Doubt

Richard Shiff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415973083
• eBook ISBN: 9781135872212
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

In an age where art history's questions are now expected to receive answers, Richard Shiff presents a challenging alternative. In this essential new addition to James Elkins's series Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts, Richard Shiff embraces doubt as a critical tool and asks how particular histories of art have come to be.

Shiff's turn to doubt is not a retreat to relativism, but rather an insistence on clear thinking about art. In particular, Shiff takes issue with the style of self-referential art writing seemingly 'licensed' by Roland Barthes. With an introduction by Rosie Bennett, Doubt is a study of the tension between practicing art and practicing criticism.

DOUBT

I. PRAGMATIC DOUBT

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have … Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

—Charles Sanders Peirce, 1868¹

Charles Sanders Peirce was an artist-philosopher. A doubter, he was also a believer. He trusted the analytical procedures he devised and his skill at deploying them. Even more, he trusted his intuition, a skill at guessing, whether evaluating an incomplete set of data or judging the significance of the slightest sensory discrimination. To guess and then commit to the hypothesis was for Peirce as basic to human patterns of reasoning as more formal, seemingly more conclusive, methods of proof. At times, proof would come to pass as mere feeling, “ a single feeling of greater intensity … belonging to the act of thinking the hypothetic conclusion … Hypothesis produces the sensuous element of thought.”²

However much Peirce believed in his ability to prove or, if need be, to guess, he reserved a degree of doubt for his conclusions. Doubt is not distrust. He knew that his judgments, whether rational or emotional, could be no more than relatively reliable—no more certain than the degree of certainty that he, in his fallibility, could achieve. A degree of certainty is the reciprocal of a degree of doubt: “I used for myself to collect my ideas under the designation fallibilism; and indeed the first step toward finding out is to acknowledge [that] you do not satisfactorily know already.” What remains obscure in the physical sciences as well as in the abstract disciplines of mathematics and logic seems minor by comparison with the darkness that descends on speculative work in the human sciences: “In those sciences of measurement [such as geology or meteorology] which are the least subject to error … no man of self-respect ever now states his result, without affixing to it its probable error; and if this practice is not followed in other sciences it is because in those the probable errors are too vast to be estimated.” Having made his statement without identifying those “other sciences”—was he thinking of economics? psychology?—Peirce confided wryly that he was “a man of whom critics have never found anything good to say.”³

By “critics” Peirce meant his academic peers: those of comparable authority who differed in being less willing to assign the doubt factor and to admit that it bore on their professional judgment. Peirce was an academic whistle-blower. He could have referred to professional critics of every type. Although their work is by nature speculative, critical thinkers often claim for it an authority beyond the arbitrary and fallible, believing that—or perhaps merely acting as if—they were able to distinguish the determinate from the indeterminate, the certain from the uncertain. We value critics for the reliability of their judgment in fitting an object or situation to an appropriate category, announcing its proper identity. Challenging the categories themselves is far less common than arguing over their fit or inventing additional ones to contain an experiential overflow. There are nevertheless times to doubt what the categories and the procedures designed to serve them indicate we should believe, and there are times to believe—to trust to intuition and feeling—what the same patterns of rationality may indicate we should doubt. To believe and to doubt with neither more nor less than a beneficial quotient of self-doubt becomes a useful psychological skill, an intuitive self-discipline.

Effects become causes; it happens

In 1965, the American pavilion at the São Paulo Bienal featured the work of senior artist Barnett Newman. Six younger painters and sculptors accompanied him, among them Robert Irwin. When Artforum published a preview of the group enterprise, only Irwin’s page appeared without illustration. He explained the situation as if to say that any object of his creation was … what it was:

I am concerned with specifics and reject the generalities of photographs. Every element in painting has had both an identity and a physical existence – identity has always lent itself to being transferred in both photographic and literary terms. The physical existence never has.⁴

