The Stubborn Machinery of Belief

Just an addendum to the previous post about irony as the position of the ‘good [not bad] subject’. The attitude that a subject assumes with respect to what s/he does can be anything from amused mockery, outright rejection, cynical indifference – the whole spectrum. This subject will insist there is a gap between h(is/er) performance and his beliefs, and his/her Irony is his negotiation of this gap. Blah blah


This needs to be complemented by the insistence on a ‘vulgar materialism’ of belief. That is to say (and I may have written about this before so forgive any repetition here) Belief as stated is one thing; but more stubborn is that belief incarnate in practice - I.e., ‘materialized’ in what we do. Teaching for example, will involve certain implicit ‘beliefs’ about power, pedagogy and so on, which inhere in things as seemingly trivial as the layout of chairs etc. Belief circulates in objects and actions as much as in (or before) the mind of the individual teacher.


If belief resides in, has its ‘proof,’ in the behaviour, the practice, then what we think of as ‘beliefs’ – i.e., articulated propositions – are often defences against, or ways of evading the actual belief. (At the very least, these ‘theoretical’ beliefs need always to be seen in relation to those concrete and embodied beliefs).

We are speaking here of a ‘machinery of belief’ wherein the belief ‘continues’ and ‘flows’ through the ‘machine ‘of behaviour, irrespective of the ideas entertained by the conscious subject/ ego. Thus is the Tibetan prayer wheel the true emblem of belief as such.

In this sense, also of course, ‘belief’ can (paradoxically) precede ‘knowledge’ – we can ‘believe’ something (inscribed in our behaviour) before it reaches the plane of conscious/ explicit recognition. our belief was there all along in the rituals. And religious or political ‘conversion’ is just belated recognition of the fact that I already believed.

This last example also reminds us of, I suppose, the flip-side of the above, the more Gramscian reading. This is to say, a ‘significant social group’ may embody in its behaviour commitments to ideals of solidarity, collectivity, or whatever, that are absent from their explicit pronouncements and which received ideas would deny.

[Thunder responds here.]