> On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Maureen Therese Anderson wrote:
>> Maybe all you isolated Buffy fans should
>> have a secret handshake or something to identify each other.
>> Hey--Freemasons! Now where do *they* fit into this demonic/French
>> Revolution pantheon??)
>
>It is surely that you jest, Mme. Therese -- Freemasons were coeval with
>the French Revolution. And theirs was arguably the first attempt to
>combine symbology with the Enlightenment to produce a secularized religion
>-- a process that has arguably continued for two centuries and given birth
>to the New Age millennial feminism that culminates in Buffy -- the
>"religion without god" that your reviewer friend speaks of so
>articulately.
Mais non, Monsieur Michel de NYC, I do not jest! I think some of the inherent weirdness of freemasonry is somehow of a piece with contradictions of the Buffy-zone (cf. recent discussions on whether Buffy is anarchist liberator or is she inherently white-bread in the basic social space she inhabits?)
On Freemasons: yes they were coeval with the French revolution, and were well represented on both sides--aristocractic royalists as well as Jacobins. We are talking about a movement which transformed a guild society (actively protecting the collective rights of its artesans) into an "Enlightened" gentleman's society. A gentleman's society, evolved in conjunction with market society, ostensibly based on individual merit, universalism and equality, all the while the product of social privilege, only permitting the virtuous literate, rich, men (and eventually a few aristoractic women) to join. Likewise, the FMs were anti-religious and secular, all the while bringing preoccupation with hierarchized rituals and "mysteries" to new heights, and fetishizing secrecy for the sake of secrecy more than their Renaissance alchemist ancecedents ever did. It seems pretty clear these masonic paradoxes inevitably flow from all those Enlightenment paradoxes we know so well: Science and Reason (Europe, men, etc.) vs. religion and superstition (non-European others, the masses, women, etc.), constituting self and other in such dichotomous ways that the repressed inevitably returns, etc.
Enter Buffy, our Enlightenment rebel without a God: is her democratic entourage of humanity-saving friends a welcome utopian social model? In a way, sure. Go Buffy, go! OTOH, like the Freemasons, there something a bit overdetermined about the privileged Sunnyvale whitebread setting--something that doesn't just reduce to the writers' need to market the show for the 90210 crowd. (David quotes in his article:)
>Giles: It's a reliquary. Used to house items of religious significance.
>Most commonly a finger or some other body part from a saint.
>Buffy: Note to self. Religion: creepy.
I didn't see this episode, but reading it reminded me of how, the couple times I did see the show, I just couldn't get past Buffy's Brady Bunch-aspect. Because, while this "Ew! Body parts--yuk!" is supposed to be a critique of Jerry Falwell ("isn't religion dumb? isn't Jerry Falwell/US religious right-fundamentalism abhorrent and ridiculously superstitious?"--this is the part David picks up on), it inevitably overreaches. Buffy's "ew, creepy" sqeamishness simultaneously casts out Condomble, Vodun, and hell, most cultural practices outside of the Enlightenment west. So, as with Masonic flickering between opposites, do we need Sunnyvale sterility, and Buffy's everyday whitebread goodness, as the site that also happens to reside directly atop Hellmouth, font of Bad, hyper-supernatural energy? As some other post mentioned, try putting any of Toni Morrisson's heroines (who truck with body parts all the time) on the same page as Buffy. It won't work. And it won't work because of the ways the Buffy zone reinforces Enlightenment dichotomies: everyday life is all rational and bloodless, and then we switch into "supernatural" mode, fight vampires who are far more horrifically evil and supernatural than anything that exists within non-Enlightenment material/spiritual conceptualizations. (Though yes I know that for us lefty viewers those vampires are supposed to be just "symbols" for the real oppressors--authoritarians, capitalists--whose devilishness operates on a decidedly human plane. That's a whole other thread.)
I doubt these two castings, Buffy vs. prudish fundamentalists who are even more white-bread than her, and Buffy vs. nonenlightenment Others, are easily separated. Just as historically, all those Freemasons whose sustained targets were their fellow (superstitious, religionist) Europeans, were arguing through notions forged over a couple centuries of identity-threatening interactions (through mercantile trade and colonialism) with nonEuropean others. All those merchants' travelogues about exotic nonEuropean Fetishists, etc. were bestsellers among literate Europeans during the mercantile era, and those travelogues sat on the bookshelves of the all the Enlightenment fathers while they were forging their market-society, anti-superstition universalist categories.
Which leads to the other overlapping Masonic/Buffy paradox: historians have brought out the extent to which masonic egalitarian sociability, practiced within their little private groups, did serve as one of the more influential models for public bourgeois society. Its private-sphere sociability was appare3ntly more influential than the Habermasian salons or scientific academies in forging ideals for a broader civic society. (Though of course there was revolving-door membership in all these privileged, male private-publicities.) This leads smack into the center of all those disputes between those who follow Habermas, claiming that Enlightenment public spheres just didn't extend their privileges far enough, and those who think that any form of sociability forged for the benefit of an emergent European market-society and its key players, is probably too limited a kind of sociability to serve as a model in any deep way. Similarly, maybe, it's not clear whether the valiant efforts of Buffy and earnest Sunnyvale friends' secret society can do more than challenge the "excesses" of an inherently unsociable social system, from within that Sunnyvale zone.
...But though the program may contradict itself, Buffy is large and contains multitudes--that much seems clear from recent postings. I've seen it twice in the past year, and couldn't get past its (well-intended) hokiness to feeling any wicked spectator jouissance. But I do plan to give it another whirl tonight, with LBO Cliffnotes in hand.
--Maureen