Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (International Library of Sociology)

The Badlands of Modernity

This book offers a wide ranging and original interpretation of modernity as it emerged during the eighteenth century through an analysis of some of its most important social spaces. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of heterotopia, or spaces of alternate ordering, the book argues that modernity originates through an interplay between ideas of utopia and heterotopic spatial practice. The Palais Royal during the French Revolution, the masonic lodge and its relationship to civil society and the public sphere and the early factories of the Industrial Revolution are all seen as heterotopia in which a modern social ordering is developed. Rather than see modernity as being defined by a social order, the book argues that we need to take account of social ordering processes and the ambiguous spaces in which they emerge, if we are to understand the character of modern societies. The book uses these historical examples to analyse contemporary questions about modernity and postmodernity, the character of social order and the significance of marginal space in relation to issues of order, transgression and resistance. It will be important reading for sociologists, geographers and social historians as well as anyone who has an interest in modern societies. Kevin Hetherington is a Lecturer in Sociology and a member of the Centre for Social Theory and Technology at Keele University.

International Library of Sociology Founded by Karl Mannheim Editor: John Urry Lancaster University

The Badlands of Modernity

Heterotopia and social ordering

Kevin Hetherington

London and New York

First published 1997 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1997 Kevin Hetherington All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Hetherington, Kevin. The badlands of modernity: heterotopia and social ordering/Kevin Hetherington. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Utopias. 2. Dystopias. 3. Space (Architecture) 4. Spatial behaviour. 5. Human territoriality. 6. Human geography. 7. Social psychology. I. Title. HX806.H44 1997 304.2–dc21 97–3405 CIP ISBN 0-203-42887-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-73711-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-11469-1 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-11470-5 (pbk)

Contents

Preface

vii

1 The Palais Royal as modernity

1

2 Margins, orderings and the laboratories of society

20

3 Two castles Heterotopia as sites of alternate ordering

39

4 The utopics of modernity

55

5 Secret virtues, Euclidean spaces Freemasonry, Solomon’s Temple and the lodge

72

6 The factory for itself

109

7 The space of the horizon

139

Notes Bibliography Index

144 149 159

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This book is about space and modern society. Social space has become a major focus for social theory over the past decade. Where once it was argued that space had not been taken seriously enough by sociologists, or had not been adequately theorized by human geographers, it is no longer necessary to make such a claim. Cultural geography and to a lesser extent the sociology of space can now be said to have become central to understanding key issues within social science: social change, modernism and postmodernism, consumption, power, inequality and political and cultural resistance to name just some of them. This book draws on much of this work and hopes to make some small contribution to it. There are, however, one or two things that make this book somewhat different to the ‘new cultural geography’. First, my interest here has been more historical than contemporary. The spaces that I look at and discuss in relation to questions about modernity are all drawn from the eighteenth century rather than from the present. Second, the book is about modernity rather than postmodernity; indeed one of the things I am trying to say here is that we should still be concerned with modernity because it remains all around us despite very obvious recent cultural changes. Third, whereas the majority of this new theorizing of space has tended to focus on marginality and acts of resistance to the social order, this book is very much about social order. That, however, is not because I want to offer a critique of those whose work has tended to focus on marginality, resistance and transgressions of the social order—although there has perhaps been a little too much romanticism involved here at times—but because I want to offer a critique of static views of social order that do not take account of the processes, ambiguities and differences involved in trying to think about the social ordering that we have come to call modernity. In that sense, the title of this book should be viewed with the irony intended. The badlands of modernity are not all that bad. Both in the sense that they are not so terrifying as some might lead us to believe nor are they ‘bad’ in the more contemporary vernacular sense of being good because they represent some form of counter-hegemonic site or practice. My use of the term badlands is then here to show the significance of what others have described as marginal space in vii

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relation to modern societies, while at the same time avoiding a romance with the margins because they are marginal, Other and different. The central concept that I have used in this book, heterotopia, is a medical one that Foucault has introduced to the social sciences (1986a). Places of Otherness, sites constituted in relation to other sites by their difference, are the basis of my badlands. More precisely I define heterotopia as spaces of alternate ordering. Heterotopia organize a bit of the social world in a way different to that which surrounds them. That alternate ordering marks them out as Other and allows them to be seen as an example of an alternative way of doing things. Doing things in a different way is what modernity has always been about, and I do not claim to be saying anything new there. What I have tried to show, through both theoretical argument and illustration through a number of cases, is the spatial dynamics of these new modes of social ordering that have gone into the making of modernity. These new modes of social ordering, found in modernity’s Other spaces are not something that have emerged as a completely blind process, nor as something completely planned, but have derived from ideas about the good society. As well as discussing what Foucault has had to say about heterotopia, I have also spent some time in this book looking at the better known term utopia. In particular, I have drawn on the work of Louis Marin, who in my view has offered us the most sophisticated analysis of the significance of utopia to date (1984, 1992). His analysis allows us to consider this process of social ordering and its spatial dimension more fully than would have been possible if Foucault’s arguments had been used alone. Marin’s concern is not with utopia as such, imaginary perfect societies, but with the spatial play that is involved in imagining and trying to create these perfect worlds in the spaces that make up the modern world. He uses the term utopics to describe this spatial play. For Marin, the way to understand everything there is to understand about utopia is to start from a position of irreconcilable ambiguity. When Thomas More first coined the term Utopia in his literary satire of sixteenth-century society, he collapsed two Greek words together: eu-topia meaning good place and ou-topia meaning no-place or nowhere. His Utopia was a good place that existed nowhere, except in the imagination. And yet ever since people have been trying to create utopia. That is what modernity has been all about, trying to create the perfect society, by turning the nowhere into the good place, more specifically trying to create a society that is ordered and stable and governed properly as well as one in which the principle of freedom is upheld. Marin’s aim is, however, to pull apart the nowhere from the good place, to return utopia to eu-topia and ou-topia and to look at the space, one might say chasm, that opens up between them. That space, which Marin calls the neutral, is where I would locate Foucault’s heterotopia. It is also the space in which my examples are located. I look at modernity, then, not as a utopia, nor even as a dystopia—a utopia gone wrong. Instead, I want to look at process; the ordering of modernity within this in-between space that I call heterotopia. To do that it is in my interest, made

Preface

ix

possible by Marin, to keep this space-between not quite nowhere, but not as a good space either. Heterotopia do exist, but they only exist in this spacebetween, in this relationship between spaces, in particular between eu-topia and ou-topia. Heterotopia are not quite spaces of transition—the chasm they represent can never be closed up—but they are space of deferral, spaces where ideas and practices that represent the good life can come into being, from nowhere, even if they never actually achieve what they set out to achieve—social order, or control and freedom. Heterotopia, therefore, reveal the process of social ordering to be just that, a process rather than a thing (see Law 1994). That, I would argue, is how we should look at modernity, not as a social order, as has tended to be the sociological convention, but as a social and indeed spatial ordering. The book is organized into seven chapters, and should be seen not specifically as a work of social history but as a work of social theory that is historical in context; a theory of the spatial dynamics of modernity. To say that it is a work of social theory is not, however, to say that the argument is offered in the abstract. I have tried to use as many cases as possible, not only to illustrate the arguments but also to allow me to develop the theory through them. To that end there are three main examples in this book of the space of modernity: The Palais Royal, a royal palace significant during the French Revolution in 1789; masonic lodges; and early eighteenth-century factories in Britain. This is by no means a comprehensive set of examples and is not intended to be representative either—rather it should be seen as illustrative. My interest is in the processes expressed through these sites more than in the sites themselves. In Chapter 1 I aim, through the example of the Palais Royal, and through some of the spaces contained within it, such as the coffee-house, to give an overview and an introduction to the book as a whole. I look at this site at the time of the French Revolution as an example of a heterotopic space in which a utopics of modernity was expressed in contrast to the France of the Ancien Régime. Chapter 2 looks in detail at what has become known as the new cultural geography. I discuss some of the main work and some of the concepts that have been used, notably those which might have some similarity with the concept of heterotopia. I discuss representational space (Lefebvre 1991), margins (Shields 1991; Wilson 1991), and paradoxical space (Rose 1993) as well as the anthropological concept of liminality (Van Gennep 1960; Turner 1969) that has figured prominently in some of this more recent work. I also look at the relationship between resistance and transgression, two prominent themes in all of these texts, and that of social order, which I want to suggest is the basis of what makes heterotopia different from many of these other terms. Chapter 3 takes up this last term through a detailed discussion of Foucault’s use of it and the ways in which it has been used since. Heterotopia are defined as spaces of alternate ordering, an ordering based on a number of utopics that come to being in relation to a tension that exists within modern societies between ideas of

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freedom and ideas of control or discipline. It is in this way that modernity has been spatially performed. Chapter 4 looks in more detail at the ways in which social order and its relationship to modernity has been discussed within sociology. Through a discussion of Bauman’s work in this area, I challenge the view that modernity be seen as establishing social order through the eradication of social ambivalence, and suggest instead that modernity be seen as expressing a series of utopics which aimed at ordering society through spatial arrangements that are more ambiguous, different or ambivalent in character than is sometimes assumed. Chapter 5 is the first of two detailed examples through which these arguments are expressed. Here I look at the development of freemasonry in Britain during the eighteenth century and its use of the utopics expressed in the biblical idea of Solomon’s Temple in the form of the masonic lodge. The lodge comes to be seen as a space for the moral ordering of men within an emerging public sphere in which bourgeois, male identities, capitalist interests, consciousness and relations of trust are constituted. I consider the space of the lodge as a heterotopia in relation to that public sphere, and use this argument, with its focus on ordering as process, to challenge the dominant social science perspective on the development of that public (in particular Habermas 1989). Chapter 6 looks at the development of the factory as a heterotopia in which a utopics of capitalist production were developed. Rather than see the factory as a space of total discipline, its difference, in terms of the production process, use of fixed capital, division of labour and spatial and temporal arrangements, mark it out as a space of difference and an alternate ordering rather than as an established capitalist utopia. Chapter 7 concludes around Marin’s metaphor of the horizon, seeing modernity as a social ordering that moves ever forwards towards an ideal goal without ever being able to get there. It is through heterotopia that this endless ordering and engagement with difference takes place. I would like to thank Robert Cooper, Gordon Fyfe, Mike Peters, Mike Savage, Rob Shields, Alan Warde, Pnina Werbner and John Urry, as well as colleagues in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology and Centre for Social Theory and Technology, both at Keele University, who offered comments and criticisms on the book during its preparation. I would also like to thank Chris Rojek, who commissioned the book when he was at Routledge, and Mari Shullaw, also at Routledge, for seeing it through to publication. I would especially like to thank Steve Hinchliffe, John Law, Rolland Munro, Martin Parker and an anonymous referee for their comments on the manuscript as a whole.

Chapter 1

The Palais Royal as modernity

[W]hat a day, not of laughter, was that, when he [Duc d’Orléans] threatened for lucre’s sake, to lay sacrilegious hand on the Palais-Royal garden! The flowerparterres shall be riven up; the Chestnut Avenues shall fall…. Philidor, from his Café de la Régence, shall no longer look on greenness; the loungers and losels of the world, where now shall they haunt? In vain is moaning. The axe glitters; the sacred grove falls crashing, for indeed Monseigneur was short of money…. He will surround your Garden with new edifices and piazzas: though narrowed, it shall be replanted; dizened with hydraulic jets, cannon which the sun fires at noon; things bodily, things spiritual, such as man has not imagined; and in the Palais-Royal shall again, and more than ever, be the Sorcerer’s Sabbath and Satan-atHome of our Planet. Thomas Carlyle1 All men forgot themselves. The place, that strange place where the scene was passing, seemed, at such moments, to forget itself. The Palais Royal was no longer the Palais Royal. Vice, in the grandeur of so sincere a passion, in the heat of enthusiasm, became pure for an instant. The most degraded raised their heads, and gazed at the sky; their past life, like a bad dream, was gone, at least for a day; they could not be virtuous, but they felt themselves heroic, in the name of the liberties of the world! Friends of the people, brothers to one another, having no longer any selfish feeling, and quite ready to share everything. Jules Michelet2

THE PALAIS ROYAL AS MODERNITY Near the Louvre in Paris stands a rather grand building known as the Palais Royal. It was built on the site of the Hotel de Mercoeur and Hotel Rambouillet for Cardinal Richelieu in 1629 and originally named the Palais-Cardinal. After Richelieu’s death, the Palais was left to Louis XIII who left it in turn to Anne of Austria and her son, later Louis XIV (Dark 1926). After several other changes of residency, the Palais was sold to the Orléans family, cousins to the Kings of France. It was inherited by Louis-Philippe, the Duc de Chart res, who, on his father’s death, became the Duc d’Orléans in 1785. He was later to renounce that title and become famous during the French Revolution as Philippe Egalité. 1

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In the early 1780s, Louis-Phillipe made a number of substantial changes to the Palais Royal, giving it a more commercial orientation, in order that he might offset the costs of his lavish expenditure on high living and boost his dwindling financial resources. Not least, he had built, originally in wood but later in iron, galleries or arcades filled with shops and boutiques selling all manner of consumer goods and services (see Geist 1985). These galleries were the forerunners of the famous Parisian arcades of the early nineteenth century, which in turn became the inspiration for the later department stores and shopping malls (see Benjamin 1973; Geist 1985). Before the Revolution in 1789, the Palais Royal was one of the places in Paris for people of quality, and those who aspired be part of the cultured elite, to be seen. Strolling around its gardens, arcades and shops one would find: [F]inanciers, musketeers, judges, dukes, women of the court, writers and doctors. In short, the crowd was elegant. The women came in their finest gowns, often arranging nightly trysts in the dark shadows of a tree. (Isherwood 1986:219) It was here also, in the Palais Royal, that men and women would come to buy the books of the Enlightenment philosophers and to read the latest journals and newspapers. The Palais Royal, as well as being the residency of one of the leading members of the aristocracy in France, also contained gardens with fountains, a masonic temple (the Duc d’Orléans was a leading figure amongst French freemasons at the time of the revolution), theatres and an opera. It boasted cafés and restaurants, a stock exchange, and pavilions were constructed to contain the variety of commercial enterprises and entertainments that were open to the public. In addition to being a leading site in the consumer culture of eighteenth-century Paris, the appearance of the Palais Royal, therefore, would seem to be in keeping with the idea of a public sphere of Enlightenment: it was a site of openness, tolerance and civility as well as a space for rational and enlightened debate that played a significant part in the emerging civil society of the bourgeoisie (see Sennett 1986; Habermas 1989). That at least was the surface appearance, but we shall see that there was more to the Palais Royal than this. For the moment, however, that well travelled English agriculturalist and diarist Arthur Young, visiting France in the late 1780s, can speak, albeit in the typical manner of the English tourist abroad, for this public sphere. He found the Palais Royal an interesting place in which to find out the latest news, obtain the latest books and pamphlets and to entertain his friends: Dine with my friend at the Palais Royal, at a coffee-house; well dressed people; everything clean, good and well served; but here, as everywhere else, you pay a good price for good things; we ought never to forget that a low price for bad things is not cheapness. (1929:82)

The Palais Royal as modernity

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If the Palais Royal was a place where the enlightened bourgeoisie came to mingle and promenade with members of the elite of French society, for the common people it was valued more as a site of spectacle. Popular theatre, festivities and all manner of circus entertainments found their way into the Palais Royal. As well as a site of civility then, the Palais Royal was also a site of the carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1984); a space of playful cultural inversions, with the highest and lowest strata of society able to mingle, which offered a moment of freedom from some of the hierarchical constraints of French society. The gardens, for instance, were a source of much pleasure, offering a place where both women and men could come to promenade. As with other gardens in Paris, like the nearby Tuileries (which, however, by the end of the eighteenth century, had fallen out of fashion after the court had relocated from Paris to Versailles): Regular and occasional visitors to the gardens of Paris went there to see and be seen in a social pageant that, whether it was a balletic ritual composed according to the rules and conventions of society or a free improvisation on the visitors’ own themes, was the outward manifestation of a silent, secret battle between order and pleasure, decorum and fantasy. (Conan and Marghieri 1991:29) The Comte de Sirrac also rode one of the world’s first hobby-horse-style bicycles in the gardens of the Palais Royal, and one can only wonder what sort of reaction that might have received from passers by. I have not chosen the Palais Royal to stand as a metaphor for modernity arbitrarily. As well as being an important site in the genesis of a consumer culture and a space of the Enlightenment, the history of the Palais Royal during the revolution of 1789 places it clearly at the centre of an event that has been taken by many as the threshold of modern society. Symbolic as this may be, this space can be seen as exemplifying an emerging, modern bourgeois sociality in France at a time of major social change. It was the space of a marginal class of people soon to lose their marginal status. While considerable attention within cultural studies and sociology has recently been given to the Paris of the mid-nineteenth century, seen either as a world of panopticon-style social discipline (Foucault 1977; Rabinow 1989); or a world of bohemians, Haussmanized boulevards, arcades and strolling flâneurs, a world of the so called ‘fleeting and fragmentary and contingent’ conditions of modernity (see for example Grana 1964; Benjamin 1973; Berman 1982; Clark 1984; Frisby 1985; Wolff 1985; Buck-Morss 1989; Wilson 1991, 1992; Tester 1994; Prendergast 1995), this modernity can be found crystallized in this one particular site some seventy years earlier. In many respects, it was to such places as the Palais Royal, around the time of the French Revolution, that the mid-nineteenth century poets, painters, bohemians and historians (if we include Michelet) looked back to with a degree of nostalgia.3 The Palais Royal can tell us a good deal

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about modernity. Modernity, however, is a broad topic and my particular focus is somewhat narrower. More precisely, I am interested here in the space of modernity, or what might be called the utopics of modernity and their relationship to the ordering of society. The history of how modern society has developed, and the question of social order that is often at its heart, in many ways the main preoccupations of classical sociology, whether that be about modes of production (Marx), divisions of labour and moral individualism (Durkheim) or rationalization and bureaucracy (Weber), have been discussed in many books over the past century. It is only recently, however, that the significance of spatiality to the shaping of modern society and modern outlooks, notably in the work of Foucault, have become apparent (see in particular Foucault 1977, 1989a, 1989b; also Rabinow 1989; Lefebvre 1991). Also in recent years, a new cultural geography, overlapping at the fringes of sociology, has emerged and has sought to place space at the centre of social theory. This cultural geography, while originating in a neo-Marxist perspective (see Harvey 1973, 1989; Massey 1984; Gregory and Urry 1985; Soja 1989; Lefebvre 1991; Thrift 1996), has broadened to include Foucauldian, feminist and postmodern perspectives as well (leading examples include Shields 1991; Wilson 1991; Massey 1993; Rose 1993; Sibley 1995). In particular, the emphasis has moved away from an interest in the dominant space of capitalist society, towards the margins and the marginal use of space by those who have, in various ways, been located on the fringes of society. Major themes within this work have included: the different and multiple meanings attached to space; the Otherness of place; and especially the relationship between marginal spaces and forms of cultural resistance, transgression and alternative identity formation. The work in this field has offered us important insights into spatiality and its relationship to questions of agency and power, especially around the political issues of how acts of resistance by those marginalized within society are distinctly spatialized. Recent attempts to theorise these Other or marginal places, these badlands, have also been made by analysts of postcolonial and postmodern culture such as Bhabha through his concept of third space (1994). Another approach has centred upon the anthropological concept of liminality and liminal space (van Gennep 1960; Turner 1969) to show the importance of spaces like the shopping mall to the ludic character of lifestyle politics (see Shields 1990, 1991, 1992; Featherstone 1991). The Palais Royal provides us with an important historical opportunity through which to begin to critically explore some of the issues raised in this recent analysis. In some ways, what was happening in the Palais Royal in the 1780s and its consumer culture was not that different to the shopping malls of today. The features of the Palais Royal I have described so far show it to be a site of pleasure, consumption and civility, but the Palais Royal had another side to it, a side more associated with the issues of politics and resistance. One of the

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galleries, the Galerie de Bois, was known at the time as the Camp of the Tartars (Geist 1985:452). The gallery: [B]ecame the hangout of debauched youths, thieves, petit-maitres, swindlers, prostitutes, and financiers…where libertines screamed indecent propositions at the women and rude youths jeered and taunted the crowd. (Isherwood 1986:222)4 Below the public gardens and promenades were grottoes that housed cafes that were used for more seditious purposes; these were places where Jacobins and freemasons would meet and plot. In the newly built arcades, prostitutes would rent small shops with rooms above, in order to be able to provide sex for their clients. Streetwalkers would mingle with the fashionable crowds and dress up, to disguise their intent, as ‘mothers tending rented children, others grieving for husbands who had never existed’ (Conan and Marghieri 1989:5). The bookshops sold not only the latest Enlightenment works, political pamphlets, newspapers and journals, but alongside them pornography and seditious writings. Nicholas Rétif de la Breton, archpornographer, author of several hundred books, perhaps best known for his writing on foot fetishism (and, incidentally, for inventing the word communism), the so-called ‘Rousseau of the Gutter’, was fond of wandering late into the night, voyeuristically observing and writing about the prostitutes at work. The Marquis de Sade also at one time had a bookshop in the Palais Royal from which he sold his writings (Billington 1980:29). From a space of intellectual and cultural liberty, to one of hedonistic consumption and illicit pleasure, it was but a short move to sedition and open revolt. It was here, after all, on 12 July 1789 at the Café de Foy, one of the most famous of the many coffee-houses to be found in the Palais Royal, that Camille Desmoulins clambered up onto a table and delivered his speech that was to lead to the storming of the Bastille, an event which has been seen as the spark for the French Revolution (Dark 1926:47; Rudé 1967). As Billington suggests: The Palais Royal played a central role in Revolutionary Paris…[it offered] a privileged sanctuary for intellectuals where they could turn from speculation to organisation…[also] the Palais provided a living link with the underworld of Paris and with the new social forces that had to be mobilized for any revolutionary victory. (1980:28) Rudé is equally clear in the role that the Palais Royal played in the French Revolution of 1789, such that we can say that the Palais Royal was the space of the Third Estate, most notably associated with the Orléanists:

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In June 1789 the centre of agitation, which had lain for a while in the eastern faubourgs, shifted to the Palais Royal, where the Duke of Orléans and his retinue of orators, pamphleteers, and journalists had established their headquarters. It was from here that the crowd set out on the night of 30 June to release the eleven Gardes Français from the Abbaye prison, where they had been locked up for refusing to fire on Parisians who had demonstrated at Versailles against the attempt to dismiss Necker a week before. It was at the Palais Royal, too, that Camille Desmoulins and others gave the call to arms on 12 July, which touched off the Paris revolution; and it was from here that parties set out to destroy the barrières, to search religious houses and gunsmiths’ shops for arms, and to fetch grain to the central markets from the monastery of the Saint-Lazare brotherhood. The Palais Royal played its part again in preparing opinion for the march to Versailles in October; it was in its gardens and cafés that the Marquis de Saint-Huruge and his associates tried to force the pace by inciting Parisians to march at the end of August; and with greater success, its orators repeated the incitement on 4 October. In the years to come the arcades and gardens of the Palais Royal (soon to be renamed the Maison de l’Egalité) became notorious as a haunt of prostitutes, money jobbers, speculators and gamblers rather than of political journalists or orators; but it reappeared as a centre of agitation after Thermidor: it was the scene of verbal exchanges between muscadins and sans-culottes in the spring of 1795, and of more violent outbreaks between royalist youth and republican troops in the days before Vendémiaire. (1967:215–16, original italics) We have in the cosmopolitanism and the activism of the Palais Royal not only a metaphor for modernity, but also a strange combination of the socially central with the socially marginal, which leads me to suggest that we characterize the Palais Royal not as a utopia, an island of a nascent but perfectly formed modernity within the midst of a society still defined by the Ancien Régime, but as a heterotopia, or a place of Otherness, that expressed an alternate ordering of society through its contact with the society that it despised (see Foucault 1986a). The cosmopolitanism and apparent freedoms of the Palais Royal from courtly codes of social behaviour, represented in a space like Versailles (see Elias 1983) allowed those who were otherwise excluded from office to use this place as a site from which they were able to give voice to their views and to mobilize popular support for change. The Palais Royal was not, however, defined by everything that was Other to the Court and to Versailles, but through its mingling of the old of the aristocratic order, courtly manners and interactions with the new of bourgeois commerce, philosophy and politics. And both were at the same time enmeshed in hedonism and consumption. The issue of what was central or dominant and what was marginal was not always clearcut and that is important.

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Across both the social sciences and the humanities over the last thirty years or so, a major impetus has been to allow the voice of the powerless or marginalized within society to be heard. While such a position has long existed within Marxism, recent feminist, black, gay, third-world and ‘subaltern’ perspectives have both questioned the orthodoxies of academic study and put onto the agenda formerly marginalized issues for research. The position of the Other and the validity of difference, hybridity, transgression and uncertainty have become significant political as well as academic issues and some writers have given them the slant of geographical analysis (see Bondi and Domosh 1992; Keith and Pile 1993; Rose 1993; Bell and Valentine 1995). The margins have come to be re-evaluated as the space for the empowerment of the marginalized, and of the importance of marginal practices (see Shields 1991). In effect, margins have come to be seen as sites of counter-hegemonic resistance to the social order. ‘Other places’ have become the space of Other voices. In marginal spaces, people not only raise their voices to be heard but are seen to live different, alternative lives, openly hoping that others will share in their vision or at least accept their difference (see Hetherington 1996b). In sum, the major theme of cultural geography over the past few years has been the valorizing of margins in terms of their importance as sites of resistance, protest and transgression. All of these acts can clearly be seen in the example of the Palais Royal in the 1780s. However, my main concern in this book, paradoxical as it might appear at this stage, is less with the issue of resistance and marginality, and more with that of order. My general criticism of this approach to margins is that the image of a counter-hegemonic margin that acts as a site of resistance, offers us an image that oversimplifies, through a process of polarization, the issues of marginality, difference and Otherness. Difference, being different to the accepted norm within a culture, while it is indeed a source of marginality and of resistance to marginalization, is always also implicated in a social ordering, even if at the most fundamental level, it is opposed to everything that society, seen as a social order, stands for. If we are to overcome this simple polarization, between centre and margin or between order and resistance, we should speak here not of order but of ordering. Contrary to the traditionally held sociological position which tends to see order as a thing rather than a process, I take the view that order is not something fixed but a mobile process full of uncertainty, heterogeneity and contradiction (see Law 1992, 1994).5 Just as the process of social ordering creates positions of uncertainty, so those positions of uncertainty are implicated in processes of ordering and re-ordering. Ordering and disordering go together, as do centres and margins, in ways that are tangled, uncertain and topologically complex. I have suggested that the Palais Royal was a heterotopia rather than a utopia. This is a more useful concept to use than margin, even if it is often invoked as a substitute term for a marginal, liminal or hybrid space. It is the

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concept that I will use in this book to organize my argument, to try and make some sense out of the tangle of centrality and marginality or disorder and order. The literal translation of the Latin heterotopia, which is originally a medical term, is ‘place of otherness’. For Foucault, who is most prominent in using the term (1986a, 1989b) and who makes many references to the metaphor of the social body in his work,6 there exist places of Otherness, heterotopia: sites of contrast whose existence sets up unsettling juxtapositions of incommensurate things within either the body of society or within a text (1986a, 1989b). In the main, Foucault is interested in the heterotopic character of language and the way that a textual discourse can be unsettled by writing that does not follow the expected rules and conventions (1989b). He does, however, also go on to speak of heterotopia in relation to specific social spaces whose social meaning is out of place and unsettling within a geographical relationship of sites (1986a). While this later use has not been without its critics (see Genocchio 1995), it is a variation of this theme that I am using in the example of the Palais Royal, along with the other examples that appear later in this book. Heterotopia are places of Otherness, whose Otherness is established through a relationship of difference with other sites, such that their presence either provides an unsettling of spatial and social relations or an alternative representation of spatial and social relations. The question remains, what is meant here by Otherness? Otherness can mean a number of things, prominent among which are: something without (defined as different to the norm either within a culture or between cultures; see Said 1991), something excessive or something incongruous, a hybrid combination of the incongruous. There are other, notably religious, meanings of the term Other (see for example Levinas 1989). It is also the case that these different meanings are not always completely separate, they often overlap or exist at the same time. For my purposes, in focusing on heterotopic spaces and their importance to modernity, I consider Otherness mainly in terms of the incongruous, although I accept that some of these other meanings of the term cannot always be excluded. This Otherness has to do with different modes of ordering rather than simply with a contrast between order and resistance. Heterotopia do not exist in themselves, there is nothing intrinsic about the Palais Royal, or indeed any other site, that might lead us to describe it as a heterotopia. It is the heterogeneous combination of the materiality, social practices and events that were located at this site and what they came to represent in contrast with other sites, that allow us to call it a heterotopia. Heterotopia exist when the relationship between sites is described by a difference of representation defined by their modes of social ordering. For example, holding a festival next to a prison would constitute a heterotopic relationship, each space being used to order the social in very different ways. Either site could be taken as heterotopic in relation to the other but the likelihood, given that prisons are sanctioned within society whereas festivals are often not, is that the festival

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will be seen as the heterotopia. Within France in the 1780s, the Palais Royal was more like a festival than a prison, but that is not to say that it did not develop its own ordering process. It is just that it was a different ordering process to that of the ‘prison’. For Foucault, there are two principle modes of ordering: through resemblance and through similitude. It is the latter that we associate with heterotopia. The ordering represented by resemblance is a familiar one, social expectations developed over time assume that certain things go together in a certain order. These representations act as signs where what is being signified refers to a known referent. Similitude, however, is all about an ordering that takes place through a juxtaposition of signs that culturally are seen as not going together, either because their relationship is new or because it is unexpected. What is being signified cannot be easily attached to a referent. Foucault takes the surrealist paintings of Magritte as an illustration of the ordering process of similitude (1983). Similitude is constituted by an unexpected bricolage effect. This similitude can be used to challenge the conventions of representation. This representation may well be all about resisting or transgressing the cultural expectations that go into making up the idea of a social order. All the same, this similitude is still a mode of ordering (see Lévi-Strauss 1966). Just as certain modes of writing, like the automatic writing of the surrealists, might be said to be heterotopic because of the way they challenge our expectations and offer us a view of an alternative, so too can spaces, given their position within a society’s geography, be seen as heterotopic. I do not define heterotopia as sites of resistance, sites of transgression or as marginal spaces but precisely as spaces of an alternate ordering. My argument in this book is that heterotopia, when defined in this way, can be seen to have played an important role in the social and spatial ordering of modern societies. MODERNITY AND SOCIAL ORDERING The issue of social ordering as an uncertain process has to be at the heart of our thinking about the character of modernity. It is too easy to see modern societies as either regimented and totally ordered on the one hand, or in a state of continual change and flux that has no order, on the other. Indeed, these have become the two distinct perspectives on modernity—somewhat incongruous perspectives at that—to emerge recently, notably in relation to the idea of a Postmodernity.7 One approach to modernity, an approach usually identified with advocates of postmodernity, sees it largely in a negative light, as something based on an overwhelming desire to order around some grand design that began with the Enlightenment. In this sense modernity is seen as having an order that is driven by the Grand Narratives of freedom, progress, utopia and emancipation, which have effects that are anything but to do with freedom,

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and which end in overall social control and the marginalization of all those who do not fit into its grand designs. Bauman’s recent work on the Holocaust, seen as an event that emerges from this modern outlook and its desire to eradicate the signs of social ambivalence, is one of the best recent works that takes this approach (1989). The other tradition that has emerged alongside this critical approach sees modernity in quite a different light, not as something monolithic but full of uncertainty and ambiguity. Modernity becomes the embodiment of flux, change and ephemerality. Most of the writing in this tradition has tended to come from those attempting to re-evaluate classical social theorists by placing them back in the contexts in which they wrote as theorists of modernity who acknowledged its heterogeneous and uncertain character and, to some degree, valued it. Marx (Berman 1982), Simmel (Frisby 1981, 1985), and Weber (Whimster and Lash 1987; Scaff 1989) are some of the writers who have recently been reconsidered in this way. These works take the uniqueness and distinctiveness of modernity to be something central to the social theories of these writers; they take the issues of complexity and change, furthermore, to be at the centre of those theories and visions of the modern. Another version of this approach to modernity has suggested that only now, in the late twentieth century, are we fully becoming modern and arguments that modernity has come to an end are premature (see Giddens 1990; Beck 1992; Lash and Urry 1994). The position that I offer here can also be seen as attempting to bring back some idea of uncertainty into how we look at modernity. However, my study is not based upon an analysis of social theory, whether it be of one single classic writer or on modern social theorizing as a whole. By looking at modernity through some of the spatializing processes that emerged within it and their relationship to modes of social ordering, we can see uncertainty and ambiguity as central to the utopian vision of modernity rather than as things that always had to be subject to panoptical surveillance or planned eradication. Order is not something that always exists in a pristine state, fully formed. Nor is it something always intentionally created, it is instead a contingency effect that arises from ongoing social, and some would say technical, processes (see Latour 1988; Law 1992, 1994). The Palais Royal, important in terms of political protest, consumer culture and public sphere, shows us this heterogeneity and ambiguity very well. But we must not go too far in the other direction and see in this space a celebration of the ambiguous and anomalous in themselves. Out of the enlightened, hedonistic and revolutionary conditions of the Palais Royal emerged ideas about order and about processes of how society should be ordered, just as much as ideas about freedom. In describing the Palais Royal as a heterotopia, the alternate ordering it came to represent shows us this complex character. If the space was not a utopia in itself, not a space of the good and ordered life, it did at least have

