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Foucault and Freemasonry
Margaret Kohn, Assistant Professor, Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville
“Heterotopias desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences”.[1] Foucault first introduced the concept of heterotopias in his 1966 book The Order of Things. In this initial formulation, heterotopias figure disorder, the incongruity of linking things together which are inappropriate. They are made up of “fragments of a large number of possible orders” juxtaposed “without law or dimension”.
In this first formulation, it is not clear whether the heterotopia is a discursive or spatial formation. Foucault’s inspiration for the concept came from a fictional story by Borges which captured the fundamental disorder of language and the opacity of meaning. Yet the term heterotopia already had a distinctly spatial connotation. Foucault emphasized that the disturbing quality of social life results from the way disorder is embodied in space. Disparate elements are “laid”, “placed” and “arranged” in sites such that it is impossible to even imagine a shared principle of order. In other words, heterotopias do not merely disrupt the organization of a particular system of signification, they transgress the line dividing signifier and signified, abstract language and concrete space, words and things. I believe that this is what Foucault meant when he suggested that heterotopias not only “shatter the syntax with which we construct sentences”; they also disrupt the “less apparent syntax which causes words and things to ‘hold together’.” Not just an element of discourse, they can rupture or challenge a discursive framework.
A year later in 1967, Foucault gave a lecture entitled “of other spaces” which explicitly used the concept of heterotopia to think about the relationship between architecture, politics, and theory. He emphasized the critical function of those sites which "have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect."[2] He differentiated two types of such spaces: utopias and heterotopias. For Foucault, utopias are sites with no real place. They express the reversal or radical transformation of society but are essentially mental rather than spatial constructions. He defines heterotopia in the following way.
There are probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.
He employs the term heterotopia to express the radical contrast between these sites and the rest of society which they reflect and challenge.
According to Foucault, heterotopias are distinguished by a breach of traditional time, juxtaposition of incompatible places, and mode of inclusion which conceals (sometimes tacit) exclusions.
Foucault distinguished two types - crisis heterotopias and heterotopias of deviation. Crisis heterotopias are places like the boarding school, military service, the honeymoon trip - privileged or forbidden sites that serve to mark out or mask liminal stages in life. Heterotopias of deviance, places like the prison, psychiatric hospitals, and rest homes, are a way to embody and patrol the borderline between normality and abnormality. They are real spaces, counter-sites constructed to materialize an alternative reality. Yet they also make use of, imitate, and transform pre-existing sites or institutions. They are places of illusion which reveal the illusory nature of our most stable realities. They are real places where it is possible to live differently. Hetertopias are sites that nurture the dreams and nightmares that sustain the capacity for vitality, dissent, and variation.
Now, in typical fashion, Foucault does not explicitly set up the heterotopia as a principle of political emancipation, a model of social transformation, or a normative groundwork for self-fashioning. He could not, however, resist a concluding warning: “In civilizations where (heterotopia) is lacking, dreams dry up, adventure is replaced by espionage, and privateers by the police”. We are left with the sense that the heterotopia is not just a space of otherness but the basis (or at least the inspiration) for struggle against existing forms of domination. Some of Foucault’s followers have been more explicit about drawing this conclusion.[3] As a real countersite which inverts and contests the conventions of the dominant society, the heterotopia could be an important locus of struggle against normalization. By dennaturalizing existing practices, such spaces could contribute to a broader project of social change. What utopia was for the modern period, from Moore to Marx and Bacon to Bellamy, heterotopia is for the age of postmodernity.[4] It substitutes contingency for necessity, danger for safety, variability for sameness and accepts these as the basis of politics.
In his recent book, “Spaces of Hope,” David Harvey challenges this approach to theorizing the relationship between politics and place.[5] He suggests that a position of alterity vis-à-vis the dominant social structure does not, by itself, nurture critique, let alone resistance. Heterotopic spaces can be the basis of guerilla struggles against normalization but they can also serve as tactical measures for achieving more nuanced forms of social control. This seems obvious when we consider that according to Foucault’s definition, the paradigmatic heterotopias of contemporary America could include the shopping mall, gated communities, Disneyland, and militia camps. These are our are “effectively enacted utopias.” They are undoubtedly places where some of our culture’s other real sites are represented, inverted, sanitized or demonized in order to highlight their mythic properties. Earlier forms of community and icons of history are torn from their time and place and presented for admiration and consumption. Some of the best recent work in cultural studies has demonstrated how theme parks, shopping malls, world fairs, and new urbanist communities employ architecture, symbols, and stimuli to sell an alternative reality, a place that is broadly accessible yet carefully protected from the outside.[6]
These counter-sites, however, employ their distinctiveness to perfect rather than dismantle dominant patterns of consumption and social relations. This seems to be the conclusion that Foucault himself reached in his subsequent work on the prison. In Discipline and Punish, heterotopias of deviance like the prison, insane asylum, and reform school mobilized their distinctive spatial practices to intensify and refine methods of normalization and, despite their otherness, they presented almost no potential to attenuate or disrupt the circulation of power.
