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Doubt
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.
214 pages, Paperback
First published November 26, 2005
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February 14, 2020
Here are some of my favorite quotes and conceptual considerations:
"There are nevertheless times to doubt what the categories and the procedures designed to serve the indicate we should believe, and there are times to believe-- to trust 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." (p18-19)
"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." (p20)
"Whereas things that exist are singular, each identity becomes multiple, acquiring ever more members of its class, sacrificing the unlike for the like." (p21)
"Self-differing appears as a condition of all human experience, if only because experience is necessarily temporalized: It moves. ... 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-- ... 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..." (p21-22)
"If belief and doubt belong to the same experiential category, then a doubt is a weak belief; we feel doubt when a belief is weak. Reciprocally-- but oddly-- a belief is a strong doubt: When the doubted fact gains degrees of acknowledgement, it becomes a belief. ... The potential for confusion here is not due to paradox but results from our having two identifying terms for a single continuum of feeling-- a common situation, a variant of self-differing. When we concentrate on the extremes of binary opposition, we fail to see that the middle is also an extreme. ... You can be as certain (an extreme of conviction) of a doubt as you are of a belief: ... Believing in your doubt, you can act on it, use it as a corrective." (p24)
"Emotion is a cause as well as an effect." (p25)
"There are nevertheless times to doubt what the categories and the procedures designed to serve the indicate we should believe, and there are times to believe-- to trust 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." (p18-19)
"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." (p20)
"Whereas things that exist are singular, each identity becomes multiple, acquiring ever more members of its class, sacrificing the unlike for the like." (p21)
"Self-differing appears as a condition of all human experience, if only because experience is necessarily temporalized: It moves. ... 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-- ... 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..." (p21-22)
"If belief and doubt belong to the same experiential category, then a doubt is a weak belief; we feel doubt when a belief is weak. Reciprocally-- but oddly-- a belief is a strong doubt: When the doubted fact gains degrees of acknowledgement, it becomes a belief. ... The potential for confusion here is not due to paradox but results from our having two identifying terms for a single continuum of feeling-- a common situation, a variant of self-differing. When we concentrate on the extremes of binary opposition, we fail to see that the middle is also an extreme. ... You can be as certain (an extreme of conviction) of a doubt as you are of a belief: ... Believing in your doubt, you can act on it, use it as a corrective." (p24)
"Emotion is a cause as well as an effect." (p25)
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