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utopian pretensions. These pretensions had to do with the interweaving of the issues of freedom and control. That is what lies at the centre of this tangled space. Freedom, just like order, is more than an abstract idea, it is a situated social performance and an expression of agency. The alignment of the idea of personal freedom with conditions of social control is the basis of the social ordering that marks out modern societies and was born, I argue, in heterotopic spaces, like the Palais Royal. MODERNITY, UTOPIA AND UTOPICS Most of this book, then, is concerned with the relationship between freedom and control and the ways that they are woven into the spaces of social ordering. Another way of expressing this would be to say that it is about the relationship between utopia and heterotopia. Sociological approaches to the theme of utopia have tended to focus on a number of issues, notably: the supposedly perennial idea, dating from the time of Plato, of the creation of the good society; utopia as a literary genre (Kumar 1987, 1991; Manuel and Manuel 1979); utopian thinking and its influence on social theory (Mannheim 1938; Levitas 1990); or on small-scale, counter-cultural utopian experiments, communities and communes (Talmon 1972; Abrams and McCulloch 1976; Pepper 1991). While all are interesting and important issues in their own right, what I believe to be the most significant aspect of the utopian ideal, its translation into spatial practice, the means in which it has had a most lasting impact in shaping modernity, has been largely over-looked in this literature. The one notable exception is the work of Louis Marin (1984, 1992). Marin’s emphasis is on the manner in which utopian ideals, which were embedded in the idea that good, freedom and order were synonymous, have been used to help shape modern society through the ordering of its spaces (1984). For Marin, this is a process known as utopics, meaning quite simply, a spatial play on the theme of utopia. This term, which he derives from a deconstructive reading of Thomas More’s Utopia (1985), is associated with the ambivalence, or more precisely what Derrida would call différence (1976), contained in the original word utopia, which for Thomas More referred to both ou-topia meaning no place and eu-topia meaning good place. For Marin, who is neither concerned with ou-topia nor eu-topia directly but the gap between them, a space that he calls the neutral, this deferral expresses the utopian idea as a process of spatial ordering and disordering that tries to close this gap. Marin’s neutral, as I shall argue in detail in later chapters, is also Foucault’s heterotopia. We have perhaps come to think of such utopian spatial play within modernity as being exemplified, since Foucault’s comments on it, by Bentham’s utopian ideal of the panopticon, and of the so-called great confinement of the mad and criminal in carceral institutional spaces, associated with the Enlightenment thinking of the eighteenth century (Foucault 1977).8 Within this

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Foucauldian perspective on the spatiality of modernity, the ideas of the good place are transformed not into a perfect society but into spaces for the perfection of society and the individual within it. The spatial ordering of the deviant and their subsequent self-disciplining in sites of confinement becomes, for Foucault, the basis of his reading of the genealogy of the conditions of modernity (1977). This point is reflected in Bauman’s recent discussion of modernity as being about anxieties over social ambivalence and uncertainty in a period of dramatic social change, and the modern desire to eradicate that ambivalence (1987, 1990). For Bauman, the central defining feature of modernity that was prominent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the question of social order. For Bauman, the source of fear in modernity as the certainties of the ‘old order’ collapsed, was the lack of order in a world in which social relations were changing. This fear manifested itself through well known processes of scapegoating focused on a fear of strangers or ‘masterless men’ (Bauman 1987; Biere 1985). While Bauman can be seen to be following Foucault, notably in his understanding of modernity as involving ordering processes that aim to achieve a social control over ambivalence that leads those individuals to internalize the mechanisms of social control into a form of self-control, there is clearly also an echo of Durkheim’s discussion of anomie in his view of modernity (1964): social change, it is believed, leads to social dislocation and the threat of disorder, out of which a fear of ambivalence emerges that leads to the development of new processes of social control and order (Bauman 1993). A common criticism of these sorts of negative assessments of this utopian dream of total order and control has been that it allows no room for resistance. However, as I have argued above, it would be too simple to produce a reversal and simply celebrate acts of resistance and transgression in themselves without also raising the question of order. With Marin’s concept of utopics we are able to do this. A projection of the good into an idea of good control becomes the principle upon which social ordering of an idea of freedom emerges, rather than one in which the idea of freedom is done away with (Foucault 1977, 1982). This is clear in Foucault’s analysis, although not in his use of the panoptical metaphor. This brings me back to the issue of marginal spaces and the new cultural geography discussed above. It is my contention that heterotopia played a key role, as spaces which acted as obligatory points of passage (see Latour 1988) in producing a spatiality that expressed the utopic ideas of freedom and order through which we might begin to understand modernity. Heterotopia are sites associated with alternate modes of social ordering that are expressions of a utopic spatial play. They are the spaces, defined as Other, relationally, within a spatializating process, which, I believe, have this distinct utopic associated with them. Almost like laboratories, they can be taken as the sites in which new ways of experimenting with ordering society are tried out. Those that have succeeded, like the factory, have helped to define the character of modern society that has emerged around that ordering. Others, like the Palais Royal or

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the masonic lodge, have had a more partial and temporary importance. In all of them, however, this ordering is played out around the ambivalent, incongruous relationship that was at the heart of the idea of utopia, between freedom and order. It is what lies in that gap between the no-place and the good place that is of most significance; the gap between freedom associated with the ‘good place’ and the invisible and all pervasive ‘nowhere’ and yet everywhere of social order. In beginning my discussion of the themes of this book with a description of Palais Royal around the time of the French Revolution, I argue that if we look at some significant heterotopic sites, we can see an interplay between freedom and order that is both informed by and has helped to shape a utopics of modernity. The issues, then, are the relationship between utopics and the production of heterotopic sites, and the effects that that relationship has had in the process of modern social ordering. Here in the Palais Royal is an example of this interplay between a utopian desire of a better society that offered greater freedom and new forms of order and a heterotopia, a site of alternate social ordering. This site provides a glimpse of the public sphere, to be found in the eighteenth century in Europe, in which some of the issues of the ordering of modern society were developed.9 I have begun in this book with a site that can be seen as important to the geography of an emerging bourgeois public sphere. That public sphere has been subject to a number of analyses that have been extremely influential in shaping a view of modernity as it came into being in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Sennett 1986; Habermas 1989). As a space of reason and civility, a new mode of ordering has been associated with it. This ordering is linked with Enlightenment thinking, new codes of behaviour and the shaping of economic self-interest. In the work of writers like Sennett (1986) and Habermas (1989) a vision of a modernity perfected in this public sphere is offered. It is a public sphere based on the utopia of reason and civility. However, it could also be argued that we find in this public sphere not only the mobilization of reason in the name of a ‘just cause’ and the class interests that might be said to lie behind them, but also the mobilization of emotion and desire, of the more expressive aspects of social life that have to do with personal freedom, from the clandestinely sexual to the overtly political. This intertwining of the rational with the affectual is to be seen in the mobilization of the crowd in the Palais Royal during the French Revolution as well as with the activities that went on within the space of the Palais Royal. If one were to look at some of the spaces that made up the constituent parts of the Palais Royal this might become clearer. Markets, bazaars, theatres, streets, shops, gardens, arcades, brothels and coffee-houses are some of the key sites. In these spaces we see not so much a new order but a new ordering. Not a utopia on the grand scale but a utopic play at creating a different sort of space. In the rest of this chapter I will take one of these

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examples from the Palais Royal, the coffeehouses, to illustrate this utopics and its relationship to the issue of social ordering. THE COFFEE-HOUSES AND THE PALAIS ROYAL During the late eighteenth century, the Palais Royal was in some ways like Covent Garden in London, perhaps combined with elements of Hyde Park (see Burford 1990; Rogers 1949:108). Like Covent Garden, the Palais Royal was the site of many coffee-houses that were fashionable at the time. The coffee-houses, heterogeneous sites, as much used for gambling and for prostitution as they were for reading newspapers and political pamphlets, convey this utopics of modernity (see Ellis 1956; Billington 1980; Stallybrass and White 1986). The cultural significance of the coffee-house during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, according to Stallybrass and White, was that it was able to promote the carnivalesque conditions of the market place necessary for an emerging bourgeois civil society in a civilized way, removing all the uncertainty and heterogeneity that were associated with the market (1986: Chapter 3).10 Its utopics were the freedom of commerce and political discussion with the ordering of relations of trust required in a civil society defined by economic interests (see Agnew 1986; Sennett 1986). The coffee-house, taken as an idea by travellers to Egypt and Turkey and brought first to England and then France in the middle of the seventeenth century, suited the puritan culture of England especially well. It was a space associated with the drinks of coffee and chocolate that, unlike alcohol, were seen to promote a convivial and open atmosphere of intelligent discourse and debate (Ellis 1956). Coffee-houses were places open to all men although not women in England. Women were however, admitted to the cafés in the Palais Royal (Bradshaw 1978:32). On payment of a penny and recognition of the house rules, people were invited to mix with strangers of all social ranks and engage in discussions with them. During the late seventeenth century, the coffee-house became a site in which business transactions took place. The London stock exchange originated in a coffee-house, as did some of the major insurance companies like Lloyds (see Ellis 1956: Chapter 9). Coffee-houses were also places where auctions took place and where business was conducted. They became places of trust, places in which the conditions of capitalism were encouraged and allowed to develop in a regulated way. The coffee-houses of the Palais Royal, while they also had many of these features, were also somewhat different to those of London, notably in that they were also sites of journalistic activity and political radicalism that surpassed what Billington has described as the ‘mild, Whiggish reformism of the London Coffee-houses’ (1980:26). In France they had a more radical and subversive aura: they became political sites, associated largely with the figure of the Duc d’Orléans, who gave them an air of authority against the King’s court. As we have seen, during the Revolution, they were to become the

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gathering places from which political leaders like Camille Desmoulins could mobilize the revolutionary crowd. Although coffee-houses had opened in Paris in 1643, it was not until the eighteenth century that their popularity began to grow. By 1716, according to Bradshaw, Paris had 600 coffee-houses, a number which had doubled by 1788 on the eve of the Revolution (1978:27). The cafés were popular with the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and members of the literary elite. Rousseau and Diderot, in their younger days, were often to be found in the Café de la Régence in the Palais Royal (Bradshaw 1978:30). During the revolutionary period different political factions each had their favourite café in the Palais Royal: The Jacobins met at the Café Corrazza in the Palais Royal. Royalists liked the Bourbon, the Mirabeau, the Grand-Amiral. The Café Gilbert was Dantonist. At the Café Valois the Feuillants sat reading the Journal de Paris. The Enragés met at the Café Mécanique. Followers of Marat met at the Café du Pont-Saint-Michel…. Other militant ladies, the tricoteuses, shouted blasphemies and insults over their bad wine at the Café des Tuileries, whose windows had been bricked in to stop them staring at the Palace. At the fiercely republican Procope the garçon served Robespierre with baskets of oranges to clear his complexion…. His enemies met in the Café du Commerce. Lafayette was still adored at the Régence while the habitués of the Café de la Monnaie burned his effigy. At the Café Vert a monkey had been trained to leap at the throat of anyone who he heard denounced as an aristocrat. (Bradshaw 1978:32) Stallybrass and White have argued that the success of the coffee-house was that it was able to neutralize the social ambivalence associated with the market place, civilizing it by neutralizing all of the carnivalesque elements that were associated with the market and making the conditions of trade and commerce trustworthy (1986: Chapter 3). Another way of putting it is that as a heterotopic space, a space of an alternate and somewhat muddled and incongruous ordering, it performed a utopics of bourgeois interests in commerce and politics, promoting both the ideas of freedom and order. Central to Stallybrass and White’s discussion of the formation of bourgeois identity and its relationship to the public sphere, is a recognition that the production of this identity was coupled with an incorporation and negation of its other: What we have then is a perfect representation of the production of identity through negation, the creation of an implicit sense of self through explicit rejections and denials…. The public sphere is neither pure ideation nor something which exists only in and for itself: it is, like any form of identity,

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created through negations, it produces the very domains by taking into itself as negative introjections the very domains which surround and threaten it. It thus produces and reproduces itself through the process of denial and defiance. (1986:89) While leaving their comments about the topography of bourgeois identity somewhat under-theorized, Stallybrass and White do make it clear that such a process takes place in particular spaces like the coffee-house. Their argument expresses quite clearly, without ever using the term, the ordering principles found within heterotopia: places of an alternate ordering, caught up in the processes of transgression and resistance, and as well as that of order, informed by a utopic mixture of ideas about freedom and control, produced new ideas about order and new identities through an expression of forms of difference encountered there. They were neither spaces of rational debate nor of hedonistic pleasures but a mixture of the two and more besides. As Billington suggests, ‘The truth seems to be that the cafés provided not just a protected place for political meetings, but also the intoxicating ambience of an earthly utopia’ (1980:31). In particular, it was the informal, subversive and clandestine ambience that provided much of the revolutionary discourse of this public with their emotive and meaningful character: Hedonistic awakening was combined with political and intellectual discussion in an atmosphere of social equality and directness of communication that had been unknown among the aristocratic conventions of the old regime. (Billington 1980:32) For Stallybrass and White, the coffee-house is defined through a relation with the tavern as well as the market place, just as the Palais Royal as a whole might be defined as an alternative space to Versailles at one level and the Ancien Régime at another. That opposition, however, was not defined as a difference between two pure forms. As a heterotopic space, the coffee-house [C]ombined democratic aspirations with a space of discourse less contaminated by the unruly demands of the body for pleasure and release than that of the tavern. The coffeehouse was one of the places in which the space of discourse was being systematically decathected. (1986:97, original emphasis) The coffee-house became a space of the bourgeoisie and an embodiment of their utopian ideals first in London and later in Paris. They engaged with the Otherness exemplified in the tavern within this space and performed an ordering of their own identities and outlook in the process. While it is possible to agree with this position and recognize it as an important perspective on the

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space of the public sphere, Stallybrass and White do not fully spell out this process of encounter with this Other. They recognize but tend to play down the fact that coffee-houses were not only civil spaces of discourse but also often gambling dens, places where one could obtain drink, sites of sedition, and in many cases brothels (Ellis 1956; Billington 1980, Chapter 2; Burford 1990). Bourgeois identity expressed itself through the utopics of the coffeehouse, and created ideas about new modes of social ordering, associated with politics and the institutions of commerce, journalism and social encounters within the coffee-house. This heterogeneous mix of practices defines the coffee-house as heterotopic. Or in Stallybrass and White’s words: We have cause…to reflect on an unnoticed slide between two quite distinct kinds of ‘grotesque’, the grotesque as the ‘Other’ of the defining group or self, and the grotesque as a boundary phenomenon of hybridization or inmixing, in which self and other become enmeshed in an inclusive, heterogeneous, dangerously unstable zone. What starts as a simple repulsion or rejection of symbolic matter foreign to the self inaugurates a process of introjection and negation which is always complex in its effects. (1986:193, original emphasis) CONCLUSION The Palais Royal, with its coffee-houses, gardens, arcades and theatres, was the epitome of a heterotopia that played a significant role in the emergence of modern society in France at the time of the French Revolution. It can be read as one of the first sites in which the utopics of modernity, the ambivalent interplay of freedom and control, were expressed. This is reflected in both the social composition of its visitors and the openness of access and social mixing that it encouraged and its significance to the events of the French Revolution. What this site also reveals and what it can also be taken to illustrate, is the emerging utopics of a bourgeois society fixed on overthrowing ‘the dead weight of previous generations’ and producing new modes of social ordering. The Palais Royal allowed new conditions of sociality to come into being. A key question for me here has been: ‘Should we describe the Palais Royal as a utopia rather than a heterotopia?’ My answer has been no. As an idealised place, a place of the good life, the Palais Royal was not a utopia. Nor was it a place where a concerted attempt was made to create some alternative, utopian community, although it did at a later stage become the architectural model for Charles Fourier when he was drawing up the design for his utopian community which he called the Phalanstery (see Beecher and Bienvenu 1971). What is also true is that although the Palais Royal played an important role in the revolutionary events of the latter half of 1789, and it was for a time called the Maison d’Egalité, by the time of the Terror in 1793 however, the Palais Royal

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was being seen in a different light. It came to be associated with the counterrevolutionary forces, with intrigue, secrecy and plots as well as representing debauchery and deception (Ozouf 1989:195). In fact, the many festivals that were held in France during the revolutionary period, which came to celebrate the events that had happened in a patriotic light and became the utopian expression of a desire for a better society, were generally sited in open country, or in symbolically neutral spaces rather than in the sites of the Revolution like the Palais Royal (see Ozouf 1989). The Palais Royal, then, was not itself a utopia; it was not the model of a new society but contained within its walls, arcades and coffee-houses a transitional moment, or point of passage, that can be taken, in Marin’s terms, to be an expression of the utopics of modernity. As a space in which new processes of social ordering were tried out, it helped to define some of the ideas about the ordering of modernity. Marin’s ideas about utopics can help us to understand the utopian character of modernity. Just as Foucault’s analysis of heterotopia can help us to understand its spatiality. This book is not about the Palais Royal but about the utopics of modernity and the role that heterotopic sites played in the creation of new modes of social ordering. It is about what I have called ‘The Badlands of Modernity’, those somewhat uncertain zones that challenge our sense of security and perceptions of space as something ordered and fixed. The purpose of this book is definitely not that of a romantic celebration of the margins of modern society, the other side of the tracks, or of dangerous and mysterious places and what they might be taken to mean. By stressing the importance of such sites as sites of alternate ordering rather than simply of transgression, I aim to avoid any romance with the margins. I am trying to find a middle way, seeing places of Otherness neither as panoptical spaces of total control nor as marginal spaces of total freedom. Modernity is defined by the spatial play between freedom and control, and this is found most clearly in spaces of alternate ordering, heterotopia. In later chapters I look in detail at two further examples of such modern spaces, the masonic lodge and the factory, in order to further illustrate and develop the arguments that I have introduced here. The theoretical claims I have made about both utopia and heterotopia will be developed in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively, following a more detailed discussion of recent work on marginal space in Chapter 2. The Palais Royal, the masonic lodge and the factory. These then are my badlands, not perhaps the most obvious to choose, but their significance lies in their role as sites of alternate modes of social ordering important to the development of modern societies. There is a rationale, however, in choosing these particular spaces. The first two were very much associated with the political and cultural life of a new bourgeois class, notably associated with an emerging public sphere during the eighteenth century, while the latter came to be their main economic space. There are, of course, other examples of the spaces of modernity that could have been chosen here: museums, theatres, galleries,

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botanical gardens and so on. There are of course also other groups, based on class, gender and ethnicity, who have a different story to tell of their modernity. I have chosen examples associated with the dominant group in modern societies, the male bourgeoisie, as it is their view of modernity that other views have subsequently had to challenge. The Otherness of the Palais Royal—confused, contradictory, ambivalent and decidedly different from the society that surrounded it—shows how these conditions facilitated the development of a distinct utopics that was expressed through an alternate mode of ordering. Without wishing to sound too glib, if one wanted so sum up as concisely as possible the expression of this utopic that lay behind the mode of ordering which heterotopia like the Palais Royal performed, it could be done in three words: liberty, equality and fraternity.

Chapter 2

Margins, orderings and the laboratories of society

INTRODUCTION As we have seen over the past ten years, space has become one of the central issues for social theorists. We have seen the emergence of work from critical human geographers (Thrift 1983, 1996; Massey 1984; Gregory and Urry 1985; Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Cooke 1990; Shields 1991; Zukin 1991; Jackson and Penrose 1993; Keith and Pile 1993; Gregory 1994; Pile and Thrift 1995), feminist geographers (Rose 1993; Massey 1994) and cultural studies analysts (Wilson 1991; Carter et al. 1993; Bhabha 1994) that puts space at the centre of questions of social theory. Much of this recent cultural geography draws on earlier theoretical interest in space to be found in French social theory in the works of Bachelard (1969), Foucault (1977, 1980) and Lefebvre (1991). In addition, anthropolog y, which, much more than sociolog y, has had a longstanding interest in space (see Durkheim and Mauss 1963; Durkheim 1971; Turner 1969; Douglas 1984), has started to have a wider impact on spatial theory. While the subject matter of this new cultural geography has been diverse, there have been a number of key theoretical claims around which it has developed. First, space and place are not treated as sets of relations outside of society but implicated in the production of those social relations and are themselves, in turn, socially produced. Second, space and place are seen to be situated within relations of power and in some cases within relations of power-knowledge. Power is said to be performed through spatial relations and encoded in the representation of space (see Lefebvre 1991) or as ‘place myths’ (Shields 1991). Third, spatial relations and places associated with those spatial relations are seen to be multiple and contested. A place does not mean the same thing for one group of social agents as it does for another. In some cases something like a dominant ideology or hegemonic discourse of place is perceived (Lefebvre 1991) with the possibility for resistance left open within interstitial or marginal spaces and the opportunities they leave open for counter-hegemonic representations of space. Ideas of resistance and especially forms of transgression to the spatiality of 20

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power have become a major interest within this field. While this may have its origins in Lefebvre’s views on resistance to capitalism, these arguments have been picked up and developed through poststructuralist and feminist accounts of how the subject is constituted spatially, and furthermore how a spatiality of resistance emerges around forms of subjectivity (associated with race, class, gender and sexuality) that are marginalized in space (for example, Keith and Pile 1993; Rose 1993:137–60; Bell and Valentine 1995; Pile and Thrift 1995). The opportunities provided by places of resistance or places on the margin have therefore become one of the main foci that characterize this new cultural geography (see Shields 1991; Wilson 1991; Rose 1993: Chapter 7; Hetherington 1996a, 1996b). Since Hegel first used the term modernity to refer to a period in history (see Habermas 1987), the idea of a temporal dimension to social order has been a dominant theme within social theory. It is there in Marx and in most variations of classical sociology, with that social order being variously described as capitalism, industrial society, a gesellschaft, or indeed as modernity itself (see Berman 1982). It is largely due to Foucault’s work on prisons, asylums and hospitals, and most famously on his adoption of Bentham’s panopticon as a metaphor, that the space of modernity and its social order has begun to figure as equally important alongside the issue of time. In this chapter, I look at some of the assumptions about space, notably marginal space, that lie behind this turn to culture in geographical analysis. In particular, the works of Lefebvre (1991), Bakhtin (1984) and Turner (1969) have been especially influential. I then discuss the use to which their ideas about marginal space have been put within this new cultural geography, notably in Shields (1991), Wilson (1991) and Rose (1993). Finally I consider the whole issue of social order in relation to these issues of spatiality. Actornetwork theory (see Callon 1986; Latour 1988; Law 1994), with its focus on the process of ordering and on spaces like the laboratory that act as obligatory points of passage for this ordering, provides us with some means in which some of the problems encountered in cultural geography can be resolved. MARGINS AND RESISTANCE It will be clear from Chapter 1 that my criticism of the valorization of margins rests on seeing them as counter-hegemonic spaces that exist apart from ‘central’ spaces that are seen to represent the social order. All the same, I accept that something like margins do have some importance in the shaping of society. However, they have to be seen as more complex spaces than is usually the case, caught up in the processes of what I have called alternate social ordering. 1 Henri Lefebvre’s work, alongside that of Foucault, is an important starting-point for discussing these issues (Lefebvre 1991).2

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Lefebvre can best be understood as operating from within a humanist Marxist perspective, although his Marxism has always been rather heterodox in character, a counterpoint first to the orthodox dialectical materialism of the French Communist Party in the 1950s and then to the structuralism associated thereafter with Althusser (see Hirsh 1982). Even from within the humanist Marxist tradition, Lefebvre can be seen as a somewhat idiosyncratic thinker. Under the influence of both Nietzsche and surrealism early in his life (see Nadeau 1987:119), Lefebvre retained a belief, notably through his focus on everyday life as a field of political struggle, that it was heterogeneity of forms and spaces of resistance to the dominant social relations of capitalism that were the basis for potential social change (1971, 1991). In describing how space is produced within society, Lefebvre suggests that we should consider what he calls a triadic process, which consists of the relationship between ‘Spatial Practice’, ‘Representations of Space’, and ‘Representational Spaces’ (1991:33).3 For Lefebvre, spatial practice is associated with the production of a distinct space by social relations associated with capitalist production and reproduction. Representations of space are the hegemonic ideological representations associated with the space that is produced. It is Lefebvre’s belief that within the capitalist social formation, its spatial practice is rendered invisible as abstract space by the dominant representations of space, obscuring the social relations of power by which that space is produced. Space, in this account, can therefore be said to be fetishized in the same way that Marx argues that the commodity is fetishized in capitalist societies (Marx 1938). For Lefebvre, resistance to the dominant social relations must make this space visible. This resistance takes place through what Lefebvre calls representational spaces (sometimes translated as spaces of representation). 4 Such spaces Lefebvre describes as ‘embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art’ (1991:33). He goes on to suggest that representational spaces are [S]pace as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. (1991:39) Such spaces, therefore, are not sites as such but temporal situations, events, which occur in particular places that open up the possibilities of resistance within society to certain marginal groups or social classes.5 Again, the Palais Royal around the time of the French Revolution might be taken as an

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example. As we have seen, it was a space in which members of the Third Estate could meet and express their own interests in relative freedom, and at certain times, because of the associations with freedom that this space had, mobilize the crowd into acts of open revolt. Representational spaces are practices associated with places that have their origins in the realities of that everyday life, and in particular, through the realm of the imagination not immediate to the natural attitude, in resistance to the mundane and alienating features of everyday existence. In that sense, they contain a utopian element in the form of a desire for some form of improvement or change within society. However, the logic behind such spaces is not one of complete autonomy, but one which emerges, according to Lefebvre, from what are seen as the contradictions in the production of social space. Such contradictions are a characteristic of capitalist modernity. For Lefebvre, the production of capitalist space aims to achieve homogeneity and retain an abstractness that leaves it invisible. However, this process also produces contradictions that result in a condition of fragmentation that leads to the creation of a differential space that opens up the possibility for resistance in those areas of life and their associated spaces that remain unmediated by forms of commodification (1991:302ff.). Representational spaces involve making use of sites that have been left behind or left out as fragments produced by the tensions within the contradictory space of capitalism that lies hidden by its representations of space. The use of sites whose attributed meaning leaves them somewhat ambivalent and uncertain allows for these spaces, according to Lefebvre, to offer a vantage point from which the production of space can be made visible and be critically viewed. For Lefebvre, it is the task of acts of resistance, in such spaces, to make space as a whole visible, and in so doing reveal the social relations of power that operate within society. In this account, activities associated with the production of representational spaces, are dis-placed, such that marginality is let free; marginal groups, marginal practices and marginal ways of thinking help produce the meaning of the sites that are used in the creation of representational space. In the 1970s when Lefebvre was writing The Production of Space he had in mind the sorts of acts of resistance by students and workers that he had seen in the representational spaces of the campuses and streets of Paris in 1968. For Lefebvre, representational spaces are spaces of freedom. That is where the problem begins. If we were to apply this idea of representational space to societies of the late-eighteenth century, as in the case of the Palais Royal, the issues might be somewhat different. No doubt a simple analogy to spatialized acts of popular resistance, comparing the 1960s and 70s with the 1780s, would look at the crowd or popular street culture and festivals under threat from the authorities (Yeo and Yeo 1981; Ozouf 1987; Burke 1994). However, this would tend to assume that the social order of a capitalist modernity had already been

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established. But one can ask the question: what about the representational spaces of the middle-class merchants, factory and mill owners, intellectuals and others waging their own battles against the persistent, in some countries insistent, influence of the aristocratic landowner, absolutist monarch and church? It was this class, and not the working class, that sought to wage war against absolutism while at the same time establishing its own interests and authority within state, economy and civil society. The working class indeed did have their own representational spaces but they did not have a monopoly on them. The point that Lefebvre misses is that spaces of resistance are also spaces of alternative modes of ordering; they have their own codes, rules and symbols and they generate their own relations of power. This interplay between resistance and ordering is crucial to understanding the spatiality of modernity. Lefebvre’s representational spaces are marginal spaces but they are also counter-hegemonic spaces of freedom. The main problem with Lefebvre’s approach is that he does not allow for a relationship between freedom and order within these representational spaces, but wants to see them solely as spaces of freedom and resistance. ‘PLACES ON THE MARGIN’ AND THE POLITICS OF PLAY In some respects, Shields in his Places on the Margin (1991) has gone some way in addressing this relationship between freedom and order in representational spaces. Shields’ work draws heavily on that of Lefebvre and also Victor Turner’s analysis of liminal space (1969). He focuses on margins in relation to the social construction and production of space, described conceptually as social spatialization, and on the significance of places on the margins within the social production of space (1991). Shields develops a social constructionist theory of space, with particular emphasis on the significance of marginal, or liminal places (1991:29–65). He is concerned first with the imaginary geography of place and the creation of socially constructed accounts of place or ‘place myths’. His second concern is with places whose meaning are marginal and in transition. He sees the significance of such places as an opening for affective groups, or neo-tribes, engaged particularly in ludic and transgressive practices associated with the creation of new consumer-led identifications or lifestyles (1991:91, 1992). Through four case-studies of marginal places: Brighton; Niagara Falls; the relationship between the north and south in Britain; and the Canadian north, Shields shows how certain places attain a particular mythological meaning of marginality which develops an independence from their social construction to become a place myth. Such place myths, Shields argues, come to be seen as real and begin to influence the reception of a place in popular representations and imaginings. Place myths, for Shields, are the product of social practices out of which discourses about place and space are formed. Place myths are the outcome of

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what Shields describes as ‘social spatializations’ which involve the ‘ongoing social construction of the spatial at the level of the social imaginary (collective mythologies, presuppositions) as well as interventions in the landscape’ (1991:31). Place myths become a means of framing social performances, interactions and presuppositions about appropriate activities in particular places. The nation is an example of a place myth, but they can be seen to exist at both lower and higher levels of resolution. The body, a room, a house, street, town, city or continent, even the universe, can all be seen as having their own place myths. These are all imagined cultural formations that fit into a symbolic system of placing. Place myths are defined, therefore, not only by their own contested symbolic criteria, but also in relation to other places. Place myths also, according to Shields, form a system of differences. Although this point is not fully developed in Shields’ work, he does show, through the case of Brighton, how the beach in the spatialization of British culture acts as a liminal zone associated with pleasure between the seriousness of urban space and the arcadian place myth of the rural (1990). What is also less well developed in Shields’ approach is an understanding of the recursive relationship of the subjective and active engagement by agents in the production of place myths and their objectivization in discourses or symbolic cultural systems of placing. In short, there is a tendency to conflate the social construction of space with its social production, a tendency that sometimes confuses cultural representation with social action. A more important point that can be made about Shields’ argument is that he does not fully consider the place myth of the margin that he is reproducing in his own work. For Shields, margins are always linked in a binary way with centres. They cannot, he argues, be separated from those centres. Rather, their existence is either defined by the centres as all that is excluded from the centre, or as a site of opposition to all that the centre stands for (1991:276–8). While Shields is right not to treat margins as something unitary and exotic, his work reproduces and adheres to the idea of a binary relationship of centre and margin without fully exploring this relationship. In particular, when margins are seen in relation to resistance, this issue of centres and margins needs to be developed around questions of social order. Order and resistance tend to get polarized. Shields identifies a series of binary oppositions that exist within society: rational and ludic; civilised and nature; centre and periphery; social order and carnivalesque; mundane and liminal (1991:260). By identifying how these binarisms are encoded into the space of a society, he goes on to suggest that Real spaces are hypostatized into the symbolic realm of imaginary space relations. The world is cognitively territorialised so that on the datum of physical geographic knowledge, the world is recoded as a set of spaces and places which are infinitely shared with connotative characteristics and emotive associations. (1991:264, original emphasis)

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He then suggests that The resulting formation—half topology, half metaphor—is inscribed as an emotive ordering or coded geography. (1991:265) That ordering quickly gets coded into an order in his analysis of the margin. Shields’ work has been pathbreaking in the ways that it has opened up analysis on the social construction of space and place. His work is important because he aims to show how space, when incorporated into social theory, might enable us to see beyond these binary divisions and better analyse how the social is constructed. A focus on the margins, on the space that Lefebvre would see as invisible within the spatial practice, reveals its construction. Through forms of transgression and resistance, sometimes by social actors but more often through the examples of textual representations, the relationships between these binary codes is made apparent. But what is problematic in Shields’ account is that he reproduces one of these binaries in his approach to margins. They are treated as separate, even if relational, sites of playful transgression which help to reveal the social order. Their own ordering and their complex engagement with ‘centres’ remains unclear. A not-dissimilar approach to the analysis of margins, associated in this case with the nineteenth-century city, is put forward by Wilson (1991). She has developed a feminist reading of the modern city, aiming to bring out the relationship between women’s ambiguous relationship with city space and the construction of their condition of marginality. She attempts to show, through an analysis of the culture of cities, how women have been perceived as the Other of the city, a position which facilitates new opportunities for women (1991, 1992; see also Walkowitz 1992; Ryan 1995). Wilson considers how women have come to represent the Other of the city in terms of figures such as the prostitute or lesbian, and how the city comes to be seen as feminine through the promiscuity of crowds, consumption and temptation in male discourse. Woman, for Wilson, becomes the uncertain figure of the Sphinx who inhabits the Other places of the city. As such, the city becomes not so much a place from which women are excluded, in the way that other feminist writers on the city have suggested (see Wolff 1985), but a place whose uncertain spaces offer sites of resistance for women. Wilson’s work suggests, in the case of women, how a category of marginalised Other does not cease to exist in terms of placing, but inhabits the interstitial spaces within that system of placing that constitutes the city, notably the metropolis. Again the marginal is somewhat celebrated as a space of freedom, here for women, to explore their identities and their power. In itself, this of course is not at issue, it is just that this exploration is also associated with processes of ordering and classifying. This does not imply some loss of freedom but is the means by which freedom articulates itself.