Identity “always” lends itself to transference; the physical existence “never” does. Rhetorically, Irwin allows no exception, no doubt. His statement of faith amounts to a general definition, even a theory. Yet he constituted this generalized identity for the sake of specificity—the definition of a class by the name of physical existence, a class that whenever invoked would have but one member: This object happens to have this physical existence. A person senses its specific quality, this appearance. It comes to pass—no explanation, no theory needed. Such a class is either a very weak category or no category at all. Categories are classes preestablished by an order of identities. The reproductive practice of photography is such an order, Irwin argued, “a whole system of logic which allows [only] certain kinds of information to come in … and our essential state of consciousness is formed by that logic. … And what we’re saying about photographs is absolutely true for words.”⁵ In his understanding, the representational orders of photography and language accommodate the data of new experience by determining meaningful qualities in advance, including like with like by whatever means of resemblance and excluding whatever remains.⁶

Irwin set representational “duality” against the type of art he sought, experiential classes of one member. Duality as he conceived it had little to do with ambivalence or doubt. It was instead a matter of reference—a relation between two entities that would channel the experience of both into the form established through their relation. “Duality in art,” he claimed, “is a language of romantic sentimentality using the art forms to recall past experiences and feeling … Duality works as a language of expediency with the ability to facilitate mass communication and education … Its accuracy is limited to the concept of ideas as absolutes.” An identity that can be photographed or illustrated is an expedient, communicative duality, explaining one thing in terms of another, ultimately working toward an encompassing concept (like modernism and other art-historical categories). Identity, in this sense, is inherently self-differing; it signifies one thing but also some other thing, and then still another. Yet, because an identity offers ready answers to all questions about itself and its class, it coalesces into a teaching, a common doxa. It develops an order ever less open to adjustment. Any material object, but especially an Irwinian object of art, has the potential to resist the importation of identity and so resist doxa and ideology as well. Irwin argued furthermore that people themselves form a resistant barrier: “The duality’s truth is very questionable when confronted by the constant state of change (and therefore lack of absolutes)—the inconsistencies, irrationalities and emotions of the human equation.”⁷ Judgments of identity—dualistic sameness and difference—fail to respond to the changing human spectrum of doubt and belief.

By opposing the human experience of physical existence to the abstract dualities of identity, Irwin implied that every identity becomes a commodious category with which any number of disparate events, phenomena, and bits of data have the potential to be associated. The interpretive, representational linkages would appear to enrich the cultural significance of an object, duality after duality; yet, from another perspective, they reduce and impoverish the object. Whereas things that exist are singular, each identity becomes multiple, acquiring ever more members of its class, sacrificing the unlike for the like. Statements of identity are subject to perpetual transfer in spatial relay and temporal delay, with identity itself functioning like a proper noun or even a pronoun. (A personal identity, a person’s name, however unique, fits innumerable configurations of personality and emotion.) As a linguistic place-filler—a concept, not a physical condition—identity becomes ever more self-differing. With one statement of identity leading to another, each is equivalent in some emerging sense, yet also a variant that requires as its glossing validation the next in a temporal sequence or enumerative series.

We have become so familiar with modernist—yes, modernist—notions of self-difference that some critics—Rosalind Krauss is a case in point—regard self-differing as if it were an absolute, a condition (the term to which Krauss often resorts).⁸ Self-differing appears as a condition of all human experience, if only because experience is necessarily temporalized: It moves. Experience changes, so the self differs from itself (as Irwin suggested). Yet notions of self-differing feed on a corresponding desire, also modernist, for selfless immediacy. As much as the latter, the former is our nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century doxa—the not-so-hidden flip side of Romanticism, notably explored in the writings of Paul de Man.⁹ Krauss insists that “the [immediate] subject can never become identical with himself,” that is, with the temporalized self. She opposes the experience of the temporalized self to a phantasmatic “all-at-onceness [that] suspends the temporal dimension.”¹⁰ But neither version of the self, immediate or temporalized, can be regarded as absolute if both are to be addressed as “conditions.” Conditions of what? There is nothing conditional about self-difference if it is a defining quality—nothing that you can feel: A fish, whose condition is to exist in water, would not feel wet.¹¹ If the self always self-differs (never integrates), then self-difference becomes its identity, not its differential condition, and to differentiate the immediate from the temporalized as viable descriptions of conscious experience becomes pointless. All is belief; nothing is left to doubt: no self-difference within this critical consciousness who writes of self-difference.

