ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 Encyclopedia of radical doubt introduces readers to thirty-three “encyclopedia” entries written by a variety of professionals in fields of physics, biology, digital media, philosophy, anthropology, feminist theory, mathematics, language studies, and theatre arts. In a wide range of narrative voices echoing the carnivalesque quality of the Joker System, contributors describe concepts – including butterfly effect, fractals, noise, limits, fugues, riddles, and kōans – that reflect and relocate a dynamic of the Joker System. All of the concepts exhibit a nonlinear or counterintuitive bias. All revel in qualities aligned with humor. All borrow, to an extent, on what philosophers (from René Descartes to Pierre Bourdieu) refer to as “radical doubt”: self-implication, the questionable nature of knowledge, the necessity of rupture (or estrangement), and the social change afforded by an outlaw’s point of view.