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There are other feminist writers who have theorized the spatiality of women’s resistance through conceptions of Otherness, often within the context of a critique of the androcentric bias in most geographical writing (see Deusche 1992; Massey 1994; Bondi and Domosh 1992; Rose 1993). Rose, in particular, offers a seemingly similar analysis to those identified above through a concept of what she calls ‘paradoxical space’ (1993: Chapter 7). In her work, however, we begin to see a more complex analysis of the relationship between centres and margins. By paradoxical space she refers to the possibilities of multiple positioning in space that challenge the everyday oppression of women, notably though an objectification by a male gaze in space. By attempting to act differently from social expectations, by being Other in the territory of sameness (1993:149), not only do women empower themselves through refusal and constitute for themselves an identity on their own terms, but they also challenge the spatiality of their location, constituting it as an unsettling space. In so doing they create a place for themselves. In contrast to Shields and Wilson, who tend to maintain the separation of centres and margins, Rose wants to think beyond that binary divide. Her concept of paradoxical space is useful in that it suggests that women positioning themselves in ways that resist centrality and marginality offer a way of thinking about space that is not reliant on that neat separation. This is an important theoretical development that helps us think about the nature of social space as a more complex set of relations. The one issue that remains unresolved, however, is that Rose still relies on another binary way of thinking: between order and disorder, represented in terms of women’s resistance (as disorder) to patriarchal power (as order) through their positioning and constituting of paradoxical space. While Rose resolutely resists the suggestion that resistance is located on the margins in the way that these other writers do, the issues as to whether this order is a fixed entity and whether resistance is not itself a form of ordering remain unanswered in Rose’s account. Paradoxical space creates further interesting paradoxes. It is not just the question of the separation of centres and margins that it puts into doubt, but also the separation of order and resistance to it. It would be wrong, therefore, to see margins in themselves as the theme of my book. In focusing on the issues of freedom and order together rather than apart, I am interested in alternate spaces rather than margins—what I describe as heterotopia. Heterotopia are not margins in the sense that is conveyed above, but they are margins in the sense of the unbounded and blurred spacebetween rather than the easily identified space at the edge. Margins are spaces of traffic. They are spaces that contain both the central and the ‘marginal’ in ways that unsettle social and spatial relations. In some respects, however, I am concerned with what some of these recent analysts of marginal space have uncovered, notably the important relationship between space and forms of resistance and transgression, as was indicated by the opening account of the Palais Royal. But like Rose, I am keen not to see centres and margins as

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separate spaces. The Palais Royal was indeed both, when considered in relation to the wide range of social actors who occupied it. It not only acted as a space of resistance and a freedom from certain social constraints, but also as a space for the maintenance of patriarchal and class orderings of society. Rather than treat that social order as fixed and hegemonic in its shaping of social relations, identities or subjectivities, and then look at how it is resisted or transgressed from some separate and identifiably marginal site from which a counter-hegemonic position emerges, the purpose of this book is to show how that social order is never an order but an ordering that is itself continually changing, fixing and unfixing itself. There is no social order, only modes of ordering (see Law 1994) but this is not to say that there is no structure to society or indeed spatial relations, and it is certainly not to say that power does not exist within a society. THE MARKET AND THE CARNIVALESQUE: OLD AND NEW CULTURAL SPACES A further example through which we can look at these ideas about heterotopic space and social ordering is through the example of the market place. In Chapter 1 I took the Palais Royal as an instance for the condition of modernity and tried to express this not only by linking it with the French Revolution but by trying to convey this site as one of an alternate ordering of society to that which existed in France at the time. While the Palais Royal was a site of political intrigue and sedition as well as a site of carnival-like entertainment and hybridity, it was also a market place, the forerunner of nineteenth-century arcades and department stores. The market has always been an important space within a society, often associated not only with trade and commerce but, through fairs and festivals, with entertainment and ritual performances in which the existing moral codes and norms of behaviour are momentarily mocked and overturned. Within cultural geography the idea of the margin as a counter-hegemonic site of resistance has been combined with an interest in the practices of consumption and in the space of the market (Shields 1992; Gregson 1995). Shields, again, has developed this theme of the carnivalesque associated with markets in relation to new spaces of consumption and pleasure (1989, 1990, 1991, 1992). The beach as a marginal space, along with the seaside resort, is one such space that has been discussed (Shields 1990, 1991). However, it is another space, the shopping mall, a market space with its exuberant and excessive emphasis on the pleasures of consumption, that has received most attention (Chaney 1982, 1993; Shields 1989, 1992; Featherstone 1991). The market place has in the past been a pre-eminent paradoxical space associated with strangeness and Otherness: it creates a world of the unfamiliar, chance encounters, the exotic, the pleasurable, and with throwing off social constraints in which the centre and the margin as distinct spaces

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are blurred (Addison 1953; Bakhtin 1984). As well as a site of capitalistic trade and associated forms of rational calculation, the market place has traditionally been a space where one might come into contact with people and activities which in any other space would be considered unusual and transgressive (see Stallybrass and White 1986). The market place has, therefore, always been associated with the ambivalent, the profane, the strange and the disrespectful as well as with trade and commerce. The world of the medieval market place has always been as a space in which strangeness and ambivalence are of central importance. A seminal account of the world of the market and its carnival atmosphere can be found in the work of Bakhtin (1984) and his discussion of the carnival and festival themes found in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Much has been made recently of this study in relation to themes concerning the playful, ironic and transgressive nature of contemporary cultural change (see Castle 1986; Stallybrass and White 1986; Fiske 1989:67–102; Shields 1990, 1991; Featherstone 1991:79–83). Bakhtin’s work looks at medieval popular culture and the influence it had on Rabelais, and considers the role of laughter, the mocking of civil and ecclesiastical authority, the inversion of cultural norms and the emphasis on the grotesque, secreting, sensual and desiring body, in the creation of what he calls the carnivalesque (1984). This carnivalesque culture, associated in particular with the market and the fair, is a highly theatrical spectacle in which people assume personae through the use of masks and costume, and behave in an excessive way. This occurs most notably on particular feast days like Shrove Tuesday or April Fool’s Day, which, according to Bakhtin, are celebrations of freedom from everyday constraints and provide a release, notably through mockery, from the fear of death.6 The carnivalesque emphasises transgressions of moral sanctions and normative behaviour and strange behaviour through the assumption of the persona of the Other. This transgression takes place, as Stallybrass and White suggest, through a process of symbolically inverting the meanings associated with established binary codes, notably the classical—grotesque duality where normally all that is classical dominates over the Other category of the grotesque (1986:18). The grotesque is celebrated at the expense of the classical in carnivalesque performances. Thus a strategy of resistance emerges, utilizing the body, which celebrates the categories of Otherness through acts of transgressive wastefulness, eroticism, bad language and the rejection of taboos. The grotesque body becomes a site of heterogeneity, waste and excess. In this body the symbolism of the high and the low are reversed; dirt, gluttony and waste are celebrated, the body loses its boundaries, it acts as a site at which all forms of authority and decorum are mocked. The body comes to express matter out of place, the ‘slimy’ in Douglas’ terminology (1984). In other words, this grotesque body, as Stallybrass and White put it, becomes a site of ‘mythopoetic transgression’ (1986:24). Situating this body in space makes the familiarity of that space appear uncertain and ambivalent. The space of the

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market takes on the character of the social spatialization of hybridity and transgression as a consequence. In the carnivalesque, there is an association between such performances and the spaces in which they occur. As a site of such ambivalence, the market place is the model case. In the context of debates surrounding postmodernism, this carnivalesque mocking through utilizing the Other category in binary codes has tended to be seen in terms of the breaking down of high—low cultural distinctions, such that all that is low, tasteless or kitsch is celebrated as culture at the expense of high art, and in mockery of the intellectual taste associated with all art assumed to be of quality. What interests me here, however, is the spatiality of the carnivalesque. In the time of Rabelais and until the eighteenth century the market place was a theatrical space of encounters with both the familiar and the strange (see Agnew 1986). It was this ambivalence which allowed the market place to be seen as a marginal space where the ambivalent and transgressive practices of the carnivalesque were allowed to take place. And yet transgression should be seen as another mode of ordering rather than an absolute break with order. This point is made by Stallybrass and White in their discussion of the market place (1986). Their account of the role of the carnivalesque in the constitution of bourgeois identity criticises Bakhtin for his over-emphasis on the transgressive freedoms associated with carnival festivities. Such practices were tolerated by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities during this period (1986:10). The market, especially in relation to its association with the fair, gathers and organizes nearness and remoteness into a unity. The market, while it might be associated with the town in relation to the countryside, is also a place that can be contrasted with itself at different times. Market day, Saints’ days and festivals in which the carnivalesque makes its appearance are temporally situated in relation to other times. At certain times the ambivalence associated with the space of the market is made apparent: the mingling of the near and far, town and country, locals and strangers and centrality and marginality, are made apparent and used in a moment of festival which reaffirms the continuity of social existence. The market place, in other words, as well as being a space of transgression and freedom, was also a space of ordering and control. Over a considerable period of time and largely in relation to the responses to popular culture set in motion by the Protestant Reformation, the attitude to the carnivalesque changed from one of tolerance to one that sought to suppress it and its spatiality (see Yeo and Yeo 1981). Not until the nineteenth century can the carnivalesque in Protestant countries be said to have been contained or rationalized. The fair and carnival were transformed into rational recreations and the contemporary holiday. Looking back from this position in which fairs and markets are just shadows of their earlier form, it is easy to think of the medieval fairs and markets as spaces of freedom and subversion.

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Their role as spaces of regulation, articulated through controlled moments of disorder, tends to get forgotten. According to Stallybrass and White (1986), such a process corresponds to the emergence of the bourgeoisie as a dominant class. In their studies of literature on the fair; eighteenth-century novels on the grotesque body; nineteenth-century fears of pollution and disease in cities; the sexual fascination of bourgeois men for their servants and prostitutes; and the carnivalesque themes in the dreams of Freud’s bourgeois hysteria patients, they show the ambivalent response of the bourgeoisie to all that is associated with the carnivalesque. Such studies show a mixture of fascination and horror with their grotesque subject and exhibit the need to control through a process of sublimation. The Other, as a source of horror, emblematic of all that is associated with the carnivalesque, is a continual theme of bourgeois culture, continually exposed and considered, but in reality controlled and repressed.7 While the examples might be limited, the significance of this work lies in the emphasis it places on such forms of resistance not as rational and discursive, but as the ludic, ironic affectual involving a high degree of communitas (see Maffesoli 1988, 1996; Featherstone 1991; Shields 1992). In a society where production is the dominant mode of signification that marks out that society’s sense of itself through its cultural practices like those associated with shopping and consumption, the rational calculation that it promotes has tended to inform the rituals of political resistance (or at least replace earlier more playful forms of ritual resistance). In a society where consumption is the dominant form of signification, the emphasis on forms of behaviour stresses more affectual and expressive modes of behaviour (Campbell 1987), then it is likely that political acts of resistance will take the forms associated with this, with the emphasis on more ‘cultural’ than overtly political acts. As such the transgressive nature of the carnivalesque will again become important, as will its more overtly spatial nature, given the significance of using symbolic acts, theatrical performances of resistance. However, in Bakhtin, as well as in the work of more recent geographies of transgression and resistance, the marginal site becomes a free site, celebrated as a space apart in which people can be and act out difference in ways that challenge the social order. What is missing in these accounts is a recognition that such spaces and such practices have their own way of ordering. The identities that are produced in these spaces, while they may be different and somewhat unsettling and challenging to the many who are happy not to challenge cultural norms, have their own logic, their own symbols, their own rituals and their own ordering. The same can be said of the spaces themselves. There is no space that is free from ordering in some form or another. The medieval market, the fair, the beach and the shopping mall are all sites in which activities are in some way ordered, even if that order does not appear to be rigid and confining.

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In sum, two main points need to be made about this recent fascination with marginal space. First, when margins are established as distinct sites like the beach or distinct sites at specific times like the market, they do not exist as separate spaces with no structure but in relation to other sites and therefore with some alternate structure and social ordering logic. Second, not all marginality or difference is defined by a particular space. On many occasions different practices, practices somehow different to those that are expected, define a site as marginal momentarily because of the unsettling experience one finds there. It is important to recognize that both marginal space and forms of resistance and transgression are never free from forms of order, it is just that this order is an alternate one established in relation to another through the practices in which it is inscribed. This has been convincingly established by anthropologists in their discussions of rites of passage, from where the much used concept of liminality has recently been taken. SYMBOLIC SPACES: LIMINALITY, TRANSGRESSION AND ORDERING Like the terms margin, carnivalesque and transgression, the anthropological term liminality has also played an important part in recent discussions of space within sociology and cultural geography. Again, the emphasis has tended to be on issues of freedom and playfulness rather than order, but liminality is all about the relationship between freedom and order. The term liminality comes from an initial concern with the symbolic ordering properties of the spaces that are associated with rites of passage in small-scale societies (van Gennep 1960; Turner 1969, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1982). Rites of passage are rituals associated with life changes that require the move between different statuses, states, ages or places. Rites of passage are concerned with the ways in which people are socially ordered within society. They involve a process of symbolic transition that van Gennep suggests can be separated out as a process into three stages: separation, margin and reag-gregation (1960:11).8 In the first stage, a person who at a particular point in their life is required to move on to another point, such as from childhood to adulthood, or other life stages such as marriage, is required to go through a set of initiation rituals before they can take on their new state. They are separated physically from the rest of their society and stripped of any previous status and identity. Once this has been achieved, they exist in a liminal or marginal phase. Liminality is associated with a transgressive middle stage of a rite: it is often marked out spatially as a threshold, or margin, at which activities and conditions are most uncertain and in which the normative structure of society is temporarily suspended or overturned. People here are subjected to ritualized ordeals that mark the distinctiveness and the in-betweeness of their non-identity. The spaces that they inhabit are also seen as ambivalent and marginal. Magical powers might be attributed to those in the liminal state and to the

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spaces with which they are associated. In the final stage of a rite of passage, the person is reintegrated into society as a new person. In small-scale societies, liminal rituals, as rites of passage, are an important part of the life of the people. According to Turner, they also exist as a means to self-understanding by a particular society and as a means of renewal of that society through a process of restructuring (1969). This liminal phase is characterized by acts of transgression or inversions of everyday, mundane practices. Turner identifies two particular types of liminal rituals in small-scale societies: rituals of status elevation and cyclical rituals (1969:167). In terms of their relationship with the carnivalesque as a significant form of resistance associated with marginal places, it is the latter that are of significance. Such rituals embody the principles of the world turned upside down, where everything becomes its opposite. For Turner, however, in small-scale societies such rituals embody not only acts of transgression but the means of reintegration and order. As he suggests: Cognitively, nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox. Emotionally, nothing satisfies as much as extravagant or temporarily permitted illicit behaviour. Rituals of status reversal accommodate both aspects. By making the low high and high low, they reaffirm the hierarchical principle. (1969:176) While liminal rituals such as marriages, christening, funerals and various ceremonies associated with changes of status along with cyclical rituals such as festivals and public events still exist in large-scale complex societies, their significance as an integrating and totalizing means of social renewal is weaker and more fragmented than in small-scale societies (see P.Werbner 1986). In order to retain some sense of liminality in modern societies, Turner makes the added distinction between what he calls liminal rituals and liminoid rituals (1982). Liminoid rituals resemble liminal ones in many structural respects but also have a number of notable differences. First, liminoid rituals are achieved rather than ascribed; whereas in the liminal rituals of small-scale societies there is no choice involved in rites of passage, in socially differentiated western societies there is. Second, as a consequence of their achieved status, liminoid rituals are weaker as sources of social integration than are liminal ones (Turner 1982:33). Liminal rituals involve constraint as well as freedom, liminoid rituals are said to be more ludic in character and do not require the same sorts of obligation as liminal rituals. A third difference is in the nature of the spaces involved. Liminal spaces are often clearly defined sites, betwixt and between in the way that they incorporate elements of both the sacred and the profane. They act as a dangerous and polluting margin, danger in the symbolic sense of the mingling of the sacred with the profane, and as such liminal spaces tend to be clearly demarcated and associated with

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their own practices. Although profanation may take place, it does so in a symbolically regulated manner. Although there are of course still sacred sites within modern society, there is not the same pervasive sense of the separation of the sacred and the profane. Liminoid spaces are therefore likely to be created out of spaces during particular events or in breachings of the mundane order (see Garfinkel 1967), effectively what is implied by Rose’s characterization of paradoxical space (1993). Turner, in particular, associates liminoid space with leisure activities and political protests that have a strong carnivalesque element, and sees the spaces as being ones associated with the individualism and personal freedom that such practices aim to achieve (1982). For Turner, one of the most important aspects of liminoid rituals, when freed from the association of liminality with social renewal and regeneration, is their significance as sites for the production of new symbols for new modes of living (1982:33). This is in keeping with his ideas on the duality of structure and anti-structure within a society (1969). In small-scale societies liminal rituals, as well as being rites of passage for individuals, are also meaningful collectively as means of ordering the social. The structure of a society is symbolically inverted through the transgression of its moral codes, a period of anti-structure, such that a process of renewal and regeneration can occur. Liminality is associated with anti-structure, passing moments of release, usually associated with festivals and ceremonies. In this sense Turner sees liminality as highly functional in its role within small-scale societies. In larger, more complex societies, this functionalism is removed; the association between liminality and social renewal comes to be seen as have a more subversive role at an intra-societal level in the form of social dramas (1974; see also Chaney 1993). While the idea of a liminoid space resists a functionalist interpretation, Turner, like Bakhtin and much of the recent geography of marginal spaces that draws upon their work, leaves himself open to the criticism of assuming that in play and in the invented rituals of the liminoid transgressor, there is no structure or process of ordering. This is not to suggest that social ordering is determined by functional prerequisites; however, it is necessary to see the process of transgression as also a process of ordering, even if the type of order it is hoping to achieve remains uncertain and contingent in form. Freedom has its own modes of ordering, quite simply because it is a relational state defined against forms of unfreedom. It is about defining what one wants against a prescriptive order, and in doing so, ordering alternative ways of being and acting. The heart of the problem here is that those who want to see margins and resistance as a source of political opposition within society are reluctant to see such activities as implicated with a notion of social order that they want to see challenged. This is a consequence of the fact that within sociology order has come to be seen as something monolithic, static, conservative and prescriptive (see Law 1994). To break the rules always appears to be about

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challenging social order. But that challenge, whatever form it takes and in whatever place it is found, will always be an alternate form of ordering. This is not to suggest that things will always return to the same order and that resistance is futile. Ordering is not just about fixing things in an established way so that things make sense, it is principally about ways in which social activities are arranged and distributed and the contingent effects of those arrangements (Law 1994). Ordering is not just simply something we do, as when we make lists; more significantly, it is something we are in (see Strathern 1991). Ordering is a performance context: social, technical, material, temporal and spatial, and this context is not fixed but open to infinite change and uncertain consequences. The Palais Royal was one form of ordering that agents found themselves in. It was a spatial context, socially and materially constituted, most significantly, for a short period of time in the late eighteenth century, through which a utopics of the modern was expressed as an alternative social ordering. That ordering was defined by activities that were not only transgressive and resistant but also revolutionary. Camille Desmoulins climbing up onto a table to deliver his speech, the ladies promenading in the gardens, the Comte de Sirrac startling the crowd as he zoomed about on his bicycle, and the crowd mobilizing to storm the Bastille, were all in this social ordering because it was something that they performed through their activities. This idea about social ordering as performance that I am suggesting here does not come specifically from cultural geography, nor specifically from the Durkheimian tradition in anthropology that Turner and others were working in, but more from the sociology of science and technology and a theory known as actor-network theory (see for example Callon 1986; Latour 1988; Law 1992, 1994). I want to turn to some of the issues raised about ordering by actor-network theory, not because in itself it offers us ‘the answer’ but because it allows us to see ordering more clearly as a heterogeneous and contingent process.9 In Latour’s analysis of the development of the process of Pasteurization and the constitution of the microbe, space and social ordering are important issues (1988). In the late nineteenth century the networks that make up science are not seen to be peopled by Great Men using their minds to transform the way we think about the spread of diseases, but of networks of actors including the followers of Pasteur but also his opponents, a ‘social movement’ of hygienists, scientific journals, laboratories, scientific instruments and a whole array of other interested parties and their role in the production of new actors, most notably the microbes themselves. Latour uses imagery and language from war: strateg y, mobilization, allies, strug gle and battles, to account for the development of the scientific constitution of the microbe (and indeed the constitution of science by the microbe).10 The network of actors engaging with one another and mobilizing new actors who are seen to ‘act’ as an effect within a network. The main issue for Latour, as it is for other theorists of

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actor-networks, is one of translation (see also Callon 1986). Within a network the actions of one actor are translated by another in their struggles and alliances with one another. For Latour, the Pasteurians, in their attempt to establish their claim of having discovered a new agent in the field of disease— the microbe—translated the actions of the existing social movement of hygienists in France at the time. Similarly the hygienists were not slow to translate the actions of the Pasteurians when making their claims about hygiene (1988). Translation has to do with ordering through association rather than with conscious decisions. Within a network there are materials that act by associating with other actors. Some actors are mobilized as allies and others as opponents—the actions of one are translated by another—sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. Social ordering can be seen as an effect of these translations. For instance, the ‘discovery’ of the microbe and the attempt to make it real emerges from the mobilization of allies and struggles against one’s adversaries. As in any battle one tries to take the key ground so as to have a better position from which to marshal one’s forces and attack the enemy. The laboratory, Latour shows us, is one such key space, an obligatory point of passage in the networks of science (1988). Of course the laboratory existed as the place of science before Pasteur (see Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Shapin 1994) but as a site it is implicated in the ordering of science. The laboratory site comes to be seen through the ordering processes engaged in by science, and in turn comes to help order and define the character of that science. It is a space that orders in the sense that action is translated through its ordering as a space. The laboratory was not only the place in which microbes were studied and made to exist as actors; the microbe, once it is made to exist, has an effect in making the laboratory. The microbe gives meaning to the laboratory through its translating effects just as the laboratory gives meaning to the microbe. The meanings of this space are not created in the minds of the scientists and then communicated to others through the process of learning, but through the processes of ordering that take place in them. Such sites, like the laboratory, are sites of resistance and transgression. And the processes of transgression and resistance become forms of ordering. Spaces like the laboratory are socially and technically constructed, contested, heterogeneous, partial, contingent and deferred. They act as important nodes, obligatory points of passage for the development of new modes of ordering. In a more recent study, Law, through an ethnography of a scientific laboratory in England in the late 1980s, has tried to show how such modes of ordering are performed (1994). Law is strongly critical of what he calls modernist sociology with its focus on social order. Sociology, he argues has always been more concerned with nouns than with verbs; with things rather than processes, hence the concern with social order as a thing rather than social ordering as a process (1994:15). Law describes the reductionism of sociology, turning processes into structures, as a fascination with ‘hideous purity’, itself

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part of the modern legislative project to know through order and the removal of all forms of ambivalence (see also Bauman 1987). In contrast, the sociology that Law wants to practice is one he describes as being characterized by accepting complexity, ambivalence, heterogeneity, reflexivity and difference as important and non-reducible to an order. Like the cultural geographers interested in margins, Law is interested in all forms of marginality, expressed in the form of uncertainty, but unlike them he recognizes that we cannot escape modes of ordering through the stories we tell, the representations we draw and the practices that we engage in (1994, 1997). These performances are all modes of ordering but they do not need to be seen as reductive forms of ordering, trying to reduce that ordering to an order. In the account of social ordering that I give in this book, I recognize, as indeed others like Latour and Law have, that I am engaged in a process of social ordering. My purpose is to describe how a certain sense of modernity is produced through a social ordering of space, but I neither try to define modernity through that process nor turn that process into a thing. The question I have set out to answer is ‘how does space fit into this story of social ordering?’ CONCLUSION The Palais Royal, like the nineteenth-century laboratory, was an obligatory point of passage where a process of ordering was expressed through the actions of its participants. While it may have been the political agitators and the revolutionary mob they mobilized which had the most dramatic effect in changing the course of French history, the prostitutes, shopkeepers and courtiers all gave the Palais Royal its character and were all part of its ordering. This ordering was not fixed and should not be seen simply as a site in contrast to the rest of France at the time. The real significance of sites like the Palais Royal is not that they are marginal places from which people can thumb their noses, counter-hegemonically, at the rest of society, nor is it that they are more complex, disordered or uncertain than any other site; rather the significance of such spaces is that they act as obligatory points of passage through which an alternate mode of social ordering is performed. Some sites are more effective at this than others. Such sites take on the character of spaces of alternate order, which I shall describe below. Really, this is what marginality (Shields 1991), paradoxical space (Rose 1993) and liminality (Turner 1969) are all about. To resist or transgress or play is to do more than that, it is also to be engaged in a mode of ordering. By looking at a number of significant sites like the Palais Royal, one should be able to get a picture of some of the ordering processes that make up modern societies and see in particular the importance of space to understanding the development of the orderings of modernity. I said above that ordering was not simply something we did but something we were in. We, as actors, are being

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ordered both by our own actions and by the actions of others. Before going on to look at two spaces in detail, the masonic lodge and the factory, I want to further develop the arguments I have begun here. In the next two chapters I look at the issue of social ordering by suggesting that the spaces that acted as obligatory points of passage be characterized as heterotopia and that the ordering process that took place was based on a utopics that wishes for both freedom and social order (see Marin 1984).

Chapter 3

Two castles Heterotopia as sites of alternate ordering

TWO CASTLES Behind Michel Foucault’s vision of modernity lie the shadowy images of two castles. The first is de Sade’s castle in his One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, a space in which the complete freedom of unrestrained, sadistic, male desire is acted out on the bodies of women and children with impunity (1990). The second is Kafka’s Castle, although it could also be the labyrinthine space of the law courts in The Trial. In either case, it is a space of the absolute irreproachable power of bureaucracy and the law. Both are obligatory points of passage in which freedom and control extend beyond their own limits and mingle with one another. Both spaces are examples of heterotopia. In the first we find a space of unlimited individual freedom, a freedom that pays no heed to moral sanctions over one’s sexual conduct, a freedom that endlessly has to outdo itself in its severity and absolutism. This is a freedom that is defined by its desire to totally control its victims. If, in this Sadean vision, freedom is allowed total control, in the second, the Kafkaesque vision, it is social control that is allowed total freedom. Here there are no limits to which surveillance and discipline cannot be exercised: The ideal point of penality today would be an infinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of examination, a procedure that would be at the same time a permanent measure of a gap in a relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptomic movement that strives to meet in infinity. (Foucault 1977:227) Of course, the issue is one of perspective. For the victims of such spaces, their meanings would be different. Indeed, we might also say that each space is the mirror image of the other. In both, the individual, perpetrator and victim 39

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is defined as a subject. But the point is not just one of perspective: for Foucault at least, the issue is mainly one of the constitution of subjectivity within the uncertain nexus of freedom and control defined by such spaces (1986a). Heterotopia are spaces in which an alternative social ordering is performed. These are spaces in which a new way of ordering emerges that stands in contrast to the taken-for-granted mundane idea of social order that exists within society. As sites of an alternative ordering, both of these castle spaces unsettle us. They are set up to fascinate and to horrify, to try and make use of the limits of our imagination, our desires, our fears and our sense of power/ powerlessness. They are spaces of the sublime. Both insist on a compulsion to order, and that ordering derives from a utopian view of modernity as an exercise in both freedom and control in all its ambivalence.1 In the previous chapters I have argued that looking at social space can provide both a distinct and important perspective on key aspects of modernity. More specifically, I have argued that the process of modern social ordering has had a distinctly spatial character to it. That spatial character is a heterotopic one. I illustrated these ideas in the first chapter through the example of the Palais Royal. In Chapter 2, I discussed the recent importance that has been attached to the idea of marginal space and argued that margins had to be seen as sites of social ordering as well as of resistance to order. The spaces that both de Sade and Kafka conceived are distinctly modern spaces concerned with the issue of social order. They define for us the extremes of modern ways of thinking, from sexual libertinage and the celebration of a libertarian individualism on the one hand, to the absolute liberty given to the bureaucratic apparatus on the other. In both, that modernity is an expression of agency, a coming-into-being of actors through their capacity to make use of their freedom to control others. They come into being as desiring machines (Deleuze and Guattari 1984) and as judges with absolute authority to define their actions and the actions of others within their own citadels or castles. In so doing they also define themselves and become the subjects of their own control. In this chapter I discuss in some detail what the nature of such space means to modern society and in particular how this concept of heterotopia might be deployed. This will entail a critical review of some of Foucault’s writing on the issue, as it is Foucault who has most clearly developed the concept of heterotopia and suggested its importance to understanding the spatiality of the social ordering of modernity (1977, 1984, 1986a, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c). Heterotopia has become something of a fashionable word within cultural studies and cultural geography in recent years (see Teyssot 1980; Connor 1989; Soja 1990; Delaney 1992; Chambers 1994; Lyon 1994; Bennett 1995; Genocchio 1995; Hetherington 1993, 1996a, 1996b). It is a word that has been much used but little theorized. While there are notable exceptions (see

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Soja 1990; Genocchio 1995), there has been little discussion of the uses of the concept outside the context of Foucault’s cursory comments (1986a, 1989b). A further point is that the concept of heterotopia has most commonly been used more in association with ideas about postmodernity rather than modernity (see Connor 1989; Soja 1990; Lyon 1994). It is a term that has a certain amount of heterogeneity about its use, and it is necessary to highlight some of the ways that the concept has been used before going on to show how I intend to use it here in the context not of postmodernity but of modernity. Sometimes the word heterotopia has been used directly, other times it has been substituted with marginal space, paradoxical space or third space. There are in fact six ways in which the idea of such as space has been used in recent analysis: 1 As sites that are constituted as incongruous, or paradoxical, through socially transgressive practices (see Rose 1993). 2 As sites that are ambivalent and uncertain because of the multiplicity of social meanings that are attached to them, often where the meaning of a site has changed or is openly contested. Soja uses the example of heterogeneity of downtown Los Angeles to illustrate this use (1990). 3 As sites that have some aura of mystery, danger or transgression about them; places on the margin perhaps (Shields 1991). 4 Sites that are defined by their absolute perfection, surrounded by spaces that are not so clearly defined as such (see Foucault 1986a; Delaney 1992).2 5 Sites that are marginalized within the dominant social spatialization (see Lefebvre 1991). 6 Incongruous forms of writing and text that challenge and make impossible discursive statements (Foucault 1989b; Chambers 1994; Genocchio 1995). In defining heterotopia as spaces of an alternate ordering, I have tried to bring some simplicity and some clarity to this issue. Such a definition does not rule out some of the above conceptions; instead it sees them as effects rather than definitions of such spaces. FOUCAULT, HETEROTOPIA AND SPACE Foucault’s writing on space has had a significant impact on the cultural geography that has emerged in recent years (see Soja 1989, 1990; Philo 1990; Shields 1991; Carter et al. 1993) often alongside developments coming from within feminism (see Wilson 1991; Rose 1993; Massey 1994) as well as from more traditional geographical perspectives (Harvey 1989; Gregory 1994). However, it is Foucault’s discussion of the spatiality of Bentham’s design for the panopticon in his Discipline and Punish (1977) that has received more attention than his comments on heterotopia. 3 The panoptical design of the

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carceral institutions as total institutions, have their origin in the systematic rational organization of space for the purposes of discipline and surveillance of categories of people constituted as criminal, sick or mad (Foucault 1977). The panopticon was a mode of ordering that was different from the accepted modes of ordering the criminal and insane at the time. It was indeed an example of a heterotopic space associated with the alternate ordering of deviance, in contrast to earlier regimes of incarceration and punishment. Foucault’s comparisons of these new carceral institutions with the space of punishment and dismemberment in the example of the regicide Damiens is an illustration of this issue of spatial ordering (1977:3–24). However, places of Otherness, heterotopia, have more often been conceived as examples of sites of an ambiguous spatiality associated with identity formation in relation to acts of resistance, rather than panoptical ordering and social control. In general, the term has been used to try and capture something of the significance of sites of marginality that act as postmodern spaces for resistance and transgression—treating them in many ways as liminal spaces (see van Gennep 1960; Turner 1969).4 It should be clear from my discussion of marginal space in Chapter 2 that this is too one-sided a view of heterotopia. Equally, however, we should not move too far in the opposite direction and conceive of all heterotopia as being like the carceral institutions such as the prison and the hospital. The paradox is that heterotopia can be either or indeed both. Spaces of total freedom and spaces of total control are both spaces of a social ordering. And so the possible wider significance of the idea of heterotopia, and some of the problems with its usage, has not yet been fully addressed (although see Genocchio 1995). I shall try and remedy that here. The term heterotopia originally comes from the study of anatomy. It is used to refer to parts of the body that are either out of place, missing, extra, or, like tumours, alien.5 For Foucault places of Otherness are spaces, whose existence sets up unsettling juxtapositions of incommensurate ‘objects’ which challenge the way we think, especially the way our thinking is ordered. Heterotopia have a shock effect that derives from their different mode of ordering. The two main places in his work where Foucault refers most explicitly to heterotopia are in the introduction to The Order of Things, where he discusses Borges’ now famous Chinese Encyclopedia (1989b:xvff),6 and in a lecture given to a group of architects in 1967 only released and published unedited shortly before his death in 1984 and translated into English as Of Other Spaces (1986a). In both cases the key issue raised is that of ordering. It is the juxtaposition of things not usually found together and the confusion that such representations create, that marks out heterotopia and gives them their significance. Heterotopia signify not through resemblance, as in the way a metaphor works—one thing being used to resemble another—but through similitude, more an example of metonymy, as in the manner that Magritte explores in his paintings, where meaning is dislocated through a series

