For Buffy Neophytes and Fans

[Maureen Therese Anderson]

On Mon, 22 Feb 1999 22:58 Michael Pollak wrote:

> 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