The Weakness of Believing: A Dialogue with de Certeau

Abstract

What this essay attempts to examine, through a negotiation with the work of de Certeau on the nature of ‘weak believing’ in a post-Cartesian world, are the cultural transformations in the production of belief. It begins with a glimpse at our contemporary ‘mediated’ society and then explores de Certeau's work (from the late 1960s to the 1980s) on the dissemination of the event of Christ and the varieties of believing it generated. It raises the question of what does it mean to say ‘Credo’ today when the ecclesial is displaced as the dominant site for the production of belief by civil society, the secular state, and the diversification of institutionalised expertise. In conversation with de Certeau's work, it attempts to answer that question.

Notes

¹ If we accept, as I would, de Certeau's analysis of Mannerism, then real virtualities began to make their appearance from the sixteenth century when ‘Virtuosity in what was also called “practice” was beginning to replace the humanist theory of “imitation”’ (1992: 141). With Mannerism there was an ‘elaboration of language upon itself, the subtle and sumptuous effects of which illustrated indefinite capacities’. Modernity's (and postmodernity's) preoccupation with the kitsch only takes this aesthetic one step further. Linguistic and fine art virtuosity draws attention to itself as fabrication. Depths are depicted that draw attention to their superficiality – an aesthetic sublimity that masks an ethical and metaphysical void.

² There are more secular, or at least less Christian narratives, which also speak of a decline and a need to restore. Take Iain McGilchrist's story of the rise of a culture dominated by the left hemisphere of the brain and the need to restore the ontological understanding of right hemisphere operations (2009).

³ Of course, this was the time when Louis XIV of France turned a waterlogged wilderness behind his father's old hunting lodge into the palace and gardens of Versailles.

⁴ Although, in a critical vein, one wonders whether the same criteria would apply to other cultural events, particularly for de Certeau, the inauguration of psychoanalysis with Freud or socialism with Marx.