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of deferrals that are established between a signifier and a signified rather than directly to a referent. This shift from modes of representing through resemblance to similitude is vital to the full understanding of the significance of heterotopia for Foucault. As Harkness suggests, in his introduction to the English translation of Foucault’s long essay on Magritte This is Not a Pipe: Resemblance, says Foucault, ‘presumes a primary reference that prescribes and classes’ copies on the basis of the rigor of the mimetic relation to itself. Resemblance serves and is dominated by representation. With similitude, on the other hand, the reference ‘anchor’ is gone. Things are cast adrift, more or less like one another without any of them being able to claim the privileged status or ‘model’ for the rest. Hierarchy gives way to a series of exclusively lateral relations. (1983:9–10) This is the main principle of a heterotopia for Foucault: as sites—and these can be textual sites just as much as geographical ones—they bring together heterogeneous collections of unusual things without allowing them a unity or order established through resemblance. Instead, their ordering is derived from a process of similitude which produces, in an almost magical, uncertain space, monstrous combinations that unsettle the flow of discourse (1989b:xvii). A further principle of heterotopia, one that derives from their significance as representing through similitude, is that they only exist in relation, that is, they are established by their difference in a relationship between sites rather than their Otherness deriving from a site itself. It is not the relationship within a space that is the source of this heterotopic relationship, for such an arrangement, seen from within that space, may make perfect sense. It is how such a relationship is seen from outside, from the standpoint of another perspective, that allows a space to be seen as heterotopic. HETEROTOPIA AS A SURREALIST THEME In looking at Foucault’s ideas about such spaces it is clear is that there is a strong surrealist theme running though his analysis, notably in his emphasis on similitude and the powers of random juxtaposition in creating alternative perspectives (although see also Canguilhem 1978). This is not something just found in the paintings of Magritte, although they are a fine example, but in some of the key surrealist texts and in some of the writings of those who followed the surrealists (notably Artaud, Bataille and Bachelard). One can find, for instance, a fascination with the sites of Otherness in Paris in the writings of Louis Aragon and André Breton. Through books such as Breton’s Nadja (1961) and especially Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1987) as well as in their everyday lives spent wandering through the forgotten areas of Paris, they went on a

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quest for a rejected spatiality of Otherness hidden within the mundane reality of the city: Man no longer worships the gods on their heights. Solomon’s temple has slid into a world of metaphor where it harbours swallows’ nests and corpsewhite lizards. The spirit of religions, coming down to dwell in the dust, has abandoned the sacred places. But there are other places which flourish among mankind, places where men go calmly about their mysterious lives and in which a profound religion is very gradually taking shape. These sites are not yet inhabited by a divinity. It is forming there, a new godhead precipitating in these re-creations of Ephesius like acid-gnawed metal at the bottom of a glass. (Aragon 1987:28) For the surrealists, the surreal product of the imagination had an autonomous existence. Surreality is the affirmation of a world of chance, affect and involuntary memory. Perceived in the manner of the freedom of the imagination, set free through the automatic production of images in meaningless poetry, automatic writing and the painterly representation of the unconscious mind, the world of the surrealist is a world of similitude rather than resemblance in which the wonder of the unconscious is revealed through metonymical juxtaposition of the otherwise incommensurate.7 The surrealists were, of course, not the first to show a fascination with the Other of the city. Before them stands the example of Baudelaire’s Flânerie at the time of Haussmann’s transformations of Paris (see Berman 1982:131–71; Clark 1984:23–78; and Frisby 1985:14–20; Tester 1994) and perhaps even earlier the fascination with wilderness and ruins found amongst the romantic poets. 8 However, the surrealist theme in Foucault’s ideas on heterotopia does not come directly from these sources but more from his interest in the surrealistinfluenced work of Bataille, Magritte and Artaud.9 Bataille, for instance, was fascinated with the idea of ‘liberatory’ release in the form of libidinous transgressive ‘religious’ practices and desires associated with ‘limit-experiences’ such as sexuality, madness and death (Bataille 1985, 1991). Notably, he exhibited a fascination for ecstatic, heterogeneous or liminal experiences of an erotic and violent nature, in which subjectivity was dissolved in the sacred, the divine social, ultimately found, for Bataille, in acts of human sacrifice (see Hubert and Mauss 1964). For Bataille, spaces of heterogeneity acted as vengeful incursions of the sacred into the disenchanted space of the profane, creating unsettling juxtapositions and ambivalences of a highly revelatory nature (Bataille 1985). The sacred, for Bataille, was embodied as an unrepresentable, labyrinthine spatiality of absence which realized itself through expenditure, the exuberance of excess, and the wastefulness of consumption; what Bataille called the accursed share, of which the potlatch is an example, in

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which things, and people, are destroyed (Bataille 1991). This is quite clearly the space of de Sade’s castle (see Bataille 1989). Another surrealist writer who deployed a notion of space similar to that of a heterotopia was Antonin Artaud in his two manifestos on the theatre of cruelty (1977). The main claim that Artaud made was that theatre had become separated from life; bourgeois theatre was too intellectual and had lost its original connection with feeling, emotion, the experience of the unconscious and the body, or in a word, with desire. He wanted theatre and life to become one, for the emotions of daily life to be reintroduced into theatre, making it a total experience and a shock on the senses of the ‘audience’. As a means of expressing desire, Artaud wanted theatre to become a direct and unmeditated situation that required feeling rather than intellectual analysis. In effect, we can say that Artaud wanted theatre to be a heterotopic experience, as can be seen from his enthusiasm for Balinese theatre (1977:36–49). In his first manifesto, Artaud set out his ideas on what such a theatre might be like. It was to be based on action rather than text and therefore required particular spatial expressions (1977:68). For Artaud, theatre was to be the language of space that ‘liberates a new lyricism of gestures which because it is distilled and spatially amplified, ends by surpassing the lyricism of words’ (1977:70). Such a theatre was to do away with the idea of a text, of a producer and of an audience in the conventional sense: Every show will contain physical, objective elements perceptible to all. Shouts, groans, apparitions, surprise, dramatic moments of all kinds, the magic beauty of all costumes modelled on certain ritualistic patterns, brilliant lighting, vocal incantational beauty, attractive harmonies, rare musical notes, object colours, the physical rhythm of the moves whose build and fall will be wedded to the beat of moves familiar to all, the tangible appearance of new, surprising objects, masks, puppets many feet high, abrupt lighting changes, the physical action of lighting stimulating heat and cold, and so on. (1977:72) Such a theatre was also seen by Artaud as the basis of the production of new symbolism (1977:72). It also required a space that was to do away with the separation of stage from auditorium and take place spontaneously in such a way that the peculiarities of the spatial setting be allowed to enliven the action. By application, such a theatre is a theatre of the body: this is an idea Artaud expresses through his concept of cruelty. With this Artaud means a hungering after life in its most passionate and immediate form, as a blind, unmeditated form of desire. For Foucault in his analyisis of heterotopia, there are similarities with Bataille’s thoughts on heterogeneity found most explicitly in the practice of sacrifice, and with Artaud’s on the transformational possibilities for the body

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in his theatre of cruelty (1986b). In one important sense then, heterotopia are the sites of limit experiences, notably those associated with the freedoms of madness, sexual desire and death in which humans experience the limits of their existence and are confronted by its sublime terror (see Foucault 1991). Heterotopic places are sites which rupture the order of things through their different mode of ordering to that which surrounds them. Such sites of limit experience can be seen to facilitate acts of resistance and transgression. However, there is another important but related role that heterotopia serve. They were also to act, for Foucault, as spaces for the means of alternative ordering through their difference and Otherness. That ordering can be the sadistic ordering of total freedom but it can also be the Kafkaesque ordering of total control: Either their [heterotopia’s] role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory.…Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. (1986:27) Heterotopia are not easily located within a system of representation but neither do they exist sui generis. Heterotopia do not exist in the order of things, but in the ordering of things. They can be both marginal and central, associated with both transgressive outsiderness as well as ‘carceral’ sites of social control and the desire for a perfect order. But in both cases heterotopia are sites of all things displaced, marginal, novel or rejected, or ambivalent. They are obligatory points of passage thats become the basis of an alternate mode of the ordering of those conditions. Through their juxtaposition with the spaces that surround them, they come to be seen as heterotopia. SOCIAL SPACE AND TEXTUAL SPACE In a recent article, Genocchio has provided one of the first, and to date most significant critiques of the use of the concept of heterotopia (1995). His critique rests on what he sees as the ambivalent use of the term to be found in Foucault’s two main references to it in The Order of Things and Of Other Spaces (Genocchio 1995:37). He suggests that in the latter, to date the more widely cited text associated with the term heterotopia, Foucault treats heterotopia as distinct sites such as brothels and prisons, while in the former and more radical usage (Genocchio implies) he refers to them as an unlocatable discursivity within language, using Borges’ ‘Chinese Encyclopedia’ as an example, which remain unrepresentable as a site. Genocchio levels a critique against the concept of heterotopia in Foucault, most notably in his usage of it as a site, by suggesting that to try and define and use an idea of

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difference as a counter-site is itself to undermine it through self-contradiction; arguing instead that Otherness derives from the impossibility of its being locatable or representable as a site (1995:38–9): [I]n any attempt to mobilize the category of an outside or absolutely differentiated space, it follows logically that the simple naming or theoretical recognition of that difference always to some degree flattens or precludes, by definition, the very possibility of its arrival as such. (1995:39)10 In other words, trying to identify sites as heterotopia is self-refuting because, Genocchio claims, the concept depends on maintaining its undefinable incommensurate character. Genocchio argues that it is this which gives heterotopia their power; to locate a heterotopia as a site and name it as such is to remove all of its alterity and make it a space like any other. Indeed, Genocchio goes on to suggest that any located and defined site can be seen as Other to some other site, making the concept somewhat meaningless, ‘Scouring the limits of the imagination, the question becomes: what cannot be designated a heterotopia’ (1995:39). Genocchio does not dismiss the concept altogether though but goes on to suggest that the radical incommensurable difference and Otherness of heterotopia rather than an ontolog y of heterotopia can still be implied if attention is turned to heterotopia as an idea about space rather than an actual place; an idea, or perhaps a practice, that challenges the functional ordering of space while refusing to become part of that order, even in difference. Genocchio’s use here of heterotopia has much in common with both Lefebvre’s notion of representational spaces (1991:33) or Rose’s paradoxical space (1993) or indeed the earlier example found in the situationists’ idea of creating ‘situations’: challenging or disruptive events that attempt to make people look on the transparency of the oppressiveness of their spatial order in a new way (see Debord 1981:17–25). Yet one keeps coming back to the fact that in such cases it is always certain sites already associated with transgression or difference that are most likely to be the location for such practices. Such challenges are often directed at the symbolism of certain sites: the streets of Paris in 1968 (with the historical memory of the barricades of 1848 and the Commune still intact), the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, and so on, rather than simply through random acts in random spaces. Indeed, the example that Genocchio himself uses at the end of his paper to illustrate his case—Denis del Favero’s artistic installation ‘Undercover’ (1995:43)—shows this quite well. This was an artist’s installation that was to be found not just anywhere but in an underground station in Sydney, and had the intended effect of unsettling one’s everyday experience of that space. But the underground system is not just, as Genocchio suggests (following De Certeau), a ‘non-space’ (1995:43; see also Augé 1995) but a space laden with all sorts of uncertainty and difference

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relating to different uses, dangers and fears that could allow it to be described as a heterotopia long before the artists came in. 11 Like Rose’s paradoxical space, Genocchio does not like the idea of seeing heterotopia as marginal places. Also like Rose, he only wants to see heterotopia in terms of the radical and the resistant, and overlooks their ordering properties and their relationship to issues of control as obligatory points of passage. Genocchio, in effect, is criticizing the use of the concept of heterotopia when it is used in the language of marginal space. His criticisms also offer a challenge, at least implicitly, to the romantic fascination of contemporary cultural studies with the marginal and transgressive. This much we can accept. But heterotopia are more than just ideas about space. Certainly they are not sites that exist in themselves, they are relational; heterotopic—but it is also how that relationship is established that is significant. Genocchio is in effect suggesting, although he does not say so explicitly, that what is wrong with the current use of heterotopia as a geographical concept is that it uses the language of resemblance rather than similitude; an incommensurate and continually challenging relationship which cannot be fixed but whose attributes create interesting or novel resonances with that which surrounds them. Foucault recognized this in his paper Of Other Spaces, even if some of his examples like the cemeter y or the brothel do indeed have the air of resemblance about them; his final reference to the ship as illustrating heterotopia is instructive here: [I]f we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development…but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. (1986a:27) This is not the first place that we encounter the ship in Foucault s work. In Madness and Civilization, which discusses the links between ideas about the great confinement of madness and the Enlightenment project of reason, Foucault’s metaphorical use of the mythical ‘Ship of Fools’ can be seen as an example of a heterotopic site that retains its difference and Otherness: The madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute passage. In one sense, it simply develops, across a half-real, half-imaginary

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geography, the madman’s liminal position on the horizon of medieval concerns—a position symbolised and made real at the same time by the madman’s privilege of being confined within the city gates: his exclusion must enclose him; if he cannot and must not have another prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of passage. He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely. A highly symbolic position, which will doubtless remain until our own day, if we are willing to admit that what was formerly a visible fortress of order has now become the castle of our conscience. (1989a:11, original emphasis) This ‘prisoner of the passage’ (1989a:11) is trapped in a heterotopic world of heterotopic spatial relations. Heterotopia are a major source of ambivalence and uncertainty, thresholds that symbolically mark not only the boundaries of a society but its values and beliefs as well. To cross a boundary or to be associated with boundaries is to become a form of moral pollution—dirt, filth, scum (see Douglas 1984). Foucault’s reference to the ‘Ship of Fools’ traversing its way across the space of Renaissance Europe refers to this marginality by using the anthropological language of liminality (see van Gennep 1960; Turner 1969). The madman is marginal, a boundary figure who comes to represent social uncertainties. The presence of the mad acts as a transgression of social order wherever it is found. Free to ‘voyage’ across Europe, this prison space— a site itself on the move—exists too in a liminal state of passage; it has no fixity in the Renaissance ideas of incarceration, yet nor is it a modern prison. It has a presence as a site, yet is not a located site but defined as Other through its relation to the space with which it is juxtaposed as it traverses. The ship is also taken to be at the threshold of the modern world, representing the transition between different attitudes to madness (and thence to reason). It is a source representing new anxieties and certainties and a shift between different modes of ordering madness. The ship is ambiguous and impossible to understand because the relationship between the mythical ship and the space that it enters is one of similitude—a juxtaposition of the incommensurate rather than a resemblance of the same. It is in this condition that the significance of heterotopia exists, something that Genocchio, in his reading of the term in relation to text, implies but does not fully articulate, and which he tends to ignore in his argument about heterotopia in relation to geographical space. The important point to remember when considering heterotopia is not the spaces themselves but what they perform in relation to other sites. My argument is that they perform a new way of ordering through the heterogeneous ways that they represent. Further clarity on this issue of similitude is given in Foucault’s This is Not a Pipe As Harkness suggests (1983:4ff.) in his introduction to the English translation of that book, Foucault, in his discussion of the surrealist painter Magritte, indeed as Genocchio suggests, sees heterotopia primarily as sources

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of non-discursivity that act as a means of challenging settled discourses. But the significance of heterotopia is that it is used in a way that unsettles the flow of meaning. Writing, for Foucault, is heterotopic, in that it offers the possibility of similitude rather than resemblance as a form of representation, in a manner similar to a Magritte painting: To verify clearly, at the end of the operation, that the precipitate has changed colour, that it has gone from black to white, that the ‘This is a pipe’ silently hidden in mimetic representation has become the ‘This is not a pipe’ of circulating similitudes. (Foucault 1983:54) Heterotopic relationships unsettle because they have the effect of making things appear out of place. The juxtaposition of the unusual creates a challenge to all settled representations; it challenges order and its sense of fixity and certainty. This process of similitude is revelatory, like a collage, it brings forward the out-of-place and offers it up as a basis for alternative perspectives and orderings, revealing what is hidden among the ruins: little fragments of past, forgotten lives, found objects, strange, unsettling novel things that have a poetic wonder about them (see also Lévi-Strauss 1966; Bachelard 1969). But one can still look at certain sites as heterotopic if they are considered not as resembling Otherness in and of themselves but as juxtaposing another way of acting or ordering against that which prevails and dominates. One can, as Genocchio suggests, try and create new ideas about space through similitude, but in doing so one is only adding to this process of giving meaning to sites. In fact, this would definitely suggest there is a relationship between sites with multiple, unfixed, contested or uncertain meaning, and practices that are seen as transgressive or oppositional. Indeed, it is impossible not to generate ideas about space without locating them in attributed meaning.12 My choice of the Palais Royal in Chapter 1 aimed to illustrate what is meant by heterotopia. I did not choose this site because I wanted it to illustrate the resemblance of Otherness, a transgressive space celebrated because it allowed the marginal to find their voice within its walls; but rather because its condition of difference did not allow it to be located within the space of the Ancien Régime. It was, in Latour’s terms, an obligatory point of passage constituted through different ordering practices that made visible, if only for a short time, conditions of difference that opened up a new perspective on the old order and all its faults. It was the emerging modernity within the Palais Royal that marked it out as a heterotopia, not the conditions of transgression in themselves. As a space, it was a heterotopia because of the impossible tension it established between two modes of social ordering associated with the Ancien Régime embodied in Versailles (see Elias 1983) and

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the modernity of the Palais Royal. It acted as a site that made possible a shift in the power balances within France at that time and became the focus for other interests and hopes for social change. My disagreement with Genocchio comes down to this: Genocchio seems to want to locate discourse solely in written texts and see heterotopia as challenges to those discourses emerging in written form. But sites, buildings, indeed the whole spatial and material fabric of society can be seen as ‘text’, and heterotopia can operate in them just as they can in books. We can accept his critique of the association of heterotopia with marginality. However, in his attempt to see heterotopia as unassailable discursive sites of resistance, he overlooks the whole issue of order. While he rejects a romantic view of the margin he still retains a romantic view of resistance. The power of the concept of heterotopia lies in its ambiguity, that it can be a site of order just as much as it can be a site of resistance. This ambivalence is at the centre of the utopian idea of modern society that took shape in the eighteenth century. It is the ambivalence contained in the idea of heterotopia as both the castles of the Marquis de Sade and Franz Kafka. HETEROTOPIA, FREEDOM AND ORDER In Chapter 1, I offered the following definition of heterotopia as sites of alternate ordering and suggested that they were places of Otherness, whose Otherness was established by their incongruous condition. That incongruity emerges through a relationship of difference with other sites, such that their presence either provides an unsettling of spatial relations or an alternative representation of spatial relations. To summarize, this definition of heterotopia leads to the following conclusions: first, no space can be described as fixed as a heterotopia; second, heterotopia always have multiple and shifting meanings for agents depending on where they are located within its power effects; third, heterotopia are always defined relationally to other sites or within a spatialization process, and never exist in and of themselves; fourth, heterotopia, if they are taken as relational, must have something distinct about them, something that makes them an obligatory point of passage, as otherwise it is clear that any site could be described as in some way Other to another site (Genocchio 1995); and fifth, heterotopia are not about resistance or order but can be about both because both involve the establishment of alternative modes of ordering. The distinctness, for me, has to do with the question of order. It is clear in Foucault that heterotopia are about the association of difference with Otherness. It is how being, acting, thinking or writing differently comes to be seen as Other, and the use to which that Otherness is put as a mode of (dis)ordering that is the most significant aspect of heterotopia. It is indeed, as Marin would recognize, at this point that there is a clear relationship between heterotopia and the discourse of utopia (1984). Different practices and

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different meanings come to be seen as Other within a society, or indeed if we were to extend the idea, as Foucault does the concept of heterotopia to places like prisons, hospitals, factories and museums, how sites of Otherness are constituted by the powerful within society and represented as such to everyone else (1986a). The alternative mode of ordering expressed in a heterotopic site is a mode of ordering based upon some idea of social improvement. For Foucault, such utopian thinking is not just about the good society and the freedom it offers the individual, it is also a modern way of thinking about social control. Bentham’s ideas about the panopticon were utopian just as were de Sade’s about desire. It is the intertwining of ideas about freedom and control within the idea of modernity as a utopian project that marks out his thinking on utopia, just as much as his ideas on power and subjectivity. In using the concept heterotopia, it would be wrong to privilege either the idea of freedom or control. Heterotopia act as obligatory points of passage that allow established modes of social ordering to be challenged in ways that might be seen as utopian, such as they did in the Palais Royal. It would also be wrong to associate heterotopia just with the marginal and powerless seeking to use Other places to articulate a voice that is usually denied them. An Other place can be constituted and used by those who benefit from the existing relations of power within a society as in the case of the establishment of the workhouse or prison as a place of Otherness that becomes a site of social control through the practices associated with it and the meanings that develop around it. A certain amount of neutrality needs to be introduced when defining heterotopia. This is why I define a heterotopia as a place of alternate ordering. I use the word alternate to suggest that some form of difference is involved, a difference that involves the deployment of a utopian alternative. In his afterword to the Dreyfus and Rabinow discussion of his work (1982), Foucault addressed directly the issue of freedom and control through an analysis of subjectivity and control.13 In it, he states quite clearly that the effects of power and resistance are intertwined. Freedom, for Foucault, is an aspect of social control just as social control is implicated in freedom: the two castles. Who we are as free subjects comes in to being through the effects of power. For Foucault, ‘freedom is a condition for the exercise of power’ (1982:221). If we return to the two examples of heterotopia with which I began this chapter we can see this and also begin to see what it means for the relationship between heterotopia and utopia. In de Sade, the perpetrators of acts of sexual violence were as much the subject of power as their victims. Their freedom and their desires hang round their necks like chains. They cannot escape, just as their victims cannot escape (except in death). Equally, the faceless bureaucrats shut up in Kafka’s castle are just as much subject to the powers of the law as K. who wants to be given admittance. This paradox of freedom as control and control as freedom is the paradox of the utopianism of modernity and the paradox that defines heterotopic conditions: no matter how much we wish to be free, we will always

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create conditions of ordering if not order itself. Equally, in devising conditions of social order we will always create positions of freedom from which to resist that order if not freedom from order. This is the central paradox that Louis Marin explores in his analysis of utopia that I discuss in the following chapter. CONCLUSION: HETEROTOPIA AND THE SPACE OF MODERNITY Having offered my definition of heterotopia as spaces of alternate ordering, it remains for me to make clear how I intend to use the concept in relation to my discussion of modernity. Before looking at these issues through the two further eighteenth-century examples of the masonic lodge and the factory, I look in detail at the relationship between heterotopia and utopia in Chapter 4. Heterotopia, like the Palais Royal during the French Revolution, were not only sites of resistance and transgression but also sites that provided the model of alternative modes of social ordering. They produced new modes of social interaction and discourse, or more broadly, a new sociality. We could say that that model had utopian intentions even though it did not conceive of the Palais Royal as a utopia itself. The concept of heterotopia, found in the work of Foucault, can be seen as an important concept in understanding how space, within modernity, has been used as a means of attempting to create new modes of social ordering that are utopian in intent. That intention is about both individual freedom and social order. In Chapter 1 I introduced this theme through the example of the Palais Royal. I did not suggest that the Palais Royal be seen as a utopia; my intention was instead to treat it as a site of Otherness that stood out as a place of difference because of the utopics it expressed in relation to the ordering of the Ancien Régime. There in the coffee-houses, gardens and theatres a bourgeois class identity centred on the desire to gain power in France at the time, a process by no means fully worked out in advance, unfolded in a heterotopic site, and fuelled by utopian ideals engaged in a utopic practice of ordering society and its freedoms. While many of the ideals of the French Revolution might have been utopian, the reality was full of contradictions and uncertainties and succeeded all the more as a basis for bourgeois interests and power as a consequence of them rather than in spite of them. This heterotopic difference found in a site like the Palais Royal was a difference performed by the actions of those who identified themselves with this space. It would be wrong, however, to completely jettison the ideas of utopia for heterotopia. The argument I put forward here is that heterotopia come into existence when utopian ideals emerge from forms of difference which offer alternative ideas about the organization of society. Utopia have never been simply about freedom but rather new types of perceived freedom produced through new modes of social ordering. Despite the certainty that often marks out a utopian way of thinking, utopics are far from certain: they have effects

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that emerge outside of their conscious design and as such contain as much ambivalence as they seek to remove. The difference, however, is that social ambivalence, a form of ordering, is expressed as certainty. This is as true of the highly ordered and regimented spaces of the carceral institutions with their systematic, panoptical and grid-like character (see Rabinow 1989; Markus 1993) as it is of places like the Palais Royal. Modern forms of social ordering developed, not directly from utopian ideals about the good and ordered society, but emerged from a heterotopic uncertainty in which order and disorder were intermingled in a utopic practice of deferral set up between ideas about freedom and control.

Chapter 4

The utopics of modernity

ORDERS AND AMBIVALENCE I have used the example of the Palais Royal to introduce the main themes of this book, seeing it as a particular site, full of contradiction and uncertainty, that played an important role not only as a political site in the French Revolution but also as the starting point for many modern spaces of consumption such as the arcade and the department store, and as a key site in an emergent bourgeois public sphere. I wanted to choose a site that allowed me to say ‘in this site we can see a microcosm of modernity’. I also wanted to suggest, starting with the example of the Palais Royal, then following this with other examples found in the later chapters, that we can come to understand the process of social ordering better by looking at some of its spaces, or perhaps more precisely some of the spatializing processes that have been very significant in ordering modernity as a process. I am trying to show, as others have attempted over the past decade or so, that a sociology of space can make a valid and useful contribution to social theory. My reasons for choosing this site can also be read in another way associated with the issue of ambivalence, which has become a prominent theme in recent analysis of modernity (see Bauman 1987, 1991). Through the example of the Palais Royal and the concept of heterotopia, I have explored, in effect, the relationship between order and ambivalence. In his influential account of the development of modernity, Bauman has argued that one of its defining characteristics was its war against ambivalence (1991). Within modern societies, forms of both individual freedom and social control stem from this struggle and the fears that lie behind it (Bauman 1988, 1991). The intellectuals and state functionaries who become the promoters and agents of this war against ambivalence become, for Bauman, enmeshed in a legislative project that seeks to order society. For Bauman, that ordering project, while never fully accomplished, was utopian in its design. Following Foucault and his use of the metaphor of the panopticon, Bauman seeks to show that the modern idea of legislation involves the intertwining of ideas about both freedom and order. It is this issue and its relationship to the idea 55

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of utopia that interests me here. In this chapter I develop my discussion on the spatiality of modernity by looking at the relationship between utopia and heterotopia with regard to this question of social ambivalence. There are, however, shades of difference between Bauman’s argument and the one that I put forward here. Rather than see the ordering project of modernity as being expressed through an intentional desire to eradicate all forms of social ambivalence, I argue instead, through a discussion of what Louis Marin calls utopics (1984, 1992) that ambivalence, in the form of ambivalent spaces, was in fact the vehicle for ordering strategies rather than their enemy. The issue, in terms of social ambivalence, was more one of incorporation or negation rather than eradication in its pure form (see also Stallybrass and White 1986). The spatiality of modernity, related to its processes of social ordering, often involves the idea of utopia but not the creation of utopia in themselves. The question is how the central idea of utopia, which I take to be at the heart of our understanding of the social ordering processes within modernity, is expressed in practice (see Marin 1984; Lefebvre 1991). This, I argue, takes a form that is distinctly spatial in character. When I talk about utopia in relation to modernity, this does not imply that utopian communities, like the kibbutz or those of the Amish, are the model for understanding this spatializing of the modern. On the contrary, they may in fact be seen more accurately as countermodern or romantic orderings of society that resist the main processes of spatialization within modern societies. Instead, it is the manner in which the utopian ideal, the ideal of a good and ordered society which Kumar (1991) suggests is a distinctly modern phenomenon beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, influenced and shaped the spatializing processes within modernity. The main issue concerns the way in which spaces were produced that were to have a lasting impact upon the development of modern ideas and their visions of social order and ordering, rather than the minor communitarian experiments whose influence was less significant. Utopics, a play between imagined sites and ideas about the good society, involves the shift from ideas about the good society into the here and now of the actual production of social space. This has been a major impetus behind the social ordering that we have come to define as modernity. This process, embodying utopian ideals, did not produce utopia but developed in relation to heterotopia that facilitated alternative modes of ordering the social via an engagement with existing representations of social order through what might variously be described as difference, ambivalence or Otherness. Modernity can be seen as associated with a social ordering through ambivalence rather than against ambivalence. The difference is one between intention and practice. What may start out as an intention to create a perfect order in which all forms of social ambivalence have been removed, turns out as something quite different in practice. The now-extensive literature on the mental asylum has so far been the main example in which such a process of the creation of ordering spaces has be analysed (see Foucault 1989a, 1989c; Evans 1982; Porter 1987;

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Scull 1979, 1993).1 The problem here is the converse of those who want to celebrate the margins as sites of freedom and resistance. In taking these carceral institutions as a model, it is all too easy to see them as total institutions standing as a metaphor for modernity. This was not Foucault s intention. As we have seen, his analysis of freedom and control starts by seeing how they are intertwined rather than separate and opposed. Drawing in particular on the work of Bauman (1987, 1989, 1990), Foucault (1977, 1989a) and Marin (1984), this chapter discusses the issue of utopics and its relationship to the social ordering that we associate with modernity. Utopics does not just imply conscious attempts to create spaces of order, but insists that there is an uncontrollable process of deferral involved which means that utopias can never actually be achieved. Utopia, in the form of utopics, always exists in deferral, and this deferral is an ambivalent condition. The social ordering that emerges is as much an outcome of these deferred effects as it is of the intentions of the actors involved. UTOPICS AND THE ORDERING OF SOCIETY As any student of classical sociology knows, modern society has been seen as a society of strangers in which impersonal, contractual, gesellschaft-like relations prevail and in which social order is seen as a problem, especially during periods of transition (see Tönnies 1955; Durkheim 1964; Weber 1968). How such a society of strangers holds together in an ordered and orderly manner, the so-called problem of social order, is a well known and well worn theme. The historical origins for the establishment of new and modern social relations have in recent times not been major issues for research. Instead, in the past thirty years, sociologists have been more preoccupied with issues of disorder, change and crisis and the means by which social order is overturned.2 It is with the recent work of Bauman, which draws on earlier work by Foucault (1977) and Douglas (1984), that the whole issue of social order has become a live one again (Bauman 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991). I want to take some of Bauman’s arguments concerning social ambivalence as the starting point of my discussion of the utopics of modernity. Especially significant is the discussion of ambivalence and social order found in his influential book Legislators and Interpreters (1987). This is concerned in part with the issues of social order, state formation and the role of intellectuals in the early development of modern society (Bauman 1987). Bauman is particularly concerned with the changing role of the intellectual during the modern period and with what happens to intellectuals when we enter a so-called period of postmodernity, and the links that this has had with the issue of social order.3 For Bauman, following Foucault, the project that Enlightenment intellectuals set themselves, offering a mode of understanding based in reason and science, was linked with the establishment of their identity through the nexus of power—knowledge associated with the process of state formation.

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While it has always been the role of ‘intellectuals’, notably religious leaders, to acquire power through knowledge which then becomes protected as doctrine (see Weber 1965), Bauman sees the Enlightenment as a pivotal point in which a distinctly secular type of intellectual emerges and seeks to establish its position in relation to the state rather than the church. Bauman takes the ‘République des Lettres’, a significant part of the emerging civil society in France during the eighteenth century (see also Habermas 1989) and Les Philosophies, the Enlightenment thinkers and writers in France, as his archetype for the modern intellectual. What was unique about this mid-eighteenth-century period in large parts of Europe, according to Bauman, was that the state began to see its role as legislator for a changing and increasingly uncertain society, and sought to incorporate the supposedly neutral, scientific and rational discourses of Les Philosophes into a legislative project to order society; a process that was to accelerate after the French Revolution. For Bauman, the social context of these intellectuals was significant. Adopting a position located in social networks associated with the town, coffee-house and the salon rather than the court, in other words, those to be found in places like the Palais Royal, they played an important role in the development of the public sphere, free from church or courtly influence. This location was well suited to their emerging role as both independent thinkers and state legislators.4 Bauman’s argument about the rising status of the intellectual and their role within the process of state formation is based upon a fairly simple dichotomy of pre-modern and modern society that tries to show how the modern state and its intellectuals developed the demand for, and solutions to, the problem of social order. This was a period of uncertainty in which the ‘dense sociability’ of pre-modern feudal society was breaking down as a result of population increase, agricultural revolution and the expansion of urban-based capitalist markets (1987). Many people were being removed from the land and from their villages and forced to become vagrants and migrants, known in the discourse of the time as ‘masterless men’ (see Biere 1985). Old patterns of rights and duties as well as one’s place in an established social hierarchy were no longer certain.5 Bauman is offering here a sociological interpretation of the fears of early modern philosophers, notably Thomas Hobbes (1929), seen through what is as much a Durkheimian as it is Foucauldian reading of the emergence of modern society from the seventeenth century onwards (see Durkheim 1964). Or, as Durkheim would have put it, one in which one type of social solidarity and its modes of social regulation and ordering were replaced with another. For Bauman this shift involved the emergence of social anxieties over the ambivalence associated with this period of upheaval and social change—what Durkheim would have called anomie—that the state and its Enlightenment-influenced intellectuals decided had to be eradicated in the name of reason, harmony and social stability.

