Doubt
Authors: Klabbers Johannes , Poletti Anna 
Published: October 2020

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Donald Crowhurst wanted to sail around the world. Or he wanted the world to believe he had sailed around it. Whilst the rest of the competitors in the 1968-9 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race sailed their wonky crafts through treacherous seas, Crowhurst dropped anchor in the quiet waters of the South Atlantic and falsified his logs. For artist Tacita Dean, who has made a number of works about Crowhurst (Disappearance at Sea, Teignmouth Electron): Crowhurst's problem was that he had an imagination. You can't have any imagination if you are going to sail around the world, otherwise you have doubt. Crowhurst had doubt, he imagined failure ... . I think it’s crucial to art as well that you somehow imagine failure. Doubt is very important (17). ** In developing this issue of M/C Journal we were interested in two related questions about doubt. On the one hand, we hoped to gather case studies that can give some indication of where and how doubt surfaces in contemporary media, culture and politics. We have collected a diverse sample of case studies considering the role of doubt in the American political response to 9/11 (Burns), the media’s reporting of sexual assault (Waterhouse-Watson), how scientists talk about climate change (Simpson) and the philosophy of religion (Brown). However, we were also interested in attracting articles that could contribute to our thinking about doubt as a method and mode of practice. Our feature article, by Sydney based artist and writer Ryszard Dabek presents both a case study, discussing Jean Luc Godard’s doubts about cinema through selected films from his oeuvre, while also demonstrating how a methodology of doubt can produce insightful cultural criticism. Elisabeth Hanscombe writes from a perspective that seeks to hold in tension the doubts that haunt interdisciplinary research (and the researcher) with the need to produce rigorous research outcomes. David Macarthur has written a useful and accessible introduction to how doubt can be applied to this end, making an argument for the pragmatist approach to doubt as a tool for valuable, critical thinking. Gonzalo Echeverria's series of delicate black and white landscape photographs, one of which we have placed at the opening of each article, are all located within walking distance of his home in Nidé, Turkey. He deliberately avoids the 'true' blacks and whites of black and white photography which were once the holy grail of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and with which we are now so familiar. Working with analogue equipment and on film, and printing his work in a traditional darkroom (and even mixing his own custom chemicals) Echeverria creates a range of greys which recall the early days of photography. Yet these images are undeniably rooted in the present both culturally and photographically. The recurring presence, and at times almost absence, of the minuets in the photographs asks us to consider doubt as much faith. In our formulation then, doubt has two sides. It can be a subject – like any other – which we can study and consider using the tools of scholarship founded on objectivity and the norms of knowledge production. Yet, doubt also has the potential to challenge those accepted methods. The definition of knowledge at the base of all scholarship, and by association the methods used to acquire it, has its foundations in Descartes’s formulation that what counts as knowledge is a conviction which is beyond doubt (Newman). In the method that leads to knowledge so-defined “doubt is predicated only to be ingeniously harnessed as the means of its own overcoming” (Fleissner 116). In her fascinating analysis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as being founded on doubt rather than obsession, Fleissner traces the extent to which the role of doubt in the project of modernity is far more complicated than this definition of knowledge and its production implies. It appears, Fleissner argues, that Descartes’s revolutionary formulation of the cogito (“I am thinking, therefore I exist”) (Baron) “depends on recasting… doubts as themselves proof of the one thing, thought, that cannot be doubted” (Fleissner 115). Indeed, the use of doubt in the methodology inaugurated by Descartes “construes sceptical doubts as the ground clearing tools of epistemic demolition” (Newman, emphasis in original). As Fleissner discusses, the perceived potential for this demolition to produce mania and madness has haunted modernity, and proved a difficult problem for psychology. Despite Descartes’s insistence that this demolition ultimately lead to construction (Newman, see also Macarthur in this issue), there is a persistent fear that once doubting has begun, it cannot be brought to an end (Fleissner 113-20). Over the years that we have discussed the possibility of a methodology of doubt with colleagues and peers, an expression of this fear has been the most consistent response. On closer inspection we can see that doubt is asked to play numerous, conflicting roles in the epistemology inaugurated by Descartes: it is a tool (or, as Newman characterisies it, a “bulldozer”) in the project of knowledge production; its presence is used as criteria for dismissing false knowledge; and its presence in the mind of the philosopher is taken as evidence of his existence. As Fleissner suggests: Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about The Meditations Concerning First Philosophy is the sense that Descartes wishes both to be rid of doubt and to preserve it; it is this combination, not the final overcoming of doubt in favour of the certainty of the mind’s powers, that the cogito might be said most strongly to install. (133) Let us now apologise if the above paragraphs offend our philosopher colleagues, for we have likely clumsily wandered through foundational arguments in the discipline that have a level of nuance and complexity to which we have not given adequate acknowledgment. However, m/c is a journal of media and culture, and for us what is interesting about the argument presented above is its potential to draw our attention to the conundrum presented by doubt and doubting in fields far removed from disciplined and technical arguments about epistemology. We are interested in how the foundational arguments presented by Descartes, and the complex status of doubt within them, have continued ramifications far beyond their original