The purpose of this talk is to investigate the relationship between alternative spaces and dominant ideologies. It seems clear that spatial alterity can intensify as well as challenge domination. My argument is that the difference between the dominant ideology and its other spaces can strengthen the hegemony of the system. The very “otherness” which distinguishes a heterotopia can serve to mask the gap between an ideology’s aspirations and its underlying effects. In order to explain how this tension or gap can serve to reinforce the dominant paradigm, I will look at the relationship between the enlightenment and its “other spaces.” The first step is genealogical. It involves uncovering the “subjugated knowledges” which were present but disguised within “systematizing theory” and recovering the fragmentary and hidden narratives that challenge the guiding self-understanding of a period.[7]
The enlightenment itself can have many contradictory meanings. For the purposes of this paper I am going to use one fairly prominent and clearly articulated version – Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of the bourgeois public sphere. The public sphere is an analytic concept which links the liberal ideologies of the enlightenment to its constitutive social structures like the café, salon, and bourgeois home. According to Habermas, the ideal of the public sphere originated in the theories of Kant and Mill, where it was imagined as a place where rational individuals could come together as equals to reach consensus on issues of common concern.[8] The public sphere was the enlightenment’s public face and self-understanding. Freemasonry was its hidden underside.
Freemasonry was a social world but also a kind of moral practice, which involved meditating upon and decoding a system of signs and symbols. Thus, Massonic knowledge was conveyed through a practice of interpretation. It followed the logic of hermeneutics, its laws were the laws of semiology. Massonry still preserved the pre-classical epistemé that Foucault captured in The Order of Things. The architecture of the Masonic lodge was supposed to reflect the plan of the Temple of Solomon and the design of the universe. Microcosm was the ordering principle underlying Masonry’s secrets. The world of the Masonic lodge, which flourished during the Enlightenment, was a heterotopia in the original sense of The Order of Things: the uncanny trace of a earlier epistemé preserved in the present.
In fact, Freemasons are what we might call heterotopians par excellence. Much of the traditional Massonic mythology and iconography evokes liminal places which symbolized ruptures in the social. As the name Masonry suggests, the movement had a longstanding connection to professions like stone work, architecture, and construction. Free-masonry originated in artisanal guilds of practicing stone masons, who built the great Cathedrals. These Masons had experience representing spiritual aspirations and social hierarchies in public space. These Master stone-workers were eventually joined by their noble patrons and members of the bourgeoisie who were drawn to mathematics, science, and engineering. The traditional interest in heterotopic spaces survived Masonry’s transformation from artisanal guild to bourgeois secret society. The fragments and symbols of mythical and historical spaces were considered privileged access points to forgotten secrets. According to one anonymous Massonic tract: “Without a doubt, history knows the popular aspect of the Ancient spirit, but only the (Massonic) Tradition has conserved a complete memory of it. It was the tabernacle where all of the occult secrets of the past found refuge and were crystallized in symbols. Only there can one shed light on all of the ruins, revealing the secrets that drove men to the work of destruction.”[9] Given the constraints of time and the focus of the paper, I cannot elaborate on the significance of their symbolization of space. I just want to introduce three examples of Masonic iconography:
- Noah’s arc. According to the Bible, Noah’s arc was a microcosm which reflected, critiqued, and redeemed the disorder of earthly existence. According to the Massonic Constitutions (1723), Noah’s arc was a Masonic project: “an initiated Mason was commanded and directed by God in the construction of the arc, which was made according to the principles of geometry and according to the rules of Massonry.”
- The Tower of Babel. According to the Bible, the Tower of Babel is seen as a symbol of sinful pride. God punishes the hubris of humanity by destroying the tower and cursing humans to speak to each other in mutually incomprehensible tongues. Interestingly, Masonic lore transforms and re-appropriates this story. The Tower of Babel is presented as an amazing fete of engineering and construction. Anti-massonic literature took up the metaphor, accusing modern Mason’s of the hubris, vanity, cosmopolitanism, and ungodliness of the original builders.