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Masterless men, vagrants, criminals, witches, Gypsies, Jews, madmen and so on became the representatives and personification, the scapegoats, of this social ambivalence or lack of order. Through their lack of integration within society they came to represent the breakdown of order; they were perceived as its cause rather than its victims and this made them appear as a threat to the newly emerging social order (see Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939; Cohn 1959; Trevor-Roper 1969; Yeo and Yeo 1981; Biere 1985; Stallybrass and White 1986; Foucault 1989a; Fraser 1992; Burke 1994). The sanctions of the local community and church, according to Bauman, were no longer effective over a mobile, migrant population moved off the land by agricultural enclosure and the development of more distinctly capitalist social arrangements. Following Gellner, Bauman uses a horticultural metaphor to understand the process of state formation in the modern era and its concern with social ordering (1987:51). Bauman describes this modern state as a gardening state, one which seeks to bring pattern, regularity and order to society, in contrast to the earlier state to which he attributes a gamekeeping role which merely tends society without trying to give it a basic overall shape, without worrying too much about the detail (1987: Chapter 4). For Bauman, the major purpose of the modern state is to order and regulate society by policing, controlling and confining those who come to be seen as the source of its ambivalence; not by exiling them beyond the city walls but by locking them away in some special place that comes to represent order, a point that he takes from Foucault’s writing on the prison and the panopticon (1977). According to Bauman, the Enlightenment philosophers and later intellectuals promoted themselves as potential legislators for this state in its gardening mode. As the experts of reason, they were able to decide what order meant, separating it off from the chaos or ambivalence of superstition, opinion and prejudice. Reason became the principle upon which social ordering was to take place. It defined what was to be ordered and how this should occur. The old reciprocal forms of surveillance found within the dense sociability of pre-modern societies was replaced, according to Bauman, with new modes of surveillance and control that had an unequal power relationship between the watcher and the watched (1988). The power of the state, according to Bauman, was both pastoral and proselytizing; education, not least educating the state, became the ambition of the intellectuals as legislators. These educative and gardening ambitions of the modern state and the crusade against ambivalence found their expression in the Enlightened thinking of the intellectuals in their desires for reason and order. Such ideas were translated into social practices of ordering and classifying all that which came to represent the ambivalence of a changing society. Bauman takes up Foucault’s emphasis on processes of ordering and classifying found in his work on asylums (1989a), clinics (1989c) and not least the prison in which Foucault used Bentham’s model of the panopticon as the metaphor for the form of spatial arrangement of the disciplinary and surveillance techniques that

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developed in modern societies (1977). These carceral institutions are taken by Bauman as inspired by the desire to remove ambivalence from society, represented by the deviants who were located in such places of containment and incarceration. Foucault took Bentham’s model of the panopticon as the model for these carceral institutions (1977). In plan, it consisted of a circular space shaped something like a wheel, with individual, back-lit cells around the outside facing the centre. At the centre was a watchtower, the only thing that the prisoners in their cells could see. The watchtower may or may not have had a guard in it: the prisoner would never be able to tell. The prisoners, therefore, were subject to a process of continual surveillance even when nobody was in the tower, because they could never know for certain if it was occupied or empty. As a consequence they subjected themselves to a process of self-discipline; acting all the time as if they were being continually watched (Foucault 1977:195–228). These sites, as sites of surveillance, constituted their subjects as deviant through a process of social ordering. The power effect of these institutions, at least in principle, was to make those subjects aware of themselves as deviant through self-disciplining techniques in which those who were incarcerated and subject to surveillance were made aware of their position and what they represented in the eyes of society. Foucault makes clear that this confinement of the mad, sick and criminal was not simply about the removal of ambivalence from society through confinement alone, but in large part a process of trying to remove that ambivalence by naming, identifying and being able to classify it as such and in so doing make it Other but knowable. In other words, the carceral institutions were places of social ordering; places where the representatives of ambivalence were made meaningful both to themselves and to society as a whole. This process of ordering not only defined the marginal and deviant, but by association all that was left outside these spaces as ordinary, normal and healthy. There is evidence that some of the principles of this organization of space were put into use in a variety of social spaces such as the hospital, prison, school, workhouse, factory, museum, and so on, during the nineteenth century (see Markus 1993); but the panopticon, for Foucault, is at another level also a metaphor for the process of social ordering within modernity itself; we live in a space that subjects us to a process of social ordering through surveillance, but as in the panopticon the watchtower may well be empty, we can never know if we are being watched at any time; there is no all-powerful group that controls us but we act in a self-disciplining way as if we are being subject to continual surveillance. If we look at Bauman’s arguments about ambivalence in the light of Foucault’s earlier observations about these carceral institutions, the following argument can be highlighted. The argument goes: from some time around the middle of the seventeenth century the problem of social order became a pressing one. The breakdown of feudal systems of social organization,

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religious and civil wars, and the emergence of new economic forces that created changes in both the country and the town can all be seen as possible causes of this anxiety with change and social uncertainty. In both civil society as well as in newly forming state institutions, attempts were made to try and overcome this ambivalence. Some unassimilable figures became the scapegoats of social anxieties and were incarcerated and studied in such a way as to try and eradicate their powers of ambivalence. In a way, their existence in society created a sort of paradoxical space, as Rose would describe it (1993), and this was not permissible because it made visible the breakdown of an established social order. In conjunction with this process, intellectuals and scientists used increasingly rationalist and secular modes of thought developed to try and offer a way of understanding a world undergoing a process of dramatic change (Foucault 1989b). Through these thought processes they set themselves up as the legislators for a new social ordering, a modern social ordering in which the ambivalences that had been unleashed by the breakdown of traditional societies would be eradicated. One can certainly see parallels with Enlightenment philosophy’s propensity to order in a number of other areas of social life at the time, such as art and architecture. It was during the eighteenth century that the neo-classical style emerged, as a critique of earlier and more flamboyant baroque and rococo styles. Whereas the flamboyance and ostentation of rococo came to represent aristocratic excess and waste, the new style that developed across the arts in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century saw a return to the simplicity, order and purity of forms associated with the architecture of classical antiquity. The neoclassical style looked back to the ‘Vitruvian’ order of classical antiquity and sought to use its form and style to represent order in an aesthetic manner (see Honour 1972, 1991). Neo-classicism placed an emphasis on form, notably in architecture on geometric shape and the position of these shapes—triangles, cubes, cylinders, and so on, within an architectural whole (see Honour 1991; Kruft 1994). Euclidean geometry and its spaces became the symbolism of social and moral order. The anxieties about social disorder during this period suggest a major reason for an interest in the world of the ancients, which came to be seen at this time as tranquil and ordered, a society where there was law and rule and were everything was in its proper place (see Lowenthal 1985).6 The ideas that inspired the neo-classical architects, artists and their patrons were the same that inspired their contemporaries in the field of philosophy: order, goodness and reason. In the case of the neo-classical style, the desire to emulate rather than copy the architecture of Rome and Greece derived from a moral cult of the ancients. As Honour suggests, talking about the return to Homeric themes in poetry during the eighteenth century: The qualities which distinguished ancient poetry could be visually represented only by a style of equally primitive simplicity. For the literary

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and artistic cults of the primitive were two manifestations of a more profound urge to purify society and re-establish natural laws which were based on reason and recognition of the dignity of man. (1991:67) During the eighteenth century the architecture of classical antiquity came to represent civic virtue as well as social order. To be able to order space was to be able to order society. That at least was the intention. The elevated status of the architect, which emerged in England with the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, can be seen as representative of this concern with a need for new modes of ordering (see Rykwert 1980). The architect was the great designer, who, with knowledge of the classical arts, was able to translate ideas about the ordering of space into the ordering of society. The architect becomes the honoured figure of the time, more so even than the philosopher. It is the architect who becomes the shaper of society (see Rykwert 1980). This fascination with order is also found in Newtonian science. Here nature becomes an ordered system that can be classified and represented and then applied to society. We can perhaps also detect a similar theme in the landscaped gardens and parklands of Humphrey Repton and especially Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown; there was a very definite attempt to make nature appear, in the form of parklands, like an ordered garden. The shift from gamekeeper to gardener would apply in all of these fields and not just to the state and its promotion of intellectual discourse (see also Rabinow 1989). While Bauman provides a compelling account of the relationship between fear of ambivalence and the desire for order, he is less clear on the degree to which this was achieved, and also about how the process of ordering often had a rather more ambivalent relationship to ambivalence than he allows for. Bauman has provided us with an outstanding and now highly influential illustration of the eradication of ambivalence in the case of the Nazi Holocaust (1989), but he offers little by way of example or illustration of this issue of the achievement of social order in earlier times. Bauman’s stress on the emergence of ideas about modernity from scientific and moral crusades against ambivalence, particularly attempts to eradicate the ambivalence of the stranger, boundary figures like the masterless men, Jews, Gypsies or Irish, gives us only part of the picture and perhaps one overstated in its comprehensiveness (see Tester 1992). What Bauman does not consider is the possibility that, in those periods of transformation like the late seventeenth century in England and around the time of the French Revolution in France, there was an engagement with ambivalence in spaces like that of the Palais Royal that facilitated a crystallization of identities and purposes which were distinctly modern and distinctly concerned with new modes of social ordering. It is almost as if Bauman presumes that the identities and practice associated with the removal of ambivalence came to that process fully formed, whereas the work of writers like Foucault (1989a), Sennett (1986), Agnew (1986) and

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Stallybrass and White (1986) would imply that this was more of an uncertain process than Bauman suggests. Bauman uses Foucault’s ideas on the panopticon as the blueprint that derives from Enlightenment desires for social engineering. The historical evidence, however, is less clear. As Porter has shown, this great confinement of the mad during the eighteenth century which Foucault used as the basis for his argument was far from as widespread or extensive as Foucault would have us believe (1990). That the mad were a source of ambivalence in England during the eighteenth century is not in doubt, but the ways of dealing with that ambivalence were far removed from the processes of incarceration and confinement that Foucault describes (1989a: Chapter 2). For instance, the popular discourses concerning the mad during this time and the asylum as a public spectacle both show not a simple horror and outrage with madness but more a morbid curiosity; a mixture of fascination and horror with the grotesquerie that madness and the mad came to represent (Porter 1990). Similarly Bentham’s panopticon, while a great metaphor for modern forms of discipline and surveillance, was in reality unsuccessful during Bentham’s lifetime and only later did a more simplified version find its way into the design of modern prisons (see Semple 1993; Markus 1993). It should be seen as representing an ordering principle, Foucault’s intention, rather than a spatial embodiment of an established social order as it has come to be seen by others. Ambivalence is like the sublime, an horrific spectacle that attracts as much as it repels. Bauman’s argument about the social anxieties over social ambivalence during the early modern period is a significant one, but the modes of resolution were surely more complex and less certain than he tends to concede. So although the panopticon may not be the best metaphor for trying to show the process by which this ambivalence was removed and new modes of social order established, there is a tendency to use it to see modernity as a total institution, already ordered, where power and control are all pervasive and ambivalence or any form of resistance is effectively erased. I have suggested the Palais Royal as an alternative. City life on the streets, economic life in the market place, cultural institutions like the theatre, as well as the many informal networks to be found amongst people within civil society, such as those of the coffee-house and tavern, attest to the continuance of a sense of social ambivalence (see Agnew 1986; Castle 1986; Sennett 1986; Stallybrass and White 1986). Indeed, as writers from Marx onwards have shown, modern capitalist societies operate through the creation of uncertainty and ambivalence, and no state has ever been able to fully remove this (see Berman 1982 for a recent and highly influential reading of modernity as the continual reassertion of ambivalence). But the crusades against working-class popular culture, vagrants, immigrants, the poor, crowds, and so on, which occurred from the seventeenth century onwards, suggest that we should not reject out of hand Bauman’s argument about the fear of and fight against ambivalence. We should instead say that the concern with ordering society and its

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relationship to the development of modern society is not one where a preconceived order is established but one where modes of ordering take place in spaces of uncertainty that act as obligatory points of passage for ideas about freedom and control to be performed. A key part of this process of social ordering within modernity which lies behind this attempt to achieve social order overcoming ambivalence, involves a translation of the utopian ideal of a good society into the practice of ordering space. This ordering of social ambivalence and its social agents was a spatial process all about the demarcation of a society through its internal boundaries. If one takes up Douglas’ ideas on pollution and dirt (1984) which figure strongly in Bauman’s ideas about the eradication of ambivalence, then the spatiality of ambivalence and its ordering can be seen as important. Boundaries are threshold spaces that demarcate one thing from another. Boundaries are a means of relational ordering: they give a space or thing an identity defined in relation to its Other. Boundaries are places of uncertainty and as such often play a very significant role in the processes of social ordering. Ambivalence is in large part about difference and the transgression of boundaries that separate this difference as it is represented in places, things or people. The response to ambivalence when it presents itself ranges from mutual dialogue and hybridization through assimilation to expulsion or extermination. The spaces of the emerging modern society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were populated by strangers who represented this ambivalence. Increasing numbers of people had lost their place in the order of things because that order had been broken by economic changes and political and religious conflicts. Certainly, the historical evidence for the extensive and punitive legislation against vagabonds and Gypsies is a testament to this fear of the travelling, displaced vagrant (Biere 1985; Mayall 1989; Fraser 1992). But there is also evidence that the representatives of modern society did not simply eradicate this ‘carnivalesque’ ambivalence but incorporated and negated it through the development of new or changed cultural forms, for example the theatre (Agnew 1986); the novel (Bakhtin 1984; Stallybrass and White 1986); through spectacle, such as in exhibitionary spaces (Altick 1978; Bennett 1995) and in forms of entertainment such as the masquerade ball (Castle 1986). I would argue further, concurring with Foucault, that one of the principle means of removing this ambivalence is to attempt to produce alternative modes of the social ordering of time and space (1986a).7 My argument is that this process of removing ambivalence and ordering the social took place through a process that I call utopics. This entailed taking ideas about the good ideal society, a society often imagined in the form of a commonwealth, based upon the principles of order and certainty. These ideas were turned into spatial practice, that is, attempts to shape social spaces in such a way that they took on the character of good and order. This does not mean that there was an attempt to turn the whole of society into an Atlantean utopia, nor that there was always necessarily an overtly expressed idea about utopia at work.

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Instead, how space should be ordered came to be expressed through ideas about virtue, discipline, reason and order which can be taken as utopian in principle if not always directly in intention. Utopias have more to them than straightforward intentions to confine, discipline, punish, treat, cure or subject to surveillance in specially demarcated spaces. Such spaces can very clearly be found during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But ambivalence was treated in a more ambivalent way in earlier times when the forces of order and reason and the social interests that they represented were perhaps either less sure of themselves or less fearful of that to which they saw themselves opposed. UTOPICS AND SPATIAL PRACTICE While the literature on utopian experiments from early nineteenth-century communities through to the twentieth-century examples of garden cities and kibbutzim is extensive, the real impetus of the utopian ideal within modern societies, in my view, lies elsewhere. All of these experiments were in some ways a critique of aspects of modern life, but it is the embedding of the utopian ideal within the very conditions that these experiments sought to escape that is the most important means through which notions of utopia came to be expressed within modernity, indeed helped to shape the very expression of modernity itself. This is, of course, a distinctly Foucauldian view of utopia; one that sees the main significance of the utopian ideal within modernity to be one that was not about the creation of an alternative good society but the effect such ideas had in ordering society in a period of economic, political and cultural change. The modernity of utopia, as opposed to earlier civic or religious conceptions of the good life, does not just revolve around a dream of a better society and a critique of the existing one, but over anxieties surrounding the issue of social order. Utopias are about ordering the social, but there is a significant tension between the intentions of the ordering project that they represent: between greater social freedom and greater social control. Even in the utopias that emphasize total freedom for those who live within them, those individuals are fundamentally shaped by social factors and expectations. Utopias are projections of the conditions of certainty which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often used images drawn from classical antiquity. But this utopian desire for order and control has had a wider impact than that found simply in either literature or the utopian communities that began to appear from the eighteenth century in Europe. The no-place/good-place ambivalence contained in Thomas More’s original pun when he coined the term utopia, contains within it one of the definitive influences on modern uses of the idea of utopia, that is, the attempt to order space or particular spaces that were nowhere and produce the conditions of an ordered and stable society that was

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somewhere (see Marin 1984). The issue is as much one of deferral as it is a well conceived project. The spaces that from the late seventeenth century onwards constitute this spatialization of the utopian ideal are numerous: agricultural enclosures, garden landscapes, scientific laboratories, town planning, places of education and schooling, factories, botanical gardens, museums, zoos, places of leisure and entertainment, and so on. The effects of this utopics and the forms it has taken have had a profound and lasting impact on the constitution of modes of social ordering within modernity. It is the combination of the ideal of the good life with the desire for social order that makes the idea of utopia of significance within modern society well beyond the confines of the literary genre that produced it. It was the linking of this ideal with the belief that ordering space was a means of achieving these ideals that makes the condition of utopics the most significant, and so far least considered, attempt to realize the idea of utopia. Louis Marin’s discussion of utopia, or what he describes as utopics (spatial play) is without doubt as significant to our understanding of the space of modernity as that of Foucault’s analysis of heterotopia (Marin 1984, 1992). Drawing on his experiences of the Paris ‘events’ of May 1968, Marin offers a theoretical discussion of the significance of utopia to modernity. He starts from a deconstructive reading of More’s Utopia, as suggested above, focusing on the play of difference between the ou/eu-topia that More introduced within this signifier. In a somewhat elliptical expression, Marin’s key concept is ‘the neutral’ which emerges out if this deferral of meaning within the term utopia itself. Utopian discourse, for Marin, begins as a critique of ideology which is itself ideological and linked to points of social change. For Marin, it is significant that utopian discourse emerged out of the conjunction between feudalism and capitalism from the end of the fifteenth century in Europe. This utopian discourse is, for Marin, a polysemic figural discourse (something visibly encoded into spaces and textual representations of space—maps in particular) which emerges from the practices of spatial play that Marin calls utopics. It is, for Marin, through this spatial play around the idea of no-place and good place that the significance of the neutral is revealed. To dream the Other, another world of the good life, the eu-topia, is to reveal its lack in the present. But this Other exists as an ou-topia, a noplace that is not to be found except in a form of social critique. Utopia, in the form of utopics, vacillates between the ‘no-place’ and the ‘good place’ in a neutral realm of pure difference. The neutral is what lies between these two poles of More’s pun. It is neither ‘the good’ nor ‘the no-’ place. This neutral is for Marin both an ‘Other place’ and the ‘Other of Place’ (1984:13). The neutral is an impossible space, a realm of différence as Derrida would have it (1976), an endless deferral of meaning that derives, in this instance, from the unresolvable tension contained within this eu/outopia.

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The neutral is a state of passage, an obligatory point of passage in Latour’s terms, rather than a place (1988). In Foucault’s terms, it is established through similitude rather than through resemblance. It is a state through which things pass. If a utopia signifies through resemblance, then utopics signify through similitude. For Marin, the discourse of Utopia reveals social conjunction to be a manifestation of this neutral. The realm of the neutral stands outside as something separate but is also a transition. It is a gap, a space that has no knowable ontological ground. Marin uses the University of the May 1968 events in Paris as an example of the neutral. It was both a site of utopic struggle and a focus for change in those events but also the passage to a new ordering after the events had dispersed (1984:3ff.). My example of the neutral would be that of the Palais Royal in the ‘events’ of 1789! The neutral stands apart, as a site of Otherness and as a process: a neutralization of difference into a new ordering—a new form of sameness. The neutral in these senses is also the limit, a site of limit-experiences found in utopian moments but also the limit of that utopia’s existence. Utopia is a striving for something impossible, social order, but whose striving has ordering effects both intended and unintended. The process of ordering involved in this utopics can be related to Bauman’s discussion of the modern outlook. The attempts to achieve a social order and to think that social ambivalence might be eradicated, are the effects of civilization’s epistemological dreaming of a clearly defined ontology of order. That order is never achieved but endlessly deferred into new modes of ordering that are utopic in intention but something else in practice. The realm of the neutral is the realm of social ordering. It is the space where difference is both encountered and ordered. The space of the neutral, therefore, is the space of an alternate ordering; it is the space I have called, after Foucault, heterotopia. The argument I want to put forward about the significance of this ambivalence to the process of utopics can now be stated more clearly: the utopian ideal that lay behind the desire for order was not necessarily ordered in itself. Places of difference and Otherness were either produced or appropriated in such a way that they facilitated a process of ordering. As I have stressed in Chapter 2, sites of resistance, seen by many as margins, are invariably sites that also offer alternate modes of social ordering.8 Returning to the discussion of marginality and ordering that I addressed in Chapter 2, Marin’s concept of the neutral embodies some of the principles of ordering found in Turner’s discussion of liminality (1969) and more importantly in Latour’s notion of obligatory points of passage (1988). Such spaces of Otherness become passages through which agents move and through which ordering strategies are engaged. In contrast to the concept of liminality, the concepts of the neutral and of heterotopia embody not only structure but also process, and in particular the uncertainties and unintended consequences of process. I want to suggest therefore, that although the sites of alternative social ordering, expressed

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through what I have described as utopics, may often stand apart and attempt to re-order the mundane world in a manner akin to that expressed by concepts of liminality (see Shields 1991), they also do so in ways that represent uncertainty. So to suggest that modernity has come to order itself in a liminal fashion would be wrong, but, I argue, it is right to suggest that alternate spaces, expressing alternate modes of ordering, are an important part of the process of social ordering within modern societies. Modernity in its diverse forms can be seen as expressed through a multitude of spaces of alternate ordering that, while not liminal in themselves, produced new modes of ordering as well as the discourses to try and make sense of those modes of order. The economic, cultural and political changes that we have come to call capitalism produced social ambivalence through the way they overturned, displaced and destroyed former ideas about established modes of social order. They also generated new modes of ordering, often in new or newly used spaces. The spaces that facilitated the opportunity for new modes of social ordering to be produced were those that were most ambivalent and uncertain, and hence open to new actors able to express their utopic through the practices that made up the ordering found in those spaces. ‘The neutral’, ‘heterotopia’ and ‘obligatory points of passage’ are all similar ways of conceiving an ordering process that is performed through particular spaces. In other words, a process that is utopian in its ideal develops in spaces that are ambivalent and uncertain either because they are new and as-yet unknown or because they are impossible archaic representations of former modes of social order that have become obsolete. One can of course think of many examples in which something rather fearful is ordered in other places: death— cemeteries; bodily waste—sewers; criminality—prisons and so on. The process of ordering embodied in this utopics was not realized through creating utopia—perfect sites of order. Even those attempts to do so, either in reality or on paper, such as Bentham’s panopticon, Fourier’s Phalanstery, Owen’s New Lanark or the numerous communes in more recent times, end up being seen as somewhat strange other places defined by their difference to all that surrounds them. The process of social reproduction and ordering that is the impulse for this utopic process was achieved through the facility of its Other: spaces apart, defined by the ambivalence or difference of their mode of ordering. By utilizing this difference through a process of ordering, they achieve the effect of representing new modes of social order, normalizing their difference and coming to be seen as acceptable sites in which Otherness is tamed. A consequence of this process is the production of new social identities out of the menagerie of ambivalent characters which have their place in an ordered sense of the social. The utopian ideals were realized in the creation of the ordering of space, separating out that which is dangerous or ambivalent and using it relationally to define what is left as ordered and normal. Agents can

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utilize such places to transform themselves through an engagement with Otherness. Not all such spaces, therefore, are places of confinement. Utopic processes utilize difference to create sameness and order but this does not necessarily imply simply shutting out that difference. CONCLUSION In this chapter I have raised a number of issues surrounding the question of how, when modern society was coming into being, social order was constituted as a problem and how that problem was addressed. My argument has been to engage principally with the recent work of Bauman on this theme. I have followed his sug gestion that the modern outlook, shaped by the Enlightenment-influenced intellectuals of the eighteenth century, was motivated by a desire to remove forms of ambivalence generated by processes of social change and projected on to marginal characters like vagrants, the mad and the criminal. But the moral crusades against ambivalence, and the processes of social ordering, I have argued, did not always result in an eradication of ambivalence. Instead, through spatial play with ambivalence and difference expressed through utopian ideas about space, modern society produced spatially significant sites that came to represent alternate modes of ordering. Using Marin’s concept of the neutral, which is almost identical to Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, I have tried to show how the passage from ideas about a utopian order to its realization is one of ambivalence and deferral. Such a space produces its own forms of regulation and techniques of ordering, its own freedoms and controls out of which may emerge stable and coherent social identities, discourses of order and patterns of social relations. That is the central argument in this book. I have dealt with it in an abstract and theoretical manner in this chapter. Marin’s concept of the neutral is simply too gnomic to develop in itself, although the ideas it contains for the issue of utopics are important ones that I will develop further in the cases presented below. There is a danger of being overloaded with concepts: representational space, paradoxical space, obligatory points of passage, liminal space, margins, the neutral. It has been necessary to introduce these concepts as I have considered the work of those writing on themes that interest me here, but I will state here that it is mainly the concept of heterotopia that I shall adopt in the rest of this book. Lefebvre’s significance lies in his emphasis on the production of space as a process of spatialization that resists the temptation to focus simply on the significance of sites in themselves. However, for me his concept of representational spaces is overburdened with the idea of anticapitalist resistance to an existing social order without fully acknowledging the ordering effect that such resistance tends to have. In a sense, representational space as a concept is too caught up with the romance of resistance and transgression, as is the more general notion of marginal space. While there is,

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of course, a danger of this in the concept of heterotopia as well, a close reading of what Foucault has to say about this does, I believe, reveal it to be a more useful and effective concept that irrevocably brings together the relationship between order and ambivalence through a notion of ordering. Similarly, paradoxical space, margins and liminality have all been linked with ideas of transgression, resistance and counter-hegemonic discourses that oppose social order. For me they simply reproduce the image of social order as a thing, a noun as Law suggests (1994), and do not say enough about the whole issue of process. I have stressed that while it is not wrong to emphasize the importance of spaces of resistance and their role in a politics of identity, one cannot ignore the whole issue of social ordering that occurs at the same time. By linking together the concepts of utopics as the spatialized expressions of ideas about social order, and heterotopia as the spatial relations in which this utopics manifests itself, I hope to do justice to the social orderings that we have come to call modernity. Rather than take Bentham’s panopticon as the model for understanding the social order of modernity as Foucault has done, I have suggested that we need to focus on the spatial process of ordering embodied in utopics that come to exist not in the formation of utopia but in what Foucault has called heterotopia (1986a). I have argued here that the issue of ambivalence as Bauman puts it is central to our understanding of modernity (see 1987, 1991), but that rather than see a modern social order develop out of the eradication of ambivalence, it is better to see a process of modern social ordering develop into spatial practice through a utopic expression and its effects. That process can be said to take place in sites that can be described as heterotopia—places of an alternate ordering that had a significant role within the spatialization processes of modernity. I have argued that the social ordering found in Europe from the late seventeenth century onwards can be described as a utopic one. Within this utopic process, sites of alternate ordering can be said to condense and perform new agents such that a new ordering of society can be seen to emerge. Modern social practices, modern institutions and modern social identities could all be described as some of the effects that emerge from the alternate modes of ordering found in heterotopic sites. The point that I have tried to make here, though, is that those who adopted a modern outlook that may have been utopian in character, trying to provide society with a vision of an orderly and just way of life, did so, perhaps inadvertently, through using or creating sites such that the difference that they came to embody—the Otherness called modernity—constituted those sites as heterotopia. In order to illustrate these arguments I have chosen two examples through which I show the relationship between utopics and heterotopia. In Chapter 5 I look at the origins and early development of freemasonry in Britain from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Starting with the fascination with Solomon’s Temple, a key myth around which many of the utopian ideals and rituals of freemasonry have developed, I show how ideas

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about space, notably Euclidean space and social ordering, are developed in the heterotopia of the lodge. The masonic lodge is not considered just in itself but in relation to the development of the public sphere of the eighteenth century. The view that currently prevails concerning this public sphere is that it produced the political institutions of the modern state and civil society (see Sennett 1986; and especially Habermas 1989). This public sphere is presented as the creation of a new social order that underpins an Enlightenment vision of modernity both by its supporters (Habermas 1989) and by its more conservative critics (Koselleck 1988). My aim is to present this public sphere, through the heterotopic example of the masonic lodge, as the embodiment of utopics which produced new modes of social ordering rather than as a social order. In Chapter 6 I look at the development of the early factories and mills in Britain and show how new modes of ordering—of the division of labour, machines and the production process—expressed a utopics of capitalism that has had an ordering effect on modernity.

Chapter 5

Secret virtues, Euclidean spaces Freemasonry, Solomon’s Temple and the lodge

UTOPICS AND SOLOMON’S TEMPLE Thomas More’s Utopia has always, justifiably, been taken as the origin for the modern literary genre of utopian writing (see Kumar 1991). However, there is another text which can lay claim to having had just as much of a lasting impact upon the utopic impetus within the modern outlook and especially on the social and spatial ordering of modern society, namely Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1974). Just like More’s Utopia, Bensalem, the island described by Bacon, is represented as a lost place discovered by a group of European sailors, who in this instance come across it after they lose their way in the course of travelling from Peru to Japan and China. But whereas Plato’s Republic figured strongly as the model for More’s Utopia, it was the Renaissance interest in the biblical story of Solomon’s Temple that provided the model for Bacon. The argument that I put forward in this chapter is that we can see, in this interest in Solomon’s Temple during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, an expression of a utopic based upon the idea that this site contained within its architecture the secrets of wisdom, goodness and order that came to provide a model for the future moral ordering of modern society.1 One of the most significant heterotopia in which this utopics was expressed was the masonic lodge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. This is not the only example which modelled itself on the idea and image of Solomon’s Temple. Solomon’s Temple was significant in the development of the idea of the Royal Society and scientific laboratories which were to become the key sites of the newly emerging modern rational approach to science that was to find its pinnacle of achievement in the work of Isaac Newton. Solomon’s Temple had by this time already been a significant imaginary site. It was used as a model in the design of Jewish Synagogues and medieval cathedrals (Curl 1991) and had also played no little part in the development and design of Elizabethan theatres (see Yates 1992). The biblical story of Solomon’s Temple can be found in the first book of Kings (Chapters 5–7), the second book of Chronicles (Chapters 3–7) and the 72

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book of Ezekiel (Chapters 40–4). These biblical accounts describe in some detail how Solomon commissioned the architect Hiram of Tyre to build a temple to God, something that his father David had wanted to do but felt unable to because of his previous profanation due to his involvement in war. The Temple when it was completed in the centre of Jerusalem was to house the Ark of the Covenant. The biblical story goes into architectural detail about the design, shape and size of the Temple. It was a place of worship, a shrine to God for the people of Israel, but it also came to be associated with Solomon’s earthly wisdom and judgement. It became the embodiment of knowledge, wisdom and order and was to have a profound impact on later thought, especially amongst neo-platonic scholars, scientists and architects in early modern Europe (see Rykwert 1980; Kruft 1994). A major reason for this interest in Solomon’s Temple came from the revival during the sixteenth century of the ancient art of memory; a mnemonic method used in classical antiquity as part of the skill of rhetoric. The art of memory worked through the association of parts of a building with parts of a speech. Skilled orators were then able to imagine themselves moving through different rooms of the building while observing some of its features. These rooms and features were associated with parts of the speech to be delivered. Then, by exercising the art of memory, the orators were able to remember their speech and deliver it skilfully. Renaissance thinkers adapted this memory facility into an hermetic one intended not for the simple act of remembering what they had to say but for the rediscovery of secret and lost knowledge which they believed to be encoded, amongst other things, in the architectural features of buildings. This produced a special interest in architecture during the Renaissance, notably amongst Cabbalistic and hermetic thinkers like Fludd, Bruno and Camillo (see Yates 1992). Buildings, architectural features, gardens and so on were believed to contain symbols and cyphers which correctly interpreted would reveal secret or forgotten knowledge held by the ancients. The lost Temple of Solomon, the seat of wisdom itself, was one of the main symbols that lay behind this interest in architecture within the revival and transformation of the art of memory. It had influenced much building from the middle ages onwards, notably some of the Gothic cathedrals (see Curl 1991: Chapter 4) which gave plenty of scope for those interested in the esoteric and arcane to exercise their newly acquired art of memory. Little trace of the original Temple remains, although it is known to have been sited in the area of the Dome of the Rock in the east of the Old City of Jerusalem (Illustrated Bible Dictionary: Part 3, 1522). Its loss, and attempts to imagine what it might have looked like based largely on the biblical descriptions, fuelled interest in it as a site of esoteric symbolism and secret knowledge believed to be embodied in its design, especially in the two freestanding pillars known as Jachin and Boaz which stood on either side of the entrance, and were supposed to be encrypted with antediluvian knowledge that had otherwise been lost to the world. Seventeenth-century architects took

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up this esoteric, hermetic philosophy and began to develop elaborate symbolic interpretations of Solomon’s Temple that they expressed in their own buildings (see Rykwert 1980: Chapter 6). In the context of late Renaissance and early modern society, the period that Foucault describes as the classical age (1989b), Solomon’s Temple represented harmony, knowledge and order, things that might be said to be lacking in seventeenth-century society, a time of religious and civil wars and social dislocation and change (Bauman 1987). This search for lost knowledge in relation to Solomon’s Temple is expressed clearly in Bacon’s utopian fragment written during this time. That knowledge was to become, for Bacon, the basis for scientific enquiry (1974). His utopia is a description of a wise and harmonious society that much impressed the fictional European travellers during their stay on the island. After an initial wariness, the islanders allow those on the ship that had discovered the island to come ashore, where they are met by a Christian people who give them hospitality and tell them about their society. They were once a well known people who were connected by trade to other parts of the world, especially through an ancient civilized American society. This American society, in Bacon’s story, was destroyed by flood and returned to savagery, cutting off the island of Bensalem from the rest of the world. While the islanders still travelled and witnessed what was going on in the world outside, they were nevertheless soon forgotten by that world. The central institution of the island of Bensalem that Bacon describes is not political or religious but scientific, in the form of a house built by one of its former Kings and called Salomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days Work (1974:229ff.). This house is the centre of moral authority in this peaceful, ordered and tolerant island society. The island of Bensalem, for Bacon, is not a perfect society, it still uses money and has social divisions and inequalities, but it is an ordered and stable society. That order and stability is partly established through a veneration of patriarchal authority, for the father within the family and for the King within the society as a whole, but it is science and the scientists, as priests, who occupy Salomon’s House and play the key role in providing this society with its sense of moral order (see Manuel and Manuel 1979; Davis 1981). Salomon’s House is a secret institution run by a few highly respected scientists who live a largely hermit-like existence within the island, only rarely, and then with great ceremony, coming among the ordinary people of the island. They also sometimes venture overseas to keep up, through spying, with the developments of science outside of their own society. A large section of Bacon’s uncompleted New Atlantis is taken up with a description of Salomon’s House by one of its scientist-priests to the chosen representative of the travellers who acts as the narrator of the story (1974: 239–47). It consists of caves and towers with many rooms given over to specialist areas of science and indeed some of the arts as well: botanical and zoological gardens, chemists’ laboratories, furnaces and engine rooms, music rooms, perfume