In general—though generalization rubs this argument the wrong way—a differential or “critical” term loses its efficacy when regarded as an absolute that “always” applies, that is, when we designate it as the correct term under all conditions, rather than as the more beneficial term under specified conditions. With absolute identity, ideological assertion substitutes for critical analysis and hypothesis. Difference is as ideological a notion as sameness. Krauss has used the art of Marcel Broodthaers to develop the thematic of temporalized self-differing. To the same purpose, another critic might have chosen the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the self-portraiture of Andy Warhol, the Woman series of Willem de Kooning, or even the landscapes of Paul Cézanne, as well as any number of other examples of work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that, by the nature of its process, format, or installation, induces a viewer to become conscious of orders of difference and temporalized plays of memory. A viewer today, perhaps primed with or conditioned by this orientation, is likely to ignore specifics to focus on generalities that integrate each perceptual unit of information and establish links between them. Self-difference is itself identifiable as a thematic shared by modernist and postmodernist art; in this respect, there is hardly a difference (more on this to follow). Were we to seek all indicators of self-difference throughout the art production of the modern centuries, we would severely reduce the differential, and therefore critical, potential of the phenomenon. So perhaps critics should let the various manifestations of self-difference lie—except in cases where it seems most pointed, there on the surface, begging to be noticed for what it is (as in Broodthaers, but also the Bechers, but also Warhol, but also de Kooning, but also Cézanne …).

By identifying a work, a supplemental photographic illustration or verbal description would reestablish or merely affirm the very ordinary split in experience that artists of Irwin’s generation were combating. They sought to mark out a physical realm of experience that would resist mundane self-differing: the gap we perceive between reason and emotion, mind and body, identity-by-name and identity-by-feeling. Illustration and description become codified, semiotic memories of this experience, distinct from “physical existence” (as Irwin referred to it). Memory is a form of identity-by-name. In memory, we reason out the circumstances of life by exemplification, taking an instance or a fragment as tantamount to the totality of a situation, so that manageable generality effaces unwieldy specificity. Imagine that, because of amnesia, you have no sense of identity and would not know how to recognize your own established character. You would no longer be in a position to evaluate any particular act you performed by knowing your own category, by having the capacity to declare, “How like me to do that,” or “I wouldn’t have done something like that.” Instead, you would be reduced to relying on how it felt to do what you did, how the act happened to happen in its “physical existence,” as if no memory at all were involved. Every judgment would be specific to the singular, undifferentiated constellation of qualities at hand—a challenging and discomforting prospect.

A photographic illustration or verbal description is less of a fact, more of a theory; like a memory, it “abstracts from experience” in order to relate to an existing system of representation.¹² Irwin and a number of his contemporaries were striving for an absolute of physical presence with the potential to occupy all channels of human attention at once, rendering memory and representational associations nugatory; in colloquial terms, his work would call for the response, “You’ll have to see for yourself; description would be useless.” Whether or not an artist succeeds in reaching such a physical and perceptual absolute—theory says no, this is impossible—what mattered to Irwin and others was their faith in the value of the attempt. The cultural significance of their art would be found in the nature of their activity and in the viewer’s experience of the result, rather than in the interpreted reference of the work as a sign. The physical existence, the material condition that an artist produces, has its “effect,” its sensory appearance. A viewer infers a motivational cause from this effect, a correspondence between the perceived form and a plausible reason for an artist’s having configured it. A form that seems to have little potential as a sign can, of course, be perceived as intended to have little meaning. Such a dynamic of cause and effect is a hypothetical guess open to doubt.

A statement from Peirce is relevant: “Belief and doubt may be conceived to be distinguished only in degree.”¹³ If belief and doubt belong to the same experiential category, then a doubt is a weak belief; we feel doubt when belief is weak. Reciprocally—but oddly—a belief is a strong doubt: When the doubted fact gains degrees of acknowledgment, it becomes a belief. The saying, “He protests too much,” which turns a negative into a positive, alludes to a sim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Doubt
• Seminar
• Endnotes
• Publications by Richard Shiff
• Index