the see me - do they see me? - they keep moving.
something about the shoes and american teenagers allows the genocide to momentarily reach in and … touch me. i cry in the small concrete room, half crying for the shoes which have been taken so far from their context, half crying for the baby faced teenagers who remain safe in their gum chewing cocoons.
(it is the first time in my life that i have felt old. that i have looked at the generation below me, and thought they possessed an innocence - an ignorance? - which i had no access to.)
i pull myself together and keep walking. some of the teenagers look at me, and give me a strange look. i find a toilet, and discover my mascara has run. the problem with my make-up seemed to be something that they could register.