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houses and places of entertainment. This science is seen to have practical applications that are socially useful on the island. Bacon clearly preferred applied to pure science. The ‘fellows’ of Salomon’s House are ordered into particular offices, each of which has its own specialist form of work and responsibility (1974:245–6). Bacon has very little to tell us about the island’s political, religious and civil institutions, partly, no doubt, because the work remained unfinished on his death. However, it is still significant that he should spend so much time describing and giving such an important role to Salomon’s House. Bacon’s New Atlantis is about a socially and politically imperfect utopia that is ordered and given stability principally through the moral authority that comes from science (see Davis 1981). This moral authority is expressed through the example of Salomon’s House. While it has been shown that Bacon probably took the idea of Salomon’s House as a model for a scientific institution from some of the scientists of his day such as Drebbel and de Caus, it is upon the biblical Solomon’s Temple that Salomon’s House is clearly modelled, given that the Temple was a Renaissance symbol for moral order and wisdom (Bacon 1974:230). Bacon’s addition was to link this idea of a moral order with science. Salomon’s House was a heterotopia on the island, a site of an alternate ordering, a moral ordering, both for those on the island of Bensalem who wanted to live up to its perfection, and for the Europeans who were allowed a glimpse of the moral authority that Bacon believed might come if science and scientists were venerated in their work and the work’s practical applications were valued and supported. The utopianism of the island was expressed through this particular Other place. That utopianism, represented through the symbolism of Solomon’s Temple, we might say, was spatialized in the heterotopia of Salomon’s House. This chapter is about an idea for the moral ordering of modernity through heterotopia that embodied the utopics of Solomon’s Temple. The Royal Society and the scientific laboratories and learned scientific societies that emerged during this period might have been taken as the example though which these issues could have been explored (see Faÿ 1932; Shapin 1988, 1994). Instead however, I have chosen to look at freemasonry in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, principally in Britain, because it quite clearly also encompassed this desire for a moral ordering of the modern world and showed the distinct spatial character, through a fascination not only with the temple but also more generally with architecture and the shaping of Euclidean space, that acted as a basis for this moral ordering. Science, as we shall see, is still part of this story, but it is the position of freemasonry within the eighteenth-century public sphere, and its treatment of individuals as moral agents involved in developing a utopian view of the ordering of society, that gives it its overall significance. This issue of moral ordering is an important aspect of the more general social ordering that is associated with the bourgeois public sphere in the late

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seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and the development of a capitalist civil society (see Sennett 1986; Habermas 1989). Any discussion of freemasonry has to be situated within this public sphere (see Faÿ 1932; Jacob 1991). Freemasonry, furthermore, illustrates the significant role that the processes of utopics played in the constitution of a secular, bourgeois desire for the moral ordering of society. In interpreting the significance of freemasonry during this period, we can say that it facilitated relations of trust between individuals, established in the form of the lodge, which became the model of a society in the minds of a group of men who saw themselves as a morally virtuous elect, and who wanted to offer solutions to the establishment of moral order in this new, contractual, capitalist society. Freemasonry and the social significance of the masonic lodge have received only patchy recognition in recent times amongst historians (see Knoop and Jones 1947; Roberts 1972; Stevenson 1988, 1989; Jacob 1981, 1991). It is a subject that has received even less serious sociological attention in Englishspeaking countries. There are perhaps two reasons for this: first, the plethora of crank conspiracy theories that have abounded over the past two and a half centuries in relation to freemasonry (for a discussion of these see Roberts 1972); and second, the contemporary highly conservative and protective nature of the organization that offers only limited access, if any, to primary sources for academic researchers who are not themselves masons (see Jacob 1981). Despite the rather unfashionable nature of freemasonry as a subject amongst both historians and sociologists (it is a subject that is usually relegated to the footnotes or a few passing comments in most general studies of the period (see for example Porter 1982; Langford 1989)), I shall argue that understanding early freemasonry is of considerable sociological interest to understanding the emergence of ideas about the moral ordering of individuals within modern capitalist society. In speaking of masonic lodges as heterotopia I aim to show that these sites were used for activities whose alternative character derives not so much from the fact that at the time they were seen as somewhat mysterious and possibly seditious (see Roberts 1972; Billington 1980) but rather that masonic lodges were spaces of exclusion in which a supposedly virtuous elect could live out their ideals of a utopian society, promoting at the same time the seemingly contradictory ideals of equality, fraternity, selectivity and hierarchy. Such a model, utopian in idea and heterotopic in practice, made the masonic lodge both an enlightened, rational and discursive space as well as one associated with an interest in arcane and secret knowledge built up through an invented tradition that sought to link freemasons with the world of the ancients, most notably with the builders of Solomon’s Temple. In this heterotopia a sense of moral order was articulated and developed which had the effect of facilitating relations of trust, symbolized in the turning of a stranger into a brother, such that in the context of an emerging capitalist civil society they might express their shared economic and political interests.

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I take as my starting point the relationship between the emergence of secular bourgeois interests in Britain after the demise of the absolutist state and the concern for social order and fear of ‘masterlessness’ that prevailed at the time (see Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939; Biere 1985; Bauman 1987). Social order in modern society, as Bauman has suggested, involves the fear of and desire for the eradication of social ambivalence (Bauman 1991). My criticism of this position, developed in Chapter 4 above, was that Bauman failed to recognize that social ambivalence may be removed through a fascination with ambivalence via the development of a utopics that expresses itself through heterotopic spaces that produce new modes of ordering, rather than simply through eradicating it in line with a preconceived idea of the social order to be imposed. This chapter is, therefore, concerned with the issue of the moral ordering within the context of freemasonry and its lodges and their position in the emergent public sphere. I shall suggest that the spatiality of new forms of sociability, the lodges, were orderings of heterogeneity through a ritualized engagement with ambivalence, notably associated with masterlessness and with the figure of the stranger, that caused its removal from social relationships. Freemasonry had the effect of producing an idealized model of virtuous and trustworthy conduct in a contractual society as well as ideas about the moral ordering and social engineering of that society. It did so through ideas that had a distinct spatial character modelled on the ideas of Solomon’s Temple and Euclidean space that assumed its heterotopic character in the form of the lodge, itself a memory temple, in line with ideas taken from the Renaissance interest in the art of memory. SOCIAL AMBIVALENCE AND THE BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE In the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century urban world out of which modern social relations emerged, the establishment of order and the fears of social ambivalence that Bauman speaks of (1987) took place in the context of the attempt to universalize monetized, contractual relations, a process that required the development of unprecedented degrees of trust between people who were otherwise strangers to one another (see Hirschman 1977; Agnew 1986; Sennett 1986). It is in this context that we should speak of the beginnings of an ordering of modern society. An important part of this process, I would argue, was the need to turn the conditions of the exotic and unusual associated with the world of the market into the basis of an ordered bourgeois civil society (see Stallybrass and White 1986). The market place had in the past been a space associated with strangeness and Otherness; it was the world of the unfamiliar, of chance encounters, of the exotic and the pleasurable, and was associated with carnivalesque inversions of social norms (Addison 1953; Bakhtin 1984). The market place had traditionally been a space where one might come into contact

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with people and activities, which in any other space, would be considered unusual and strange (Stallybrass and White 1986). The market place, as we have seen, has generally been associated with the ambivalent, the profane and disrespectful as much as it has been with trade (Bakhtin 1984). The world of the medieval market place, an archetype of heterotopia as I suggested above in Chapter 2, has always been a space in which the stranger and their ambivalence was of central importance. This expressive Other, most significantly associated with the carnivalesque and the market place, can be taken as one of the key features of the social ambivalence that Bauman has theorized.2 While there is evidence of social control exercised through a process of the eradication of the carnivalesque of the market and the fair during the early modern period (see Burke 1994; Yeo and Yeo 1981), the fair and carnival were just as significantly transformed by the bourgeoisie through what Stallybrass and White see as an engagement and containment through incorporation of the Otherness of the popular market into the ordered civility and trustworthiness of a capitalist civil society (1986). The eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere, made up of a series of spaces involving coffee-houses, taverns, private houses, salons, parks and gardens as well as emergent business institutions, and indeed masonic lodges, became the place where new forms of expressive sociability and new moral codes were created, promoting the relations of trust between strangers necessary to develop the rational calculation and impersonality required by business transactions. The public sphere helped to civilize the ambivalence of the market, and as a consequence marketized society (Stallybrass and White 1986). The main issue is how it did this. This civilizing role of the public had already begun to be seen during the seventeenth century in the development of scientific institutions like the Royal Society in which gentlemen, with no vested interest in the outcomes of science, were relied upon to be trustworthy witnesses to scientific experiments and validators of its results (see Shapin 1994). The development, often in the coffee-houses and clubs, of intermediary institutions such as insurance companies, banking, and auctioneering suggests that out of these convivial and sociable places there emerged an institutionalization of trust and a civilizing of the carnivalesque of market practices (see Ellis 1956: Chapter 9). 3 This public sphere developed as a network of spaces used in the promotion of civility and conviviality between strangers, thus promoting relations of trust between them and offering a series of places for the exchange of contracts, ideas, scientific learning, news and gossip that were tolerant and enlightened in outlook and suited to the promotion of common economic and political interests.4 The development of the spaces of the bourgeois public sphere was based upon the utopics of free trade, contract and trust. Certain sites and practices associated with them became trustworthy and from that emerged the model of an ideal of civil society.

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As we have already seen in the example of the Palais Royal, particular places like the coffee-house, club, and as we shall see, the masonic lodge, might therefore be described as spaces which fostered through their tolerance, emphasis on the virtuous behaviour of individuals and an atmosphere of conviviality, the conditions of trust needed in a contractual society of strangers. My argument is that this civil society, through the sites of its public sphere, adopted a utopics of trust and virtue in heterotopic sites. As Stallybrass and White suggest: The public sphere is neither pure ideation nor something which existed only in and for itself: it is, like any other form of identity, created through negations, it produces a new domain by taking into itself negative introjections the very domains which surround and threaten it. It thus produces and reproduces itself through the process of denial and defiance. (1986:89, original emphasis)5 This argument does, however, run counter to some of the main points put forward about this public sphere in some of the most influential work written on it, notably in Habermas (1989) and to some degree in Sennett (1986). It is therefore necessary for me to say something on this matter before going on to consider freemasonry in detail as an example to support the claims I have made here. HABERMAS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE Habermas’ influential book on the bourgeois public sphere and its relationship to modernity has shaped much of the contemporary view of the role of that public in the eighteenth century. He introduces us to this public sphere as a space in which rational, open discussion is to the fore (1989). Habermas’ work concentrates on the emergence of a public sphere between civil society and the state in the eighteenth century. His overall intention is to show how it was emasculated by its own success as it was transformed from an open public space of bourgeois men into the institutions of the modern state, culminating in the welfare capitalist state with its institutionalized ‘mass media’ style public sphere. Habermas derives this view of the public sphere in large part from the terms and interests of mid-century critical theory, notably through critical theory’s use of immanent critique (see Jay 1973; Held 1980).6 For Habermas, the main point of this critique is to suggest that over the past two hundred years we have witnessed the ‘refeudalization’ of this public sphere by the modern state through an institutionalization and bureaucratization of daily public life. In other words, Habermas is concerned with what he sees as the decline of the emancipatory potential of the public sphere as a sphere of independent critically judging subjects into a mass media sphere of manipulated public opinion.

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Habermas’ aim is to describe the significance that this public sphere played in the separation of civil society as a realm of the private individual from the public authority of feudal social ties embodied in the state and the court. This process of separation took place initially through the emergence of an autonomous household economy, very much in keeping with the Weberian perspective on the modern economy that lies behind Habermas’ argument, emergent from the ascetic individualism of the puritan household (Weber 1985). It was in this private world, Habermas suggests, that people first began to experience their autonomy from public authority and thus their individuality primarily in economic terms. The public sphere became a realm separate from the private world of civil society but articulated the interests of that realm. In Habermas’ account the puritan household provided modern society with its moral order, a moral order which was to shape male individuals into both accumulators of capital and moral agents within this public sphere. In the private sphere, in the patriarchal space of the home, men learned to relate reasoning skills to their economic interests, but at this point in time they were unable to develop those interests effectively because institutional power was still largely in the hands of the monarch and the landed aristocracy. By creating a public sphere outside of the household and autonomous from the already existing public authorities centred around the monarch and the court, civil society, Habermas suggests, emerged as an autonomous realm of individuals.7 Habermas argues that the main arenas for this public sphere were the seventeenth-century coffee-houses in London, the eighteenth-century salons prominent in France and the table societies in Germany. While the court retained some influence in terms of public displays of civility, the formal, status-bound types of interaction associated with it gave way to a more informal atmosphere that had less regard for status and rank. These new institutions were to be found in the towns, and became counter-sites to the court. But Habermas’ main concern is less with the spaces of the public sphere and more with its literary expressions, notably letter writing, journals and the free press; in other words, overwhelmingly with the discursive practices associated with this public sphere. For Habermas, this public sphere was a place in which discussion involved the public use of reason and facilitated the possibility of individual critical judgement. Through public discussion, opinion forming and the free press, the interests of civil society were expressed and demands to curb sovereign power through legal means became prominent. In other words, critical public debate came to be seen as a challenge to the state, aimed at curbing its powers over individuals and their interests. What Habermas is suggesting is that private interests to be found within civil society were turned into public issues first in debate and then in legal demands which sought to protect the private interests of individuals. It is his contention that these claims sought to produce constitutional changes, and in their success so the bourgeois public sphere became the embodiment of the institutions of the modern capitalist state.

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Historically, for Habermas, this process varied in different countries. In Britain it emerged gradually throughout the eighteenth century and was based upon the principles enshrined in the 1688 revolution. In France, of course, it took the 1789 revolution for absolutist power to begin to be overcome; while in Germany the process was more complex and extended well into the nineteenth century. This is the picture Habermas gives of the emergence and function of the bourgeois public sphere. He spends much of the rest of his discussion of the public sphere describing how it subsequently declined by losing its critical purpose. Habermas’ position may be summarized by saying that the institutionalization of public debate into state organs led to the repenetration of the state into society. This colonization of civil society created a polarization of the public and private spheres of life, with the weakening of public participation in debate and decision making. Institutions and legal relations become the vehicles for public debate, and according to Habermas, the modern welfare state with its mass culture reduces public opinion to that of its consumption rather than direct participation, and undermines individual faculties of critical judgement (1989). Broadly speaking, when Habermas refers to the public sphere, he is talking about the République des Lettres: the clubs, journals and exchanges of letters between people. But we might ask the question: was this civil society ordered through rational discourse alone? And what has happened to its spatiality? What is missing in Habermas’ account is a recognition of the expressive or affectual side of this public sphere, in other words its ambivalent characteristics, and more specifically a recognition that it included alongside rational debate the development of a convivial sociability to be found in such things as public eating and drinking (see Mennell 1985), gambling, fashion and theatregoing (Wilson 1985; Isherwood 1986) clubbing, masquerade balls (see Castle 1986) and so on. In contrast to Habermas, we can say that this public sphere, rational and affectual in character, involved social performances in certain important spaces. Those spaces allowed for the ideas of the Enlightenment to be performed as a utopics of social ordering. Habermas bases his argument on a view of a society already ordered in the minds of individuals but one in which outmoded social institutions still hold power, and resist the advances of this newly emerged bourgeois social class that wishes to institutionalize its ideas about moral order to suit its own interests. There is no recognition that a bourgeois identity that placed a strong emphasis on rational and discursive behaviour might have developed through the engagement with and negation of its Other, the ambivalence that Bauman speaks of (1987). This omission of any discussion of the expressive and carnivalesque aspects of public life relies on a view that such ambivalence had already been eradicated in the minds of these bourgeois men as they came together politically and economically. Habermas’ social actors in this public sphere are purely rational actors, they are minds expressed on the page rather

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than bodies in space. Any fear of uncertainty they may have entertained had already been eradicated in the puritan household (or projected onto women) where no doubt the issues of social ambivalence had already been resolved through the doctrine of predestination, adoption of a calling and its individualizing and rational calculating effects (see Weber 1985).8 An alternative suggestion might be that it is through an engagement with rather than a denial of all that the Protestant sees as embodying uncertainty and ambivalence, which effectively produces the rational calculating individual that we have come to associate with it. This point relates to the crux of my argument about this public sphere. I argue that it was through a public engagement of this Other, with all the uncertainties of public life, as we have seen in the example of the Palais Royal, that social ambivalence became a source of a new mode of social ordering. In other words, the sort of individual that we associate with this public, a possessive individual (see MacPherson 1964), emerged and developed in the spaces of the public sphere but did not come to it already formed. Habermas’ position, of course, stresses the rational and discursive elements of this public sphere, but because he does not adequately consider its spatial performance, it marginalizes the expressive aspects of the forms of sociability that comprised this public. A counter-argument would suggest that if we look at the more expressive aspects of the forms of sociability that made up this public sphere, for example in the coffee-houses that I discussed in Chapter 1 above (see Ellis 1956; Stallybrass and White 1986: Chapter 2), we would see more clearly that the social order that it established was not a social order at all but an ordering of the social ambivalence in which the strange and the untrustworthy were made safe and dependable through the utopics of particular spaces (see Agnew 1986; Castle 1986). PUBLIC MEN FALLING Another influential discussion of the eighteenth-century public sphere that sheds some further light on its composition and its modernity is to be found in Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man (1986). While Sennett does pay more attention to the expressive side of the public sphere and its spatiality, he still adopts a largely Weberian view of it as a space of ascetic bourgeois individualism. The Fall of Public Man written in the 1970s was principally intended as a critique of the narcissism of western capitalist societies in the late twentieth century (see also Bell 1979; Carroll 1977; Lasch 1980). Sennett focuses on what he sees as the erosion of a publicly situated individualism that developed as an important part of the modern public life of Europe during the eighteenth century. He argues that this public sphere facilitated the development of a bourgeois identity that was orientated around a strong sense of public worth, moral responsibility and individualism. As the bourgeoisie became the dominant social class within modern capitalist societies, they

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retreated into the realm of the private that they had created for themselves. The public sphere, according to Sennett, was evacuated of its role in constituting a sense of strong individual responsibility. By the late twentieth century, according to Sennett, this was replaced by an ‘other-directed’ individual who valued the display of private qualities in the public realm (see also Riesman 1950). For Sennett, the emergence of a cult of the self, which placed emphasis on intimacy, and the development of a so-called ‘destructive Gemeinschaft’ in which empathy becomes the basis of a moral ideal (1977, 1986), replaced the bourgeois individual with a weak narcissist who constantly seeks the approval of others for validating their own self. One can certainly criticize Sennett for overly romanticizing bourgeois individualism associated with this eighteenth-century public sphere. Even so, Sennett does provide us with a rich historical-sociological analysis of the public within an emerging modernity of European society. Equally, and in contrast to Habermas, he recognizes that the moral agency of individuals is established in the spaces of the public realm and not simply in the realm of the household that existed prior to it. For Sennett, it was in this public space that a society of strangers came together sharing similar economic and political interests. They did this, he believes, through the development of a suspension of disbelief in one another as strangers. Within social interaction, character and intent remained obscured, and thus that interaction was seen as inherently untrustworthy. But in reading the outward bodily signs as signs of good intent and character, Sennett argues, a means of overcoming anxieties about the untrustworthiness of character and its intent could be achieved. This was done through the reading of signs associated with demeanour, speech patterns and dress codes, in part learned from observing acting at theatres (see also Agnew 1986). 9 This allowed bourgeois men, according to Sennett, to develop a mode of interaction that allowed strangers trust one another in the public realm. This trust, essential for the interdependence required by commerce and trade between individuals, emerged from the development of a new civility and conviviality, such as was found in the coffee-houses. From this expressive side of the public realm, moral codes on how to behave towards others were established. This was partly achieved by networks and groups, clubs for instance, with their codes of behaviour, but also through the creation of institutions of trust that acted as intermediaries in trade and commerce: banks, stock exchanges, auction houses, insurance companies and so on.10 This civility, the development of new manners, speech patterns and dress codes, all facilitated, according to Sennett, the development of an open, tolerant, cosmopolitan and enlightened bourgeois public space in which interests could be developed and trade established (see also Hirschman 1977). This public sphere aided the development of new social, economic and political interests which helped promote the development of a distinct bourgeois identity. This process, in the gardens, squares and coffee-houses of London was a fairly

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benign one; in France, however, in places like the Palais Royal, it took on a more violent and revolutionary character. What Sennett recognized, but perhaps did not spell out fully, was that this public sphere, made up not only of public discourse and public display of oneself, also produced a series of public spaces that were invested with a utopian desire to become a model for a new and modern civil society that would promote the interests of the bourgeoisie both collectively and individually. This is illustrated in the example of freemasonry, perhaps one of the best examples of an institution concerned with establishing relations of trust through an expressive and partly secret mode of social intercourse, but one which at the same time promoted the idea of individuals as free and moral agents. Freemasonry can be taken as a significant feature of the intertwining of the rational and discursive elements of this public sphere with its equally significant expressive aspects. Freemasonry was an expressive, convivial and select society that engaged in secret rituals and the search for arcane knowledge on the one hand, but also promoted the new Newtonian science and rational, enlightened debate on the other. Not only was it considerably popular in England with men during the eighteenth century but, perhaps better than any other part of that public sphere, captured the ambivalences with which it was engaged, as the desire to civilize the marketized civil society impelled it towards collectively instituted new modes of moral ordering that focused on the individual as a free and trustworthy agent. FREEMASONRY, ARCHITECTURE AND THE SOCIETY OF THE ANCIENTS Disentangling the history of the origins of freemasonry from the myths it has built up around itself has been a subject of continuing, though rather sporadic, debate (see Gould 1882–7; Knoop and Jones 1947; Roberts 1972; Jacob 1981, 1991; Stevenson 1988a, 1988b). The early freemasons themselves sought to trace their origins well back into antiquity, associating themselves with, amongst other things, the building of Solomon’s Temple, the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians, as well as with secret knowledge of the ancient world still thought to be held and passed on by generations of stonemasons in their lodges (see Knoop and Jones 1947; Curl 1991). These concerns were very important as freemasonry developed in the latter half of the seventeenth century in Britain. However, this is not a true history but an invented tradition. All the same, the myths associated with it are still sociologically important. The factual history, which has not been established with any degree of certainty, can be stated somewhat more clearly: Sometime in the seventeenth century, drawing on earlier Scottish experiences (see Stevenson 1988a), English gentlemen, men of science and merchants, as well as some members of the

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aristocracy, began to become either ‘non-operative’ members of existing stonemasons’ lodges, or created their own new ‘speculative’ lodges independent of the guild of stonemasons (Knoop and Jones 1947). The stonemasons, whose once-high status had been in decline for many decades, experienced something of a revival with the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire in 1666. They were a guild that, because of the masons’ need to travel to take on work, often associated with large building projects, had established a network of mutual aid and trade protection organized through lodges. They also operated a series of degrees through which stonemasons had to graduate in their training: apprentice, fellow and finally master mason, although originally the latter two were not differentiated. They also operated with a series of secret signs, words and catechisms that were used to pass on their knowledge from master to apprentice and to protect the skills of their craft from being transmitted to outsiders, notably unskilled building workers known as Cowans (Knoop and Jones 1947). The lodges, as is known from their records of eating, drinking and singing rituals, also offered a convivial atmosphere in which fellow masons might meet and socialize. The ter ms operative, accepted and speculative masonry are used to characterize some of the changes that occurred as freemasonry developed as a secret society. Operative lodges were ones occupied by stonemasons alone, accepted lodges were ones where both stonemasons and non-operatives met together, and speculative lodges were ones where non-operatives alone were to be found (Knoop and Jones 1947). Amongst the earliest known non-operative persons to join were Robert Moray in 1641 (Stevenson 1988a:166ff.) and Elias Ashmole in 1646 (Roberts 1972:20), both of whom were later to become founder members of the Royal Society. There is evidence, however, that some Scottish lords and gentlemen may have joined after Scottish stonemasonry was reorganized by the master of works William Shaw at the very end of the sixteenth century (Stevenson 1988a:32). The most important question, however, is not the first date of entry, or whether freemasonry started in Scotland or England, but why, increasingly in the latter half of the seventeenth century and then into the eighteenth, did men who were not stonemasons begin to enter these lodges in increasing numbers or start to create their own new ‘speculative’ lodges? In the extensive but largely unsociological literature on freemasonry this is a question that has never been fully answered. Attention has certainly been given to the process of transformation from a guild system to a bourgeois institution, and one of the best accounts remains that by Knoop and Jones (1947) but the ‘why?’ question remains largely ignored (although see Jacob 1991). As we know, the seventeenth century had been a time of religious, social and political upheaval in England. The Civil War, the Restoration, fear of a Catholic revival and the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 all helped to establish new interests embodied in civil society and the writings on the social contract, and to overthrow the absolutist power of the monarch and

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replace it with an incipient liberal constitutionalism. But this period was not only one of great change but also of uncertainty, associated not only with the fear of a restored Catholic monarch but of social chaos as the final remnants of feudal social bonds were swept away (Bauman 1987). It is my contention that freemasonry was, at least in part, a response to these fears of social disorder and the intolerance it produced. A reason why the stonemasons’ guild rather than any other guild might attract the attention of those seeking answers for the ordering of society can perhaps be seen in relation to the seventeenth-century interests in antiquarianism and architecture (see Rykwert 1980; Kruft 1994). These two interests reflected an earlier fascination with alchemy, hermetic wisdom and secret knowledge found during the Elizabethan period, out of which the initial interest in stonemasonry emerged (see Yates 1992:294–5; see also Stevenson 1988a). Uncovering forms of rejected and highly coded knowledge, especially that associated with architecture and building, would, it was believed, uncover the answers that might be taken to solve issues of social harmony and offer an enlightened understanding of the world (see Yates 1992). Certainly, this hermetic quest was a fascination for the founders of the Royal Society. The remnants of this neo-platonic discourse revolved around the concern for finding order, perfection and harmony in nature, something that might then be applied to a distinctly disordered society torn by religious and civil conflict and the increasing displacement of people from their traditional social relationships. This was certainly the motivation for William Stukely to become a freemason in the early eighteenth century: Stukely was one of the most prominent antiquarians and one of the few people to leave evidence of his motives for joining (see Rykwert 1980:133). The masonic guild system offered not only one of the last vestiges of a traditional guild-based social bond in a period of social change, itself a sign of order and tradition, but also the spatial symbolism of order in its emphasis on the architectural, Euclidean geometry and mathematical skills of the stone-mason, as well as the clandestine lodge structure through which men could meet in security, talk, circulate books and socialize in a less formal manner than that associated with either the court or the universities. We can see in the development of freemasonry the idea of the individual as a moral agent, who derived a sense of social cohesion from the elect status of the secret masonic lodge. This was expressed particularly in the spatial language of architecture that so influenced the early freemasons (see Knoop and Jones 1947; Rykwert 1980; Curl 1991). Freemasonry was founded around the image of the secular architect shaping the world and himself within it so as to provide both with a sense of moral order. Stonemasons, as forerunners of modern architects, not only provided the symbolic tools for this reshaping process, but because of their past, particularly their association with the building of the great cathedrals in Europe, supplied the link with religious certainty and order. But it was the building of Solomon’s Temple which was

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the central myth of freemasonry. It embodied spatially a utopic of moral order in which individuals might lead a virtuous life and come to create the social conditions of trust required in the contractual society that was emerging around them. Freemasons devoted considerable energy to seeking out their origins of their craft in the ancient world, notably associated with the great feats of architecture down the ages. Freemasons were imputed to have been involved in almost every architectural feat in history, right back to Noah and his ark and including on the way the construction of Solomon’s Temple and the Tower of Babel. The symbolism of architecture, located in this invented tradition, allowed freemasons to see themselves as connected through a secret and unbroken line with the ancients, notably with Hiram of Tyre, the first mason and builder of Solomon’s Temple. This invented tradition, as well as perhaps enhancing its members’ sense of being part of an elect group with access to secret truths, can be interpreted as offering the possibility of negating the tumult of social changes that were under way at the time. As the world changed, only the freemasons, inheritors to the secrets of order associated with the ancient world, remained as an example of stability. Moreover, this invented tradition, based upon the symbolic order of architecture, offered a utopic vision of a new type of social engineering, of controlling untamed passions and conceiving the idea of society along the principles embodied in an image of a mechanical, manipulable nature (Rykwert 1980). Architects like Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones were held in high esteem by freemasons. Drawing on the earlier traditions of Vitruvius, and the more recent work of Palladio, they sought to introduce classical elements of order into architectural form while at the same time producing buildings highly symbolic in their design. The antiquarian concern with classical society also had a significant part to play in this interest in arcane knowledge and social order. It was believed that ancient knowledge of an ordered and peaceful way of living had been lost and could only be regained through the last surviving channels in which this secret wisdom had been passed down. This symbolism of order was to be found not only in architecture but also in the newly developing Newtonian science. Its mechanical view of nature that was becoming prominent at that time was to be influential on the newly founded Royal Society. There was a considerable degree of affinity between freemasonry and Newtonian science, not least in that some of the leading scientists, such as John Desaguiliers, were themselves prominent freemasons (see Roberts 1972). The initial appeal might have been arcane knowledge, but masonic lodges soon became places of enlightened and convivial society, mixing interests in the new science and in politics as well as in banquets and socializing on an ‘equal’ basis with a wide range of people. It should come as little surprise to find that some of the first public lectures to be given on the new science took place in the masonic lodges (Faÿ 1932; Jacob 1987; and Stewart 1986a, 1986b). The most prominent lecturer was

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John Desaguiliers, a Huguenot refugee, pastor, philosopher, scientist, friend of Isaac Newton and leading member of the Royal Society. Desaguiliers was also one of the most prominent early freemasons, helping to found the Grand Lodge in London on 4 June 1717 in the tavern, the Goose and Gridiron in Covent Garden, and becoming one of its first Grand Masters (Roberts 1972:21). Freemasonry during this period was tolerant, enlightened, generally secular yet morally aware, and concerned with issues to do with scientific discovery. This science was used to legitimate a vision of social order as based in natural order. Freemasonry provided not only a vehicle for the scientists to lecture and socialize; it also offered the means through which these economic and political interests might find common support. It played a part in the civilizing of civil society. Newtonian science not only provided legitimacy through the symbolism of masonr y for a higher, morally regulated, perfectible society, but also the means through which perfection might be achieved. The lodges were utopic representations of an orderly society by which self-interested bourgeois individuals might be shaped into moral subjects not only through their veneration of the symbolic order found in both nature and architecture, and their acceptance of rank and hierarchy, but also through their own freedom as moral subjects and as part of a group that perceived itself as a moral elect. Through such means the unhewn stranger could be shaped into a trustworthy brother. Such a process could not but help promote the development of the shared political and economic interests that we have all come to associate with freemasonry in more recent times. The strongest symbol of that classical order was to be found in the biblical story of the building of Solomon’s Temple. As the embodiment of natural wisdom, the symbol of Solomon’s Temple held secrets in its design. The invented tradition and history that centred on architecture and the building of Solomon’s Temple not only offered freemasons a sense of being part of a select group with access to some of the secrets of the ancients but also, I would argue, allowed them to see themselves as a moral elect, able to act as a vanguard of moral agents in the emerging public sphere of the period. The interpretation of freemasonry that I have given above is drawn from the example of freemasonry in England. Not only was England the first country to unite the growing number of lodges under a grand lodge, it also produced the first all-encompassing set of charges, written by James Anderson in 1723 (although it is reckoned that others, particularly John Desaguiliers, had some hand in drafting them). These charges amount to a constitution which set down the main rules for the brotherhood and included more mystical comments on the origins of freemasonry (see Anderson, extract in appendix of Jacob 1981:279–87). The moral standpoint is set out in the first two paragraphs:

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A mason is oblig’d by his Tenure, to obey the moral law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious libertine. (Anderson 1981:280) The charges however, leave it up to the individual mason to choose which religion he chooses to follow. The charges then go on to speak about politics: A mason is a peaceable subject to the Civil Powers, wherever he resides or works, and is never to be concern’d in plots and conspiracies against the peace and welfare of the nation, not to behave himself undutifully to inferior magistrates. (Anderson 1981:280) It should be remembered that the early eighteenth century was the time of the Jacobite rebellions, and the reference to not engaging in politics not only shows the support the Grand Lodge gave to the Hanoverian monarchy but was also perhaps a way of distancing itself from the Jacobite influences that were within masonry, notably in Scotland and later on the continent. The reference to inferior magistrates perhaps suggests that masons saw themselves as selfappointed carriers of virtue above the mundane concerns of everyday political activities (see Koselleck 1988). The charges do go on though in the spirit of toleration on political matters: [I]f a Brother should be a rebel against the state, he is not to be countenanc’d in his rebellion, however he may be pitied as an unhappy man; and, if convicted of no other crime, though the loyal Brotherhood must and ought to disown his rebellion, and give no umbrage or ground of political jealousy to the government for the time being; they cannot expel him from the lodge, and his relation to it remains indefeasible. (Anderson 1981:280) Some of the links between this moral position and the importance that architecture had for freemasons can be seen in the manner in which the masons’s tools were seen as providing the symbolism of a new moral order for society: the gavel, used for fitting stones together, symbolized the moral, educative intent that freemasons had with relation to social order; the chisel, for the dressing of stones, symbolized the advanced learning of the masons over others; the square, used for measuring, represented the pursuit of honesty; the level, used for drawing lines, represented equality among masons; and the plumb, used for accuracy in construction, represented the possibility of human perfectibility (Weisberger 1986:135ff.). With the charges as well as with such symbols, which set about defining the moral underpinnings of freemasonry and types of conduct that individual