- The Cave. The cave has two different allegorical reference points. First, the cave was an important religious site in Ancient Greek cults. It symbolized connection with the earth and its mysteries. In Plato’s famous dialogue, The Republic, it took on a different set of associations. The cave became a metaphor for prejudice, superstition and blindness. Enlightenment came from leaving the cave and its shadows. In Massonry the cave served as a kind of site of reflection, a symbol of birth, regeneration, and initiation. Before the initiation ritual, the apprentice spent time alone in a chamber of reflection which was meant to evoke the cave. The cave was a source of vitality, energy, and an opening point for accessing hidden secrets of the earth. The cave evoked the borderline between public and secret realms.
All three of these examples show the ambivalent relationship between spatial difference and dominant power.
Part II: Freemasonry and the Other Enlightenment
This investigation begins with the paradox that the ideals of the enlightenment – truth, rationality, universality, equality, and publicity – were diffused through secret societies famous for their ritual, hierarchy, and mysticism.
Jürgen Habermas recognized the irony that the public sphere existed “largely behind closed doors.”[10] He concluded, however, that the “secret promulgation of enlightenment typical of lodges…had a dialectical character.”[11] Initially, reason needed to be protected from publicity “because it was a threat to existing relations of domination”. When repression subsided, the importance of secret societies diminished. According to Habermas’s account, the capacity for reason was nurtured in secret, only to vanquish the forces of censorship and persecution, ultimately emerging in the light of public. The need for “demonstrative fraternization ceremonies” disappeared and a more rational, accessible, and enlightened form of sociability triumphed.
If there was an evolutionary dynamic as Habermas suggests, then secret societies present no fundamental problem for his concept of the “public sphere.” If, however, the mystical, ritualistic, hierarchical, and hidden dimensions of societies like the Masons remained a crucial element of bourgeois sociability well into the nineteenth century, then we have reason to doubt the publicness, the universality, and the rationality of the public sphere.
The historical record of secret societies in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe raises doubts about Habermas’s narrative of evolution from secrecy to publicity.[12] Habermas quotes Lessing’s statement in Dialogues on Freemasonry (1778) that bourgeois society is the off-spring of Freemasonry. This statement, however, is taken out of context. Throughout the dialogues Lessing insists that Freemasonry is the inner nature of bourgeois society.[13] What could Lessing have meant by such a provocative assertion? There are some obvious parallels between the ideology of Masonry and enlightenment principles, most notably an emphasis on religious toleration and social equality.[14] Speculative Masonry arose in England in the late seventeenth century as a form of sociability which brought together men from different social classes and religious creeds.[15] The activities of the lodges ranged from literary and scientific discussion to raucous feasting and drinking. According to the principles of the brotherhood, all members met as equals and it seems as if many lodges did have cross-class membership, uniting artisans and entrepreneurs, or the high bourgeoisie with the aristocracy.[16] In a period where there were few informal opportunities for social mixing, the lodges provided unique occasions for aristocrats to seek business contacts and merchants to cultivate political protection. While Masonic charters rigorously forbade discussions of religion and politics, their basic organizational principles clearly reflected a liberal ethos. This ethos was also encoded in their Constitutions, which invoked natural (as opposed to revealed) religion.[17]
In some ways, the Masonic Lodge was the prototypical site of the bourgeois public sphere, a place where members of different social classes, committed to education, science, reason, commerce, friendship, religious toleration, social equality and public service could forge a new, more enlightened politics. European Masonry, however, was an extremely complex phenomenon. Masonry was associated with both Newtonian physics and alchemy. It pared reason and science with mysticism and hermetics. It created a context for egalitarian encounters only to reassert hierarchy through its constantly expanding number of grades and titles. It emphasized the values of universalism and inclusivity while tenaciously guarding its privileges and secrecy. So perhaps Lessing was correct in calling Freemasonry the inner truth of bourgeois society. The post-structuralist truism that the character of the enlightenment is determined by its constitutive outside - its secretive, hierarchical, and exclusionary dark-side - is transparent in the phenomenon of Masonry.
The paradox underlying European secret societies was that the ideal of universalism was realized through an adaptation of the model of the Guild, a typically feudal structure. Speculative Masonry was the progeny of operative Masonic lodges, artisanal guilds where practicing stone masons socialized, provided mutual aid, protected their interests, and sacralized the secrets of their craft. Masonry reflected the corporate logic,[18] which was dominant in early modern Europe. Their purpose was to form a unified collectivity, in which distinct parts would work together for the same goal. The metaphor of the body also emphasized “the indissolubility of human ties.” According to the corporatist vision, collectivities rather than individuals were the basic components of society.[19] Guilds, like the operative Masons, were formed to defend particular interests, most notably to limit access to a segment of the labor market; they were one component of the hierarchically ordered society of feudalism. Yet the