context. We are interested, in a way, in their trace in contemporary media culture and in the scholarship and creative practice that engages with it. At the end of her article, Fleissner concludes with a hope “for a doubt with a voice of its own” (134), and it is the potential for doubt to positively influence our ways of writing about our thinking that has attracted us to it. We should not hold Descartes responsible for the flow-on effects that his epistemology has had on writing in the humanities, but we do believe that the continued trace of the Cartesian method has lead to ossification of the expression of research. This part of the introduction is a perfect example of this: dense, littered with references, cautious yet authoritarian. The doubts I have had whilst writing it are silenced in order for the writing to proceed. The speaking-position required to perform the Cartesian method is, let’s be honest, not one which can often result in writing that can even hope to engage or inspire readers who do not wish to be the audience for a performance of the author’s ability to be disciplined. (And of course, as I write that sentence I consider how many readers will not make it through the proceeding paragraphs to get to this point. They’ll find the whole ‘Descartes bit’ too dry or dense.) We too want to know about how doubt might find a voice of its own, and are particularly interested in how doubt might be kept in focus in the writing of research, rather than be a point of departure that is ultimately erased. ** (The Dutch writer Gerard van't Reve once began an autobiographical piece with the words: “I was born stupid, as my father used to say”. My father never said this — and in fact I rather suffered from the inverse or opposite problem — but it is such a lovely opening that I would like to make use of it.) I was born stupid, but my mother was always telling people how smart I was. And like most people I just assumed that my parents always spoke the truth. Luckily, I was good at creating the impression that I was intelligent. But it took me a long time to work out that my mother was wrong and that parents are capable of saying things that are not true. For example my father was a great practical joker. He loved the idea that a child would believe anything you said. When I was five he told me that chewing gum was made from old bicycle tyres. It was not until I was about thirty years old that I suddenly realised this was not the case. It was not as if I actively continued to believe for a quarter of a century that chewing gum is actually made from old bicycle tyres. It is unlikely that I thought about what chewing gum is made of during those twenty five years at all. But my five year old self had stored this 'fact' in the part of my brain where things are stored about which there is no doubt. And when I accidentally chanced upon it there many years later, he had been dead for more than ten years. It was like the last pocket money cheque he sent which I received the day after I arrived home from his funeral, only funnier. My father loved to laugh and he loved to make other people laugh. This is why my mother fell in love with him. The problem was he also loved a drink or two and my mother didn't drink, neither did my grandmother, or anyone else in her family. This would later turn into a problem for everyone. But his alcoholism was still in its early stages when he married my mother, and it is easy to hide your drinking from people who don't drink: it is just not within their realm of possibilities that you would go to a bar after you kiss them goodbye at the end of the evening instead of going home to go to bed and sleep. I think it was because my mother desperately wanted an intelligent child that she was always telling people how smart I was. I think all of my family on my mother’s side spent their lives wishing they were just a little bit more intelligent, and pretending that they were. So this is where I got my gift. I just did what everyone else did. This stood me in good stead when I moved to an English speaking country where, when I had no idea what was being said, I just tried to look intelligent and pretended to understand. And generally that worked pretty well. Not many people are game to challenge other people's understanding. If it seems like you do (or should) understand, most people assume that you do. In places where you would expect people’s understanding to be challenged, such as universities, this now results in negative student feedback which academics have to explain at their performance management meetings. In today’s universities academics are expected to be dispensers of information who only utter absolute truths. The job of a student is to put the received information into that part of the brain where things are stored about which there is no doubt. And in Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid society, "where the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty" (4), the ability to conceal your doubt is your most crucial weapon. ** In her mythologising of Donald Crowhurst, Tacita Dean unwittingly animates the key terms of any consideration of doubt: fear, imagination and denial. For many, doubt cannot be disconnected from these properties that can be energised by its presence. Doubt always carries with it the potential to turn on those who acknowledge it and seek to apply it, to ricochet off the subject of doubt and create a doubting subject. Doubt is seen as the trigger for uncontrollable fantasies of failure. This issue attempts to untie this association. And we look forward to the companion issue of m/c, on failure, that will hopefully appear in the journal’s future. We would like to thank: the authors, Gonzalo Echeverria, Stephen Hetherington, and our peer reviewers for their willingness to assist us in developing this issue. We also thank Axel Bruns for his support. References Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Fleissner, Jennifer L. “Obsessional Modernity: The ‘Institutionalization of Doubt’.” Critical Inquiry 34 (Autumn 2007): 106-134. Newman, Lex. “Descartes' Epistemology”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. ‹http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/›. Reed, Baron. "Certainty." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. ‹http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/certainty/›. Warner, Marina. “Interview with Tacita Dean.” In Jean-Christophe Royoux, Marina Warner and Germaine Greer. Tacita Dean. New York: Phaidon, 2006. 7-41.