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masons should follow, we begin to see the very modern character of freemasonry. Although ascriptive in nature and backed up by religious symbolism and initiation, it should not be forgotten that although men chose to become freemasons, they could not do so directly but had to be asked by an existing member to join and risked the possibility of rejection through blackballing. Although it was fashionable during the eighteenth century, and for many probably served as little more than a club with a bit of mystery, there was no obligation to join. Despite the many motives that men may have had for joining, motives which remain unrecorded, one can surmise, on the basis of what we know about groups that place a high degree of significance on elective initiation rites (see Van Gennep 1960; Turner 1969; La Fontaine 1985) that part of the reason may well have been that they chose to join for the experience of collective solidarity in a world of uncertainty where one could not be certain of one’s status. Unlike the family, the church or the court, which previously were predetermined social institutions through which people were ascribed their position, freemasonry involved a choice whether to join or not, and the ascriptive rules and normative sanctions came after that choice had been taken. It is plausible therefore, that the desire to be part of a moral elect with access to secret knowledge, expressed symbolically in the secret and symbolic words and signs that were associated with the various grades and their initiation rites, alongside intimate friendship amongst social equals and the re-enchantment of collective life, were some of the reasons that led men to become freemasons at this time. In contrast to Habermas on the public sphere, the popularity of freemasonry during the eighteenth century suggests that the emerging class of bourgeois men entering the public world were not so sure of their position as individuals as to be able to lead a life without the public support and the intimacy of others. FREEMASONRY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE This sense of moral election should be considered in the context of the public sphere of which it was a part. A significant element of the emergence of modern society in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the creation of the institutions of the modern nation state and the development of capitalist economies. It was during this period that the public sphere analysed by Habermas and Sennett came to be recognized as an autonomous sphere of life outside the direct control of the absolutist monarchies and separate from the private realm of the household (see also Cohen 1982). There are two distinctively different interpretations of this public sphere that are significant to the debate on the significance of the role of freemasonry: again that of Habermas (1989; see also Jacob 1991) and that of Koselleck (1988).11 Habermas’ work, as I have suggested above, concentrates on the emergence of a public sphere between civil society and the state in the eighteenth century

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(1989). Koselleck on the other hand tries to show how the critique of absolutism from within what was primarily a moral but non-political public sphere, created all the hypocritical and utopian views of Enlightenment that placed virtue above and outside politics. This, for Koselleck, is the origin of and the basis for all the failings of modern society (1988). It should be made clear from the outset that Habermas and Koselleck are coming from very different political and philosophical positions. Habermas’ vision of the public sphere offers a combination of a Rousseauian idealization of popular participation with a Kantian appreciation of the public use of reason. Koselleck, by contrast, is more Hobbesian in his defence of the value of state authority, which he sees as being undermined by this public sphere. In adopting this position he draws considerably on the work of the German conservative legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1986, 1988). What both writers have in common, however, is the intention of producing a critique of the liberal capitalist outcome in the form of a public sphere. For Habermas the main point is the ‘re-feudalization’ or institutionalization and bureaucratization of the public sphere in the modern state. For Koselleck, the public sphere is to blame for the loss of the sovereign’s ability to be able to make decisions unhindered, and his aim is a subsequent ‘critique of critique’ as developed in the Enlightenment and of the modern phenomenon of social crisis. In other words, it is the emancipatory potential of the public sphere that is lost for Habermas, while for Koselleck it is this desire for individual emancipation in the first place that is the problem. Haber mas devotes little more than half a page to the subject of freemasonry in his book on the public sphere (1989:34) but his discussion of it and of the public sphere more generally has led to the development of one important view of the significance of freemasonry within the public sphere (see Jacob 1991). Drawing largely on the development of freemasonry in the German principalities, Habermas recognizes its ambivalence as being by necessity both a public and private institution and one that acted as a model for the public sphere at a time when it was openly suppressed by the state: ‘The coming together of private people into a public was therefore anticipated in secret, as a public sphere still existing largely behind closed doors’ (1989:34).12 Habermas suggests that freemasonry as a secret institution allowed people to meet outside the gaze of the public authorities until they felt strong enough to go public. Its role he argues, was to protect reason from domination at a time when the open development of a bourgeois public sphere was not possible. On succeeding in this, Habermas argues, the significance of freemasonry as a part of the public sphere declined as freemasons moved away from the liberal and Enlightenment positions that they had first promoted: The practice of secret societies fell prey to its own ideology to the extent to which the public that put reason to use, and hence the bourgeois public

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sphere for which it acted as a pacemaker, won out against state-governed publicity. From publicist enclaves of civic concern with common affairs they developed into exclusive associations whose basis is a separation from the public sphere that in the meantime had arisen. (1989:34) Koselleck, in contrast to Habermas while recognizing the significance of the République des Lettres, gives a much more prominent role to the masonic lodges in shaping the eighteenth-century public sphere. His view of the civil society, with which this public sphere was associated, is largely based on a reading of what Hobbes had to say about the emergence of the modern individual. Koselleck recognizes that Hobbes, in defending the decision-making power of the absolutist state, allowed individuals to be free in their private lives. Hobbes wrote his main work Leviathan before British absolutism had finally been defeated. His overwhelming fear of social chaos or ambivalence was shaped by a century of religious wars in Europe since the Reformation, and was written just after the English Civil War. Hobbes was not prepared, as later writers like Locke and Montesquieu were, to reject absolutism. His philosophy was in part an attempt to justify the absolute power of the sovereign. The important factor in Hobbes however, is that it is with him that we begin to see the split between public and private life take on significance. Hobbes’ absolute monarch ruled in the public realm, leaving individuals, who can really be called individuals for the first time here, free to think and act autonomously in the private realm, but having no say over the rule of the sovereign in public. As Hobbes left no place for modern individuals to express their individuality in public, it was left to other writers like Locke, writing around the time of the 1688 revolution, to suggest that such individuality should be defended in terms of its right to assert its interests outside of the private realm and through the social contract which demands that civil society the realm of the private individual be allowed public protection. In particular, it was the right of property that was seen by Locke to be the central tenet of individuality enshrined within this civil society. In sum, the economic, cultural and political interests of property-owning men were what were enshrined in this view of civil society constituted in law to protect individual interests against the state. Koselleck believes that it was through the public sphere, in institutions like freemasonry, that such rights expressed as the moral rights of individuals were constituted (1988). This, for Koselleck, is where the problem begins. He believes that people became discontent with their lack of public involvement and began to make special demands on that public. What is significant here, and there is also an echo of Weber’s sociology of religion in Koselleck’s argument (Weber 1965), is that people in their private lives were morally free rather than politically free. The claims they subsequently made on the public, therefore, were moral ones

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that were placed above the politics from which they were largely excluded. This moral concern became the thrust of public opinion. As Koselleck suggests: Civic morality becomes a public power one that works only intellectually but which has political effects, forcing the citizen to adapt his actions not just to State law but simultaneously, and principally, to the law of public opinion. (1988:59–60) It is above all, according to Koselleck, the masonic lodges that offered this enlightened moral vision that disdained politics for higher ideals. Yet the significance of this for Koselleck is that it became highly political. The people involved were often state functionaries as well as merchants and some members of the aristocracy. In general they were people with political influence but not power itself: All institutions of this novel sociable and social stratum acquired a character that was potentially political, and insofar as they already had some influence on policy and on the legislation of the state they turned into indirect political forces. (1988:66) Koselleck continues: The masonic lodges amounted to the formation—typical of the new bourgeoisie—of an indirect power within the Absolutist state. Surrounding them was a self-made veil: the mystery. (1988:70) Commentators on the role of freemasonry within the Enlightenment have been puzzled by its quest for esoteric, arcane and mysterious knowledge, and have often dismissed freemasonry, as indeed Habermas does, accordingly. Koselleck, on the other hand, sees this element as central to any understanding of the significance of freemasonry, and on this point at least we can agree with him. As I have already indicated, this mystery, which took the form of a fascination with arcane and hermetic knowledge, involved the production of an invented tradition that attempted to trace masonry back to the building of Solomon’s Temple. This search for mystical genealogical origins was, according to Koselleck, the means by which masonry was able to elevate the moral over the political. As he suggests: For what the masons, from the start and quite deliberately, enshrouded in secrecy and elevated to the level of a mystery was the extra-political

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intellectual interior which they shared with other bourgeois communities…. It was in the lodges and through them that the bourgeoisie acquired a social form of its own. In imitating both, its mystery won a place beside the ecclesiastic mysteries of the arcane politica of the states. (1988:70–2) At the centre of these interpretations of eighteenth-century freemasonry by Habermas and Koselleck is the issue of utopianism. Freemasonry, as Jacob points out, was a distinctly utopian movement which emerged just as the utopian literary genre, notably in Britain, was going into decline (1988:125). The lodges that were formed became an expression of a utopian outlook that wished to set itself up as a model of a good, ordered and moral way to live in the context of an increasingly individualizing, contractual society. Both Koselleck and Habermas view this utopianism in a different but critical light. Koselleck’s position, as I have suggested, draws quite exten-sively on Schmitt’s analysis of what he calls political romanticism (1986). This romanticism, whose agent is principally the emerging bourgeoisie, is seen as seeking to address the issues of power and authority within society, what I have called the issue of social ordering, by placing the individual as a moral agent at the focal point for any new mode of ordering. In Schmitt’s and Koselleck’s view the issues of individual experience and ‘the occasion’, notably political events through which individuals can act as moral agents, are the means through which this moral authority based in individual agents is expressed. The production of social order is linked—and it is seen as an order rather than ordering by Koselleck—by the bourgeoisie, found most clearly for Koselleck in freemasonry, with the development of secular individual moral agency. This, for Schmitt, derives from a romantic view of the self as an independent agent of morality that is expressed through its utopianism, or what Schmitt calls subjectivized occasionalism (1986:16). The romantic subject who challenges the authority of the subject, or king, treats the world, according to Schmitt, ‘[A]s an occasion and opportunity for his romantic productivity’ (1986:17). He goes on to add: Instead of God, however, the romantic subject occupies the central position and makes the world and everything that occurs in it into a mere occasion [for himself]. (1986:17) Furthermore, according to Schmitt, this occasionalism is used by members of the bourgeoisie to try and produce new forms of social cohesion and order. This is a powerful argument about the utopianism of the bourgeoisie as expressed in freemasonry. Koselleck suggests, using Schmitt’s analysis of political romanticism, that out of social disorder or uncertainty emerges a cultivation of the self as a virtuous subject whose position of independence,

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derived from a sense of one’s own moral elect status, allows freemasons to see themselves as being able to turn the political issues of social order into moral ones. What is much less convincing in this argument, indeed objectionable, is the critique to which this interpretation is subsequently put, overtly in Schmitt, who became an apologist for Nazism in the 1930s, and more obliquely in Koselleck. Schmitt’s position is a decisionist one, in the sense that he believes that social order should derive from the ability of the sovereign to make decisions unimpaired by any other authority (1988). As a supporter of a Hobbesian position, he believed in the absolute authority of the sovereign as the embodiment of the state, and criticized the bourgeoisie with its romanticism for its inability to produce social order out of its subjectivized occasionalism (which would include such things as democratic processes associated with discussion and decision making by consensus) that came to be associated with state formation in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. Schmitt is hostile to the utopianism of the bourgeoisie generally; Koselleck also, seeing this utopianism exemplified in freemasonry, because he believed that it would fail to produce the order that a sovereign with absolute authority might. There is, however, no evidence whatsoever to suggest that an absolutist state is any more effective politically in making decisions and maintaining social order than a democratic process which places more emphasis on the ‘occasionalism’ of open discussion and consensus politics. Koselleck, while he offers one of the most important and interesting interpretations of the significance of freemasonry, ultimately misses the point about its social significance. The open hostility he exhibits to the utopianism that he sees freemasonry representing means that he fails to realize the sociological point that the utopianism which freemasonry embodied was significant because it began to promote ideas about new modes of social ordering through its sociability and moral codes that were to have lasting effects in the promotion of the idea of the individual as an autonomous moral subject. The issue of whether social order is established upon this principle may be of political interest but it obscures the sociological insights that Koselleck makes about utopianism. Habermas in contrast, leaving aside the debates concerning the possible influence of Schmitt on his work (Habermas 1986; Hirst 1987; Jay 1987; Kennedy 1987) is also, as we have seen, critical of freemasonry. Indeed, freemasonry presents something of a dilemma for Habermas. Although, as Jacob has recently shown from within a Habermasian perspective, freemasonry was prominent in the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on discursive rationality and social tolerance (Jacob 1988, 1991; see also Faÿ 1932) it also involved secrecy, hierarchy and a fascination with mystery and arcane knowledge far removed from the main Enlightenment thrust of eighteenth-century thought. 13 Furthermore, freemasonry is well known for its secrecy and ritualistic ceremonies, which if he were to take them seriously would tend to undermine the picture Habermas gives of the public

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use of reason. Instead, as we have seen, Habermas reduces freemasonry to a marginal activity that performed a role initially but was outgrown when the public sphere no longer had to develop in secret. It has been left to Jacob to develop the Habermasian position with direct reference to freemasonry (1991). In her most recent work she rightly locates her discussion of the emergence of freemasonry in the context of civil society (1991:20–1). She recognizes Haber mas’ equivocation over the role of freemasonry within his view of the public sphere, although she tends to focus more on its refusal to admit women than on the issue of its central ambivalence in relation to the picture of the public sphere that Habermas paints: that it was a part-open and part-closed secret society that openly espoused Enlightenment ideas about tolerance, constitutionalism and social equality while promoting an interest in arcane and hermetic beliefs, and rites of passage that supported ideas about hierarchy and rank as a basis for social ordering at the same time. Jacob takes at face value the Habermasian view of the bourgeois public sphere as a utopian realm of virtue, and seeks to show how freemasonry helped to promote the values and ideals of an emergent bourgeois class that aligned itself with these views. This is of course partly true: freemasons did offer opportunities for learning and discussion in an open and tolerant manner (see Faÿ 1932). But this is not the total picture; what of the more expressive elements, the arcane interests, the secrecy and emphasis on hierarchy, which sit uneasily alongside the espoused vision of an enlightened, harmonious brotherhood or fraternity? Whereas Habermas worries about these elements and therefore ends up rejecting freemasonry as part of the public sphere, Jacob embraces it fully but in doing so overplays the rational and Enlightenment elements in freemasonry while ignoring the significance of those other features, indeed almost erasing them from existence. Rather than look at eighteenth-century freemasonry politically and criticize it for being either too much associated with bourgeois romantic and utopian positions, or not utopian and Enlightened enough, I want to suggest that it is these very ambivalences that freemasonry embodied which made it socially significant. I use it as an example here because that ambivalence, focused on an interest in the expressive and mysterious on the one hand and the rational and discursive on the other, is, I believe, the key to understanding the propensity towards a utopic expression of social ordering contained within an important heterotopic space within this public sphere. This public sphere should be seen as a regime of social ordering rather than an established social order. Freemasonry, better than any other element of this public sphere, illustrates the translation of fears about ambivalence and conflict, expressed in the forms of a view of society as masterless and lacking moral direction, through a utopics that expressed a desire for a new moral ordering of society. It did this, furthermore, in a distinctly spatial way. The failure to make successful decisions which derived from the occasionalism of bourgeois

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subject does not lead to a call for a return to the absolutist state but to a recognition of the fact that modes of social ordering operate through translations within networks of constituted agents, rather than through certainty and the ability to exercise absolute social control. The utopics of freemasonry was expressed through the fascination with Solomon’s Temple, and it called on its builders as ancient allies through which to legitimize itself. Overall it used the image of the architect and architecture represented in the symbolism of Solomon’s Temple and the perfections to be achieved by following the principles of Euclidean geometry as the basis of moral order it sought to establish. This spatialization was realized as a heterotopia in the form of the masonic lodge. THE LODGE, HETEROTOPIA AND MORAL ORDERING Against the background of attempting to construct a new moral order while promoting the idea of individual sovereignty, masonic lodges also provided spaces of social solidarity, or communitas, that served as the space for the transformation of identity, from isolated stranger to a trustworthy brother, through the various rites of passage associated with the initiation into different grades within the hierarchy (Turner 1969). This solidarity, best understood by the concept of fraternity, of which freemasons can be said to have provided the modern meaning, is the unifying principle of freemasonry. In seeking a response to fears of social chaos and the opportunities of civil society men chose to come together in lodges to which they gave symbolic and moral significance. In joining together they formed a fraternity that through its emotive content helped to create a new type of individual identity, embedded in the idea of a strong and trustworthy social context. The alternate ordering established by freemasonry was to be found in the idea of the lodge and its associations with fraternity and moral order on the one hand and with the issue of individual freedom on the other. The space of the lodge was significant within this process. The model, to reiterate, was that of Solomon’s Temple, with its significance as a symbol of wisdom in hermetic beliefs, which as suggested above was central to the origins of freemasonry through its association between buildings and the art of memory (see Stevenson 1988a:85–97; Yates 1992:294–6). The first lodge, in the invented tradition of freemasonry, was that found near the entrance to Solomon’s Temple. Subsequent lodge design was based on biblical description of that Temple and a geometrical layout that followed the principles of geometry set down by Euclid (see Curl 1991). Stonemasons’ lodges were originally workshops built for the duration of a building, some of which where associated with the building of cathedrals and would last for many years. They were also convivial places used for entertainment and meetings (Curl 1991:24).

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The original freemasons’ lodges, as opposed to those of operative stonemasons, were not distinct buildings as they later became, but meetings in other buildings. Initially the layout of the lodge, modelled on the layout of Solomon’s Temple, would be chalked onto the floor of a room in a coffeehouse, tavern or private house which served as the meeting place for freemasons (Knoop and Jones 1947). The lodge, highly symbolic in design, was supposed to be an expression of the memory of the Temple. As Stevenson suggests: However crude and limited the lodge and its symbolism as described in the early Catechisms may seem when compared to the classical art of memory, it may nonetheless have its origins in the concept of the temple of memory illustrating the eternal truths and moral principles through images appropriate to the mason craft. (1988a:143) It was a space that had significant symbolic properties which had to be learned by members of the Order once they had been initiated through the various grades. The architectural features and symbols of the lodge expressed in its layout and its architecture provided freemasons with a semiotic basis for their moral education. In design, the lodge was a rectangular space orientated east—west with a three-step entrance at the west and the master’s place at the east. Later, the chalk sketches were replaced with tracing boards, cloths that contained an ornate symbolism, showing not only some of the tools associated with the masons’ craft but also arcane signs as well as scenes from some of the important events in the ‘history’ of masonry, especially that associated with Solomon’s Temple. These cloths would be laid on the floor and around them the meeting and its rituals would take place (see Curl 1991: Chapter 3). Particular cloths would be used for particular ceremonies, notably the initiation of men to the three grades of entered apprentice, fellow-craft and master mason (see Curl 1991:55ff.). The temple, while acting as the model for the lodge, also played a part in the design of many neo-classical buildings of the period, as it was used to symbolize in its architectural design classical associations of wisdom and order (Curl 1991:94ff.). Indeed there is considerable evidence to suggest that freemasonry played a major role in the development and spread of neoclassicism not only in architecture (see Rykwert 1980: Chapter 6) but also in the design of sundials, gardens, memorials, mausolea, and so on (see Joy 1965; Guralnick 1988; Curl 1991). All of the elements that went into the making of this lodge ‘temple’, which from the late eighteenth century did become separate and distinct spaces, had a symbolic purpose. Perhaps the most significant were the use of the symbol of the two free standing columns in lodge design, representing the columns

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‘Jachin’ and ‘Boaz’ as depicted in the Bible, found on either side of the entrance to Solomon’s Temple and representing the secret knowledge of the order and the lost wisdom of the ancients (1 Kings 7:21). The steps leading into the lodge are also symbolically significant, associated with different grades of initiation. As indeed was the common use in some masonic architecture of pictures of the sun or an all-seeing eye, representing the gaze of the authority of the Grand Architect (the deity). Freemasonry was able to do this because of the association that it made, embodied in the principles of the lodge, between architecture and order, notably the belief that architecture could be used to symbolically shape and order society. Freemasonry was both secretive and open. As well as meeting secretly in lodges, freemasons also held public parades, wearing their aprons and carrying lodge banners, and communal banquets (Jones 1967). Part of this semi-public face can be seen in Lillywhite’s study of 2,000 London coffeehouses between the late seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries: no less than 245 at one time or another held masonic meetings, approximately 12 per cent of the total (1963). There is also some evidence, as shown in Table 5.1, for the increasing growth of freemasonry in its formative speculative period in the early eighteenth century:

Table 5.1. Number of masonic lodges between 1717 and 1735

Figures from various sources, cited in Knoop and Jones 1947:296.

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These figures, while not absolutely convincing in their reliability, at least say something about the growth over the period 1717–35 as well as considerable fluctuation suggesting that many lodges were rather ad hoc and in some cases short-lived, but the growth in numbers is unmistakable, reflecting the fashionableness of freemasonry during this period. The figures are somewhat confirmed by Money’s research into the connections between freemasonry and loyalism in England during the eighteenth century (1990). He offers a range of region-by-region figures for England and Wales that show freemasonry growing steadily in the provinces throughout the century, and in London until around 1770, after which it goes into decline before levelling off (1990:269–71). Through its lodges and the activities associated with it, freemasonry aimed to create a new moral code for its individual members which also acted as the basis of a vision for a new mode of social ordering. It is well known, for instance, that freemasons are highly supportive of one another in hard times. They have also always placed considerable emphasis on the importance of charity. Freemasonry promoted, as a form of sociation, a collective experience of friendship amongst people from many social ranks who perceived themselves as equal brothers within the lodge. There was a strongly expressive character to this lodge sociability. Epstein summarizes well the significance of the relationship between the promotion of individual self-interest and collective solidarity: The principles of the Aufklärung called for an individualistic, even atomistic structure of society; but this did not prevent the Aufklärer from feeling the common human need for community and membership in organised institutions…[freemasonry] met man’s perennial need for solidarity, mutual sympathy and common engagement in a cause; while its secret and ritualistic character filled the psychological vacuum left by the collapse of religious miracle, mystery and authority. (1966:84) Simmel makes a similar point with regard to the sociation of the secret society: Sociation may be directly sought…in order to compensate, in part, for the isolating consequences of continuing secrecy—in order to satisfy within secrecy the impulse towards communion which the secret destroys in regard to the outside. (1950:356) This term communion continues to appear in the literature on freemasonry, often in association with the concept of fraternity clearly associated with the notion

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of The Brotherhood, a name by which freemasons are often known. Hobsbawm speaks of fraternity in the same terms: Fraternity had a very strong emotional content, uniting something like the sentiments of kinship, friendship and love in the heightened atmosphere of something like a religion. Hence—as in freemasonry—it also had a very strong ethical content. (Hobsbawm 1975:472) It is known too that eating and drinking rituals were associated with the lodges and there are many masonic songs that express this comradeship and convivial atmosphere of supposed equals (Knoop and Jones 1947). The lodge also promoted the idea of individuality; the social bonds that it had created had to be maintained through rites of passage that encourage individual self-identification and sovereignty. The whole purpose of all this was to construct an image of a regulated, egalitarian society in which people could pursue their interests in a world where the uncertainties of life were managed and controlled. I would argue that a central element in the ordering of bourgeois male identity in the eighteenth century took place in the masonic lodges and that they were, through their desire for moral and social order, progress, the architectural reconstruction of society, and self-interest, the main mediating form of sociation through which this identity emerged. It was based upon the principles of a secular individual moral sovereignty that was seen as in keeping with these worldly activities of economics and politics. The main significance of this is, moreover, that individuality and its relation to society had to be learned and encoded in a new set of moral prescriptions. It is unconvincing to me that this process would have occurred solely within the household as Habermas suggests (1989) and thus outside of a wider social context. A clear demarcation between public and private life had not been established in the eighteenth century but it was during this time that it was taking place and freemasonry played a significant part in the process. Freemasonry can be looked upon as a civic religion serving as the social context for the modern individualizing process. Perhaps more than any other aspect of eighteenthcentury life, freemasonry expressed the humanist concerns with the moral perfectibility of society, and of individuals, as a unity. The symbolic, utopic expression of this humanism and its desire to order both individual and society can be seen in the architectural imagery of masonry and its idea of shaping a new man from unhewn stone. The system of degrees taken from stonemasonry also had moral significance, as Schneider suggests: When the individual mason, in ascending the scale of degrees with absolute readiness for the genuine masonic attitude of tolerance and of self-

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protection toward an ideal humanism, experienced, as it were, the very idea of growth in his own soul, he felt the touch of never betrayed because it was beyond betraying. (1947:157) As well as embodying the principles of the Enlightenment, the religious symbolism and ritual also have to be considered in a modern rather than an arcane context. It is above all the notion of secrecy and its attachment to a mythical past and arcane knowledge that served the role of promoting both individual and collective adherence to a set of common beliefs. In putting the development of freemasonry in the context of social anxieties about the breakup of pre-modern social bonds and order, the freemasons can be seen to have provided themselves with an ideal world of stability located in general in classical antiquity and in Solomon’s Temple in particular. By suggesting that they alone had links with this ancient world, through being able to uncover some of its secrets that had been passed down by generations of stonemasons, they can be seen to have set themselves up as an elect group who had sole access to the secrets of how social stability might be achieved while at the same time legitimizing the individual as a sovereign person. The heterotopic space of the lodge, an obligatory point of passage, a space of an alternate and novel social and moral ordering, was the means by which this stability might be ideally achieved. If it represented the ideal society then it was the secret that acted as the cement; it allowed freemasonry to be more than just a club. One can turn again to Simmel’s analysis of secret societies to see this: The essence of the secret society, as such, is autonomy. But this autonomy approaches anarchy: the consequences of leaving the general normative order are rootlessness and the absence of a stable life-feeling and a norm giving basis. The fixed and minute character of the ritual helps to overcome this lack. (1950:361) Simmel is here speaking generally about all secret societies and not in the historical context in which freemasonry emerged. The point to be made is that a normative sociality outside the lodges was in a state of flux, and in offering stability to its members freemasonry also sought to offer the normative basis for society as well. This society was of course the civil society of private interests and economic intercourse. The sense of moral certainty was born from the manner in which freemasonry as the content of a particular form of sociation had a highly ritualized set of norms and regulations lacking in civil society. In this way they adopted a view about one hundred years before Hegel and two hundred before Durkheim that modern social conditions not only produced greater individual freedom but also social and moral conflicts that

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were not themselves resolvable by individuals. In this sense freemasonry might be spoken of as a ‘corporation’ that both Hegel and Durkheim saw as a necessary mediating institution between individuals and society within modernity (Hegel 1967; Durkheim 1964). Masonic lodges were the spatial expression of a utopics concerned with the moral ordering of society. This utopics was concerned with creating a space of election, trustworthiness, graded and ordered social hierarchies, tolerance and openness to new secular forms of thinking, and an imagery of linking the modern, uncertain society of the present with the classical order of the past. Freemasonry offered a new social solidarity based upon the transformation of individual desires for advancement into collective interests. The space of the lodge and the symbols and rituals that were associated with it, Enlightened and rational as well as mysterious and arcane, developed a moral ordering of the conditions of trust amongst people who saw themselves not only as ‘brothers’ and part of an elect but also as individuals, defined, as Koselleck suggests, by their perceived moral agency (1988). The secrecy also acted in a manner of isolating the individual in such a way that he had to make judgements that were self-reflective and provided the mason with his moral education. As Koselleck suggests: What the secret made possible was one’s seclusion from the outside world which in turn led to a form of social existence which included the moral qualification to sit in judgement on that outside world. (1988:83) This position challenges directly the view of public discussion put forward by Habermas. Central to his position is the argument that judgement through public discussion helps to constitute bourgeois identity while reflecting the interests of civil society. It is only through the use of secrecy, symbolism and ritual, expressions of a utopic, that these individuals in the contexts of their lodges began to articulate that individuality with economic and political interests and moral judgement. That there existed a public sphere in the eighteenth century is not in question. What is in question is the nature of this public sphere. I take the issue of its spatiality to be the key means of understanding its character. The freemasons were not the antithesis of the public but central to its ambivalent orderings, and they provide us with the best example of its dual nature. While they did have secret handshakes, words and rituals, these can be taken as reflecting their image of themselves as a moral elect rather than a clandestine organization which had to keep itself hidden because it had access to real secrets. The lodge’s heterotopic status derives from being a site of the alternate ordering of morality. Alternate not only to the church but more especially to the somewhat amoral character of the contractual basis of civil society in which it developed. Within the rituals and convivial behaviour of the lodge,

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associated particularly with its lavish banquets, attempts were made to regulate the behaviour of its members through new forms of ascribed status which at the same time supported their sense of individual moral sovereignty. This could only be achieved by taking on a dual form that led to an incongruity in the lodge between public and private. If freemasons wanted to make their moral vision known, they had to have a public face. But to have such a moral vision coupled to the support of private interests required also that the lodge be a realm of secrecy. Freemasonry attempted to gain the high ground in providing moral certainties and a vision of social stability derived through both its lodge structure and the utopics it expressed through its invented tradition of the moral significance of architecture. In doing so it created a sociation that rested not in ‘natural’ social ties but elective ones that valued individual sovereignty and freedom and also a strong hierarchical sense of order at the same time. The issue of trust between individuals as it was expressed in the spatialized rituals of the lodge was at the centre of its moral vision of fraternity. Entry into a masonic lodge was by invitation: one had to be approached, so to speak, by an existing member and then be accepted by the other members of the lodge. The process of blackballing was instituted as a means of rejecting members if they were deemed unsuitable for membership. A person came as a stranger, an outsider or ‘masterless man’ who could not be trusted but was initiated into a fellowship of trust as a brother. Ambivalence was ordered through ritual rather than eradicated. The initiatory rites of passage for the novice, which involved blindfolding the initiate while holding a dagger to his left breast at the time when his sponsor for initiation deserts him at the door of the lodge (see Knoop and Jones 1947) can be interpreted as not only symbolizing blind obedience and trust in the Brotherhood and its secrets but of also having to risk rejection and outsiderness before one can be admitted. Emphasis was placed, therefore, on a transition from being an isolated stranger on the outside of this space into that of a brother, a symbolic journey from isolation in a moral wilderness of masterlessness to that of a member of an ordered and virtuous society that would reshape not only the individual but society as well. Freemasonry developed in the ambiguous public/private space of the lodge. They needed to adopt an intimacy that was collectively experienced in order to create the collective experience in which a new moral vision could be propagated. It is my contention that in mingling the search for moral stability through tolerance and reason with that of arcane mystery and ritual in a heterotopic public/private space of reason and emotion, a common bourgeois identity was performed through the search for moral order that at the same time provided the basis for individual interests. Freemasonry, with all its regalia and titles and initiation rites, came to represent new forms of friendship and trust in the form of a fraternity as well as through a pseudo-ennoblement that acted as a means of integrating the forward-looking nobility and aristocracy with professionals, tradesmen, and

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later workers, into a network of mutual support, philanthropism, privilege and moral service in order to promote the ideology of bourgeois class interests within civil society. Freemasonry represented an expression of the desire for stability and certainty in the social order, while at the same time valuing bourgeois liberties and freedoms from constraints on both political and economic activities. But to achieve stability and moral order required belief in and the stability of one’s own position in a world of strangers (see Agnew 1986; Sennett 1986). It was in the space of the lodge, a heterotopia that brought all of the incongruous elements of civil society together, that a new sociability, a moral community, was established. Through its establishment, a vision of the moral ordering of society, expressed through the spatial imagery of architecture, Solomon’s Temple and Euclidean geometry, was created. The lodge was principally a site of alternate moral ordering, part private and part public, part rational and part expressive. It was an ordering space used as a model to represent the ordering of society, and yet it was also a space of freedom in which new ideas and political debates could take place in freedom. Freemasons were able to overcome the seemingly contradictory aspects of their order by locating themselves within an invented tradition which embodied in the spatiality of the lodge as a model of Solomon’s Temple, a sense of being part of a virtuous and moral elect. CONCLUSION I have, in this chapter, looked at the example of freemasonry to show how a distinctly heterotopic space, the masonic lodge, was used to embody the ideas of utopics associated with Solomon’s Temple, architecture and the idea of both individual freedom and social order. Freemasonry articulated this desire for social order performed through its lodge spatiality and symbolism, its invented traditions and its use of ritual. The idea of ordering the social was expressed specifically through the development of a moral ordering of its members who began to see themselves as an elect group symbolized by their secret organization and symbolic access to the secrets of the ordered societies of classical antiquity. An effect of the attempt to establish moral order, we can suggest, was that it promoted the interests of its members and established relations of trust amongst strangers who might otherwise not have known each other, symbolized in the various initiation rites and expressed through the idea of fraternity: things that would have been well suited to the conditions of civil society as they prevailed at the time. The lodge was a heterotopic space that was created out of a utopics of individual freedom and moral order. It saw itself as a model for a future ordered and stable society and a space for the transformation of strangers into brothers. It held an important place in the development of the topography of the eighteenth-century public sphere, one that allowed men to mix and engage

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in discourse on political, economic and cultural matters. But it also effected a relation of similitude to that public sphere in that its secret character and exclusivity, as well as its arcane and ritualistic practices, contrasted and challenged the ordering that was perfor med by the ideas of the Enlightenment; yet it was like the coffee-house, which while not so exclusive and secret, also performed some of these ambiguities. These ambiguities should not lead us to reject the significance of the masonic lodge, as Habermas does, to the development of this bourgeois, male-dominated, public sphere. That public sphere was not a new social order, not a perfect utopia, but a social ordering of the political, civil, economic and moral agency of the bourgeoisie. It is in the uncertainties of the lodges and what they represented that we can see this ordering as a process rather than a thing. The invented tradition provided freemasons with a sense of being part of a moral elect. It allowed them to believe that freemasonry was as least as old as, if not older than the world religions. For instance, it comes as something as a surprise to find such a person as Tom Paine devoting most of his essay on freemasonry to the view that they had their origins in ancient Druidic religion and were therefore older than Christianity (1819:47ff.). This search for origins had greater significance: for the masons it gave legitimacy to the new social bonds that they were forming. The fact that they took their symbolism from a medieval guild should not obscure the modern nature of this sociation; the appeal to antiquity served to remove the uncertainty in the novelty of masonic sociability. In other words, it gave legitimacy to the expressive nature of this sociability in a world where all forms of passion manifested in public were feared (see Hirschman 1977); it allowed publicly showing one’s feelings, albeit in an interior space because those feelings were set in the context of ancient established catechisms, rules and moral beliefs. Such an interpretation of the development of freemasonry cannot be based upon the motives of the men who became freemasons at the time. What is known however, is that many had an interest in architecture and antiquarianism which was motivated by such a quest (Rykwert 1980; Curl 1991). The stonemasons, more than any other remaining guild, could be believed at the time to have a link with ancient wisdom associated with building. The modern profession of architecture, which only emerged in England in the seventeenth century (Rykwert 1980:121) was all about the ordering of space, and through this the ordering of both society and nature. Especially after the Great Fire of London in 1666, architects such as Wren were held in high esteem, and the office of public works, headed by Wren, was set the task of rebuilding the city. The initial appeal of this to amateur architects and antiquarians of the mid-tolate seventeenth century soon spread to a wider group of men from across different classes. It is in this context that we must look for the ‘why’ of freemasonry. This fascination amongst freemasons with architectural imagery, and their attempt to see all great feats of architecture in history as having been

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produced by freemasons, which is often seen as plain silliness by historians and is one of the reasons for considering them as unworthy of serious study, is, on the contrary, one of freemasonry’s most sociologically important aspects. The idea of construction linked with a mythical history served several purposes: it offered a symbolic basis for the humanist desire to rebuild the world in an orderly fashion. It did so by spatializing history. Freemasonry was not just concentrated in the lodge, although this space acted as an obligatory point of passage for its utopics to be expressed; it also sought to locate itself in the space of the classical past and called upon Solomon, Euclid and Hiram of Tyre, as well as generations of stonemasons, as its mythic allies who might try and help order the present. By taking as the reference points of history not key events but significant buildings imputed with forgotten or hidden knowledge and moral worth, every individual could align themselves with the divine, perceive themselves as an elect group with access to secret knowledge about wisdom and virtue. As Billington suggests: Each novice sought to become a ‘free’ and ‘perfected’ mason capable of reading the plans of the ‘Divine Architect’ for rebuilding the temple of Solomon, and reshaping the secular order with moral force. (Billington 1980:92) There are many other forms of symbolism, some of which are drawn from the more mystical masonic traditions, but those above, the central ones, are the most significant both within masonry and in relation to the role that it performed in the public sphere. The other significant feature of freemasonry that has to be accounted for is the seemingly paradoxical antithesis between the promotion of individuality, clearly seen in its various initiation rites (see Knoop and Jones 1947) and its strongly hierarchical and status-bound character as a social institution. The degrees through which a mason has to pass, involving some rite of initiation, are seen as stages in a progression to greater understanding and enlightenment. Not only do they offer a structured order of authority and trust based, in principle if not in practice, on merit; but in doing so they embody a form of orderly, regulated social mobility, and ranks through which men if they follow the true path can expect to pass. There are traces here in the late seventeenth century of a modern view of social class. At the same time, the individual has to attain for himself the knowledge to pass to the higher degree, therefore hierarchy and order are used to complement and encourage individual autonomy. They serve not as a constraint on individuality but act as a basis for the moral ordering of the individual. Within a rigid hierarchy of grades which correspond to statuses within the Order, one accepts the position and authority of the master mason; one is given a master, so to speak, in a masterless world. In summary, their concern with social order aimed to enhance individual, bourgeois opportunity, but through a highly regulated system of rules, symbols and rituals.

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In adopting a form of sociation, the lodge, that was associated with an earlier guild that had its origins in a time when the structure of society was more stable and certain, freemasons might be said to have provided themselves with the symbolic means for a gained sense of security and stability in their own lives, as well as for the basis of structuring a new sense of social order. Their utopics of both freedom and order were expressed through associations with Solomon’s Temple and through a veneration of architecture more generally. The architect or mason offered a neat symbolic expression of both order and progress. The linking of Newtonian science with economic selfinterest allowed the interests of civil society to develop, not simply through rational discussion but also through symbolism and ritual that gave added emotional significance to the collective identity and solidarity promoted by the lodges. The lodge was a site of Otherness, a heterotopia, a space of strangers, in whose utopics, through its architecture, symbolism, sociation and rituals it sought to turn that strangeness, that social ambivalence, into self-confident bourgeois ideas about moral independence, trustworthiness and fellowship.

Chapter 6

The factory for itself

THE MILL BY NIGHT In 1783, Joseph Wright of Derby, friend of early industrialists like Richard Arkwright, Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood, painted a picture of Arkwright’s mill at Cromford, in the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire (see Klingender 1968:55). 1 The picture is set at night with a full moon just emerging from behind the clouds. Like many of Wright’s paintings the picture is lit from the centre, partly from the light of the moon and partly from the light emanating from the mill itself. All of the lights are on in the mill, which had been built by Arkwright in 1770 and had been running since then, continuously spinning cotton. Arkwright had millwrights build his mill to house the new machinery that was revolutionizing the spinning of cotton. It was a long and narrow building surrounded by a number of smaller workshops and outhouses in which some of the finishing work was carried out. Soon Arkwright was to build other mills in the area, as were other factory masters like Strutt. As well as making use of machinery, and higher levels of fixed capital than those found within the domestic system of production, the mill organized work somewhat differently to the domestic system; it had a more elaborate division of labour, employing workers directly (they worked twelve-hour shifts) and paying them piece rates. Initially it was staffed mostly by children, parish apprentices, women and migrants from Scotland and Ireland (see Fitton and Wadsworth 1958). In Wright’s painting then it is not just the moon that picks out the shadowy details in the night-time landscape. The mill itself is now a source of illumination; the countryside has been transformed by this new mode of ordering production (Klingender 1968; Daniels 1993). According to Daniels’ recent account, Wright transformed the factory into a spectacle (1993:62–8). This representation of the factory contrasts its sublime character against the sublime of nature. Tourists visiting the nearby spas in Derbyshire in the 1770s and 80s would often go on excursions to see these already famous mills (Fitton and Wadsworth 1958:97). A new ordering has emerged in the middle of nowhere, the expression of a new utopics of production, so at least we are 109

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led to believe by Arkwright and many subsequent interpreters of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the latter part of the eighteenth century. There can be few spaces more significant in influencing the character of modernity than the factory. The Palais Royal is certainly an important site in the events of the French Revolution, and the masonic lodge is undoubtedly significant as a space within the emergent bourgeois public sphere of the eighteenth century, but only the factory can lay a justifiable claim to define some of the most significant aspects of life associated with modernity. The division of labour, social class, gender relations, alienation, labour as a social movement, work, industrialization and technological development, all in their way seen as distinctively modern social issues, are implicated in both the history of the factory and the myth of the factory. And yet so little has been written about the factory as a social space. The literature on the Industrial Revolution and on the development of the factory system itself is, of course, vast. There are also numerous studies of particular factories and particular factory masters during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notably of the most famous factories, which include Arkwright’s mills (Fitton and Wadsworth 1958), Matthew Boulton’s manufactory at Soho in Birmingham (Smiles 1865; Delieb 1971; Goodison 1974), Wedgwood’s pottery factory at Etruria in North Staffordshire (Smiles 1905; McKendrick 1961; Reilly 1992) and Owen’s factory-based community at New Lanark. There is also an extensive literature in the field of industrial architecture and archaeology both on the factory in general (see Tann 1970; Markus 1993) and on particular factories, industries or regions (see for instance Giles and Goodall 1992; Williams and Farnie 1992; Calladine and Fricker 1993) as well as some analysis of the factory within more general accounts of the Industrial Revolution (for example Dobb 1947; Ashton 1948, 1955; Mantoux 1961; Pollard 1965; Landes 1969; Perkins 1969; Berg 1985). Beyond this, however, there is surprisingly little sociology of the early factory as a social space since Marx (1938), Engels (1987), Weber (1927) and Smelser (1959) wrote about it. Of course, one could turn to work on factories during the twentieth century and the issues of Taylorism and Fordism, as well as to Braverman’s seminal discussion of deskilling (1974) and subsequent labour process literature. There is also Thompson’s influential analysis of the factory system as an orderer of time (1967). In all of these important accounts the factory as a space receives little attention (although see Markus 1993; Biernacki 1995). Even Foucault, for whom the ordering of modern societies is a distinctly spatial process, a process in which certain spaces facilitate the technologies of power and the new conditions of both freedom and control that for him come to define modernity, makes only passing reference to the factory (1977:228). For Foucault, we know that it is the prison, the asylum and the hospital that are discussed in this analysis of the spatial technologies of power, and most of the more recent work that has drawn on Foucault’s analysis has tended to look

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at the same examples (Evans 1982). These carceral institutions offer Foucault examples of spaces that on the surface, a surface defined by the metaphor of the panopticon, are spaces of ordering in which social ambivalence, constituted as deviance, illness and madness, are to be ordered. However, in the factory, as in Wright’s representation of Arkwright’s mill, we can see a representation -of the ordering processes of work functioning just as effectively as we can in these other spaces. The freedoms and constraints of modernity are as apparent in the factory as anywhere. The factory was not a utopia of total order or freedom but a play across the gap of these two issues. It performed a utopics of freedom and control within this heterotopic space of an alternate ordering of production and the social and technical relations surrounding production. My argument is that by looking at the early factories in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, we can see an ordering process based on this utopics, associated as it was with production and profit, that is more uncertain and more heterotopic than is implied in most of the literature on the development of the factory system. That utopics did not exist as a blueprint, despite the efforts of the more utopian of the early factory owners such as Robert Owen to establish them, but as a desire to socially order, principally for the purposes of profit. That ordering was not always intentional but was an effect of the space of the factory as well as the spatiality of the factory. By bringing together humans, new machines and new sources of power, and arranging them in a distinct way, the ordering effects of the factory became apparent. At one level, the factory re-ordered working space, just as it reordered working time. But its ordering effects went well beyond this: communities, cities and regions, indeed nations, were re-ordered by the factory both geographically and mythically. Bodies, social classes and genders were ordered in this space as well as was, according to Marx at least, the very being of humans. The factory was an amalgam of other spaces: the home, prison, school, workshop, workhouse, laboratory and so on. The emphasis within this space, long before the time of F.W.Taylor and Henry Ford, was on ordering; in this case, ordering the manufacturing process and the division of labour such as to increase to a maximum the rate of output and thence, of course, the rate of profit. There were also other forms of ordering produced by the factory, the ordering and classifying of occupations and their social location within hierarchies of identity. The factory was also a space of discipline, it was not just the technology of the factory that produced the mode of ordering found there; the utopics of orderly work practices have to be seen in conjunction with those other features. Indeed, technological change and factory discipline are both performed in the space of the factory. If the masonic lodge was an example of a space in which a utopics of freedom and control were expressed in ideas of trust and moral ordering, the factory was the space in which the utopics of an orderly production regime for the making of profits was developed.

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This chapter considers the heterotopia of the factory at the beginning, from around 1760 to about 1800, the ways in which the utopics it expressed were performed and the ordering effects that emerged. Some attempt has been made to look at the factory in relation to the carceral institutions of the period (see Lea 1979; Melossi and Pavarini 1981) but the factory was much more than that, its panopticism was much less complete than that of the prison or asylum. The factory was more than just a space of discipline, even though this was one of its (partial) effects. It was at the same time a space of freedom, for capital, the capitalist and for the manager. But their freedoms became their own constraints just as the constraints they sought to impose on the workers opened new areas of freedom. The utopics of the factory is about the interplay between freedom and control expressed in terms of profit maximization, work and discipline. The utopics of the factory are about ordering both capital and labour. THE FACTORY SYSTEM AND SOCIAL ORDERING Around 1760 a wave of gadgets swept over England.2 Ashton’s well known use of this schoolboy vision of the origins on the Industrial Revolution tells us something about the issue of social ordering. The story implied in this simple vision is one of the technological transformation of society. For Ashton, as with many other commentators on the Industrial Revolution over the years, technology was seen to play a key part in the development of the factory system. The wave of gadgets is well known: Kay’s flying shuttle, Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s mule, and of course Watt’s steam engine. These are all part of the heroic story of the technology that made the ‘Industrial Revolution’ and ‘made Britain great’. Alongside them are the human heroes, the self-made men, who transformed British industry: Arkwright, Boulton and Watt, Telford, Wedgwood, Strutt, Peel, Oldknow, Owen, and not forgetting the Lombe brothers, said to have started it all in 1717 with their silk mill in Derby. The discursive construction of the self-made manufacturing entrepreneur and technological transformation was begun in the 1830s and 40s by some of the early commentaries on technological and engineering feats as well as the emergence of the factory system, such as Smiles’ Lives of the Engineers, Ure’s The Philosophy of Manufactures and even, though perhaps unintentionally, Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England. While the discourse on manufacture extends back into the seventeenth century (Berg 1985), the factory only becomes its central discursive object from the mid-eighteenth century, most famously in Smith’s account of the division of labour within his pin factory, where it is used as an example of an effective and productive division of labour (1950:6–7).

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In the early nineteenth century, notably between 1802 and 1847, the factory becomes a problem, a space that dehumanizes and exploits (particularly children) and the focus of a vocal factory movement that seeks to legislate against its excesses, notably around the issue of the age at which one can start to work in a factory; working conditions; and the number of hours one can work there (Ward 1970). From the 1830s the factory is linked with the idea of an Industrial Revolution, firstly in the writings of the French revolutionary Blanqui, which were followed up by Engels and later fixed in the canon of academic history by Toynbee in the 1880s (see Tribe 1981). From then on, the factory system and the Industrial Revolution have become synonymous. The process of revolutionary change, in its crudest expression, is made possible by the sudden emergence of the factory in the 1770s, notably with Arkwright’s cotton mills and their gadgets, which renders earlier forms of domestic production uncompetitive and obsolete. A new social order is born, which in the space of just a few years does away with the old social order. As with the stories that freemasons told themselves, we are again dealing with an invented tradition. The reality was somewhat different. We know that factories in the eighteenth century were uncommon and in many cases little more than workshops, often sublet or still reliant on links with outworkers in domestic production. The current position held by most historians is a revisionist one that tends to argue that the factory as the dominant means of organizing production emerged slowly and not in a revolutionary manner, and its impact was more gradual, partial and best understood not in terms of technological change but in relation to existing and continuing social and cultural relations (see Berg et al. 1983; Berg 1985; Lloyd-Jones and Lewis 1988). This process of change focused on the factory can be restated more effectively, however, as an issue of ordering. Whereas earlier views of the Industrial Revolution tend to focus on the transformations in terms of dramatic transformation and teleological inevitability (Marx 1938; Dobb 1947; Ashton 1948; Mantoux 1961; Landes 1969) this more recent work, notably that of Berg, has suggested instead that the impact of the factory system was one of partial transformation that required the continuation of earlier systems of production, and later establishment of the factory as dominant, such that it is not possible to speak of an industrial revolution at all, or at the very least one that does not really start to have a major impact until the 1840s at the earliest (1985).3 The earlier arguments suggest the shift from one type of social order, a mercantilist one in which vestiges of feudalism remain, to a capitalist version which is produced by the social and technical relations that surround the factory. But Berg’s account, despite its emphasis on continuity rather than rupture, is still a story of social order whereby capitalism emerges; however, it is an order that is not just produced by the factory but by a series of productive processes including domestic production putting-out, cooperatives, workshop production and factory production. For me the issue is not whether

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the factory produced a dramatic change or a more gradual one alongside other ways of producing, but the role that the factory played as a site of an alternate ordering. Its significance is one of utopics rather than of the number of factories built by any particular date. The uneven implementation of the factory as a means of ordering production in different industries and in different regions is all part of that process. Berg’s criticism of the formerly received view of the Industrial Revolution is an argument at the level of resemblance, one order replacing another as historically inaccurate. For me the issue is one of similitude: the factory performed an alternate mode of ordering to that found in the various forms of domestic production; it stood in relation to those other spaces of production, it expressed something different and novel, even if this was at first more as a symbol than an actuality. It was heterotopic in its relationship to these other ways of producing, not a substitute for them. As an alternative, the main issue is one of relational effect. The fact that there were so few factories until the 1830s and yet it became such a significant discursive object around which a vision of an Industrial Revolution was constructed, speaks volumes for the power of similitude expressed by the factory. The point, then, is to reconsider first the factory system and then the factory as a heterotopic social space, as part of a process of social ordering, an ordering that operates through a series of utopic effects associated with this particular space, rather than a shift between different social orders. While the network that makes up the mode of ordering by the factory system is vast, it can be simplified by saying that the space of the factory involved the following: an increasingly specialized division of labour; the increasing use of fixed capital in the form of new technologies, sources of inanimate power and increasingly larger and more systematically designed buildings; transformations in the labour process; and new ways of ordering the space and time regimes of the factory in relation to this labour process. The modes of ordering production prior to the development of the factory system included the following: guild control over manufacture in towns (see Mantoux 1961); a domestic system of handicraft production in most rural area; putting-out, involving domestic production of articles sold to merchants at piece rates (Berg 1985); a limited amount of royal patronage in certain branches of manufacture, notably for the army and navy and of some luxury goods; and workhouses that made use of prison labour (see Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939). The question, then, is how the factory emerges as a space for the alternate modes of ordering production. ORDERING AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The story of the Industrial Revolution and the development of the factory system is one that can be found in any textbook on the social and economic history of Britain. There are two main versions: accounts which start with

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technology (Ashton 1948; Landes 1969) and accounts, usually Marxist, which locate those technological changes within social relations (Marx 1938; Dobb 1947; Marglin 1982). This latter approach is sometimes known as the MarxSombart theory. It considers the factory system within the social relations of an emergent capitalism and offers us a teleological stage theory that culminates in the factory. On a simplified basis, these stages can be stated as follows: primitive accumulation, manufacture and machinofacture. Handicraft production, a form of primitive capitalist accumulation, on a subsistence basis within the household, where goods are sold at local markets, is replaced by the putting-out system where domestic producers produce, still largely on a handicraft basis, for merchants who pay piece rates for the finished goods and then sell them at a profit. This in turn is replaced by what Marx calls a stage of manufacture in workshops or manufactories (from about 1550–1770) where the merchant, who wants more control over the production process as well as the products, invests in fixed capital (buildings, power sources, tools and machinery) and brings workers together in a centralized workshop. Finally, with Arkwright’s mills in the 1770s and increasingly with the advent of steam power after about 1790, an era of machinofacture develops and the manufactories become factories proper (Marx 1938; see also Dobb 1947; Freudenberger and Redlich 1964). The period of change which Marx identifies with a system of manufacture extending from the mid-sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century saw a series of social and technical changes that he ascribed to the breakdown of the feudal mode of production and the rise of mercantile capitalism. Contributory factors to this change included the emergence of new markets in the so-called new world; the exploitation of slaves in the production of raw materials for manufacture; the development of manufacturing in rural areas outside of the control of the guilds and a relaxation of legislation against manufacture during the seventeenth century; agricultural enclosure and the capitalization of agricultural production (see Dobb 1947; Hobsbawm 1969); and increasing population due both to declining infant mortality and higher birth rates in some manufacturing regions (see Rule 1992). We know that this was a long-drawn-out process, and an uneven one that did not have an inevitable linearity to it (Berg 1985), but it remains the case that there was a trend towards increasing capital investment and centralization of manufacture in workshops or networks of putting-out linked to workshops. The manufactory and the factory became sites, still small in number until the 1830s, for an alternate mode of ordering production. This theory rests on the argument that as investment in capital by the merchant increases, a greater degree of control over the production process is required in order that surplus value and thence the level of profit can be maintained. Whereas in the putting-out system the merchant can only have control over the product, deciding what should be made and the price to be

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paid for it, in manufactories the merchant-manufacturer has a greater degree of control over the production process, partly by surveillance either directly or through superintendents left in charge, and partly through the creation of a division of labour within production. For Marx, Adam Smith’s account of the division of labour within manufacture, expressed clearly in his description of the pin factory, is the exemplary account of the division of labour within this stage of production. Once the worker only makes part of the product, they lose control not only over the whole product but over the process whereby it is manufactured. As a space, however, these workshops did not exhibit the degree of organization idealized by Smith. In many cases, including some of the most famous such as Boulton’s Soho Manufactory in Birmingham, built in 1765, they were more often organized along the lines of handicraft production, where the worker retained control over the production process. It was not so much that a division of labour was exercised over the production of one product but more that a range of products were made by different workers, many of whom were subletting parts of the manufactory and employing their own journeymen and apprentices, in one manufactory. These early manufactories, as Dobb has observed, were little more than forms of domestic handicraft production concentrated in one workshop rather than spread out in the homesteads across the district (1947:147). But they began to express a utopics of production that a new space that was not yet to be found could be created and turned into a good space in which technology, division, skill and better organization might allow more to be produced and create economies of scale whereby a better return might be achieved. For Marx, it was not until the machine and non-animate sources of power were used together that the manufacturer was fully able to exercise control over the production process and organize the division of labour accordingly. For Marx, the division of labour was created, at least in principle, within the workshops, but they still relied on specialist skills that often took many years to learn, which left a considerable degree of control over the production process in the hands of the skilled worker. Only when that skill could be substituted by a machine, linked to a source of power that could be relied upon to produce at a rate with which no human could compete, could the full potential of factory production be achieved. Then the worker becomes an appendage to the machine; it sets the pace of the work done and determines the product to be produced. Machinofacture, as Marx called it, is the production process associated with machine production and non-animate power. To operate this system effectively, and it is in the interest of the manufacturer to do so because the rate of profit is potentially much higher, requires a greater investment in fixed capital, in the power source, the machines and in the buildings to house them. For economies of scale to come into effect it makes sense to build large and with as many machines as possible, and to organize them in such a way as to create as many efficiencies

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as the division of labour and use of machines will allow, hence the move from somewhat disorganized workshops in which investment in fixed capital was low and the division of labour partial, to factories where a high level of investment in fixed capital required a formerly unprecedented scale of production site.4 This understanding of the factory owes a considerable amount not so much to Adam Smith, who Marx saw as describing the division of labour as it was developed in the earlier manufactories or workshops, but more to Andrew Ure, whose The Philosophy of Manufactures had been published in 1835. Ure had defined the factory thus: The term factory in technology, designates the combined operation of many orders of work-people, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill a system of productive machines continuously impelled by a central power. (1967:13) In linking technology and central power with the division of labour within manufacture, in contrast to the long-established social division of labour, Marx was able to stress the significance of the factory within the capitalist mode of production. According to the labour theory of value, capitalism worked by using the product to extract surplus value from labour, the surplus being the difference between the product’s value and the value of the amount of capital to be found in the production process. In purchasing the labour power of the worker in the form of a commodity, the capitalist is able to benefit from the value it produces. The increased productivity of machinofacture over other production processes means that machine production has the capacity to replace labour power, against which it can be measured. Machines make it cheaper to produce commodities and hence cheapen the value of labour power. Machines not only allow the capitalist to produce more cheaply and therefore cheapen the value of labour power either by reducing the number of workers required or by depressing their wages (by creating a reserve army of labour), they also become the source for regulating the labour process. This is not so much an argument that relies on a technological determinism, because for Marx the productive forces, of which technology is an expression, are themselves expressions of social relations. The relation between the capitalist and the worker, one of exploitation due to the extraction of surplus value, is expressed in the technology of the factory. Whereas in the manufactory, or even more so in the putting-out system, the capitalist only has what is known as a formal subordination of labour—limited control that offers considerable leeway for resistance by the worker, especially the skilled worker—in the factory a socalled real subordination of labour is said to exist. The increased division of

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labour leads to a homogenization of tasks and a deskilling process, and to the overall control of the production process by the capitalist. There are, as has been observed by numerous commentators, problems with the application of this theory to the historical development of capitalism (see Braverman 1974; Thompson 1983). The factory system creates as many problems for the capitalist as it overcomes, notably the need to maintain factory discipline; create new skills in workers; create skills of management not formerly in existence (see Pollard 1965); deal with different forms of workers resistance, economic, political and cultural; as well as recognize that the factory did not suddenly replace manufactories, the domestic system and forms of putting-out but indeed often relied on them and operated in symbiosis with them. Rather than see machinofacture and the factory system as a new social order, for Marx an epic vision of the factory as a utopia for capitalism, we might instead focus on its profit-driven utopic, which expressed itself in new but contingent modes of ordering social, technical, spatial and bodily relations, that existed in contrast to, but not instead of, other modes of ordering production. Central to Marx’s argument is the view that machinery, around which his view of the factory is defined, is a necessary rather than contingent expression of the social relations of capitalism. Technology and the way it is used within the factory is an expression of the conscious agency of the capitalist, that consciousness articulated in the need to exploit labour at all costs in order to continue to make a profit. But we know that the change from manufacture to machinofacture was an uneven and non-linear process. Where it did take place it created as many problems for the capitalist as it did opportunities for the worker to resist. The issue is to bring contingency back in. An alternative view that I will develop further in this chapter would be to suggest that the factory embodied not a series of necessary social relations expressed in its technology and its division of labour, but contingent social and technical relations which, while not determinant in themselves, can be used to show how the factory came to be a heterotopic site that was an obligatory point of passage for the utopics of capitalism (see Foucault 1977; Callon 1986; Latour 1988). The factory of the Industrial Revolution was an obligatory point of passage, where agency was constituted through the ordering of production, a division of labour, the labour process, spatial and temporal relations, modes of pay, social hierarchies, products, relations between workers, gender, education, morality, scale, power, speed, volume, specialization, embodiment, urban systems, housing, transportation systems, and so on. And if that were not enough, each of these were also involved in their own modes of ordering and their own networks, including that of the factory. What makes the factory important is its nodal status within these networks of social and technical relations that surround production. The factory was a heterotopic space for the development of capitalism, one in

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which its utopics of freedom to generate greater profits and control of the production process to do this effectively, were expressed. EARLY MANUFACTORIES AND THE DOMESTIC SYSTEM Before considering the factory as a heterotopia, we need to look at what it was heterotopic to. Having done that I shall look at some of the effects of that space as a site of alternate ordering. The main point of contrast is between factory production and domestic production. In domestic production there would be a number of different divisions of labour, firstly a social division of labour whereby a household would engage in a particular type of work such as spinning, weaving, pot-making and so on, alongside some form of subsistence agricultural production. There would also be a gendering of tasks within the household that contributed to a division of labour, and local customs and traditional work activities contributed to the tasks done within particular households. Goods produced would often be made from local raw materials or from those available from local markets, and would mostly be sold at those local markets. There may also have been a limited amount of putting-out amongst neighbours involving a form of cooperative production (Berg 1985). The use of technology, varying of course with different trades, would be simple and either powered by humans or animals or possibly by water mills. The labour process was, as Thompson has suggested, a task-orientated one, often related to seasonal patterns of agricultural work, and one whose spatial concentration was in the household, sharing that space with all other household purposes (1967). The tendency in most of the literature on the development of the factory system has been to see this type of production as a social order rather than a social ordering. As a social order, it is either located within feudal and patriarchal relations of power in which power is something possessed by landlords and by husbands, or alternatively, romanticized as a realm of freedom in which household members could be free from capitalistic arrangements. As a social ordering however, the domestic system of production is one that is an effect of the technology, division of labour, labour process and organization of spatial and temporal relations, rather than their rationale. Each of these contributes to an ordering in which both agency and power are effects of the networks of production that are articulated through the space of the household as an obligatory point of passage for production. The change whereby domestic production begins to be replaced by puttingout and then by an emerging factory system, can be seen not as a shift of one type of social order to another, but a transformation of the points of passage or heterotopic sites involved in the networks of production, markets and consumption. The household was the key space, or obligatory point of passage, in which the social ordering first of domestic production and then

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putting-out took place. It acted as a site in which a social ordering, notably of production but also of other social relations within the household—family and kinship, sexual relations, relations between children and adults and so on— emerged. As new processes of production were developed, the effect was not only to transform the social ordering that took place within the household, but also to produce new modes of ordering that could not be contained within its spatiality. The development of the factory, initially of a centralized workshop, emerged from the limits of the possibilities for production within the household. This process created not a utopia, but a new utopics in which the demand for greater profit, a more specialized division of labour, a greater use of new technologies, a higher degree of centralized control over the labour process and a more organized and planned use of time and space emerged. The history of the development of manufacturing industry between about 1550 and 1770 is based around a number of issues. In the first instance, there was an increasing interest in manufacture and wealth creation during this period, associated with the rise of mercantilism and the decline of both the power of the feudal estate and the town guilds (Dobb 1947). Alongside this, the capitalization of agriculture and the enclosure of land had had the ordering effect of producing a change in the social composition of the rural population. It created a class of small landowners, the yeoman farmers (those who managed to resist becoming masterless men) who, able to raise capital against their land, were able to put that capital to use in manufacturing, often on their land as part of a domestic system. It also created a rural labouring class, people who could no longer rely on the land for subsistence but who had to find work, either in the rural areas working for others, or in the towns. It also created a class of vagrants, the masterless men, which Bauman saw as the main rationale for the desire for social order during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1987). The opportunity to live from the proceeds of begging were reduced through severe legislation against this class (see Biere 1985) and they were often either pressed into armed service or incarcerated in workhouses (Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939; Melossi and Pavarini 1981). The shifting attitude towards manufacture and the transformation of agriculture made capital, especially fixed capital, a more powerful agent. Capital, as we know, can only remain as an active agent if it can reproduce itself. It does this in part by circulating, but the opportunities to manufacture afforded to merchants no longer reliant on guild production, and to farmers with land which they could mortgage, were such that this capital became more effective not by circulating but by becoming fixed. This fixing of capital created a shift in the spatiality of production. Merchants made their profits by selling goods at a higher price than they paid for them. To make these profits they performed a new way of ordering production in the form of paying domestic producers piece rates to produce the goods they would then sell. This system was known as putting-out. Merchants would sometimes supply the producer with the capital in the form

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of spinning machines, looms and so on, as well as with raw materials. Sometimes the producer themselves would have invested in these. The producer would then produce at a rate to be determined by the amount of money they wanted. The ordering effect was of course the cash nexus, an effect of the combined agency of merchant and capital operating within the network of domestic production. The cash nexus has an ordering effect on the social relations of domestic production that may or may not be to the advantage of the producer. The general effect, however, was that, while the merchant was able to profit from this engagement with the ordering of domestic production in the form of putting-out, notably by obtaining control over the product, by and large, control over the production process remained with the domestic producing household who would work for cash as they needed, and in part as determined by local cultural tradition (Berg 1985). While an alternate mode of ordering was developing it was still contained within the space of an earlier mode. The advantage was still to some degree with those who controlled this space. The domestic household, therefore, as much as the merchant, was itself an actor in the development of the putting-out system. The degree to which one subsisted as well as the degree to which local culture encouraged manufacture for somebody on a cash basis, would determine the degree to which people complied or resisted the putting-out system and the degree to which they adapted their existing system of domestic production. The intervention of capital, albeit in a rather limited way in the putting-out system, had a number of effects on the modes of ordering production: it created a substantially new system of ordering production based on the cash nexus; it transformed but allowed the continuation of a system of domestic production as an ancillary mode; and it created a demand for a new system, a new utopic with new spaces, centralized work spaces, that overcame some of the ordering limitations of the organization of work around households. The household at its biggest was a farmstead with a few outbuildings that could be used for manufacture, and often it was just a small house where domestic and work arrangements shared the same space. As a space, it allowed the merchant only limited opportunity to turn their capital into financial profits. Not only did it leave the worker in control of the production process, it also limited the scope for use of fixed capital in the form of technology and work buildings, and limited the opportunities for the economies created by a division of labour. The effect, therefore, was to promote the idea of an alternative space for production in which capital could be deployed more effectively. The ordering effect of the space of one mode of ordering production, domestic production, as it came to be altered by a new mode, putting-out, led to the utopics of the factory. Creating a space under the control of the merchant, who would become a merchant-manufacturer, would remove the worker’s control over the production process to the advantage of the capitalist. This would allow for capital, in its fixed form, to become a more

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effective agent in the production process. Marshalling fixed capital in a larger amount, which enabled economies of scale to be created, would allow the effects of capital and the division of labour to make greater use of technology. The final effect of this ordering of production would be that it would allow an alternate ordering of the time and space of production; a heterotopia of production existing in juxtaposition to the system of domestic production. THE PIN FACTORY AS HETEROTOPIA Adam Smith’s famous observations in The Wealth of Nations on the pin factory (based on that in Diderot’s Encyclopédic) are observations of the manufactory as heterotopia (1950). Based on his own obser vations of an actual pin manufactory, Smith contrasts the amount of nails that one person could produce if they had to do all of the operations involved in making a nail, compared to a system where the division of labour involved is shared out among around ten people (1950:6–7). Although he does not express himself directly in these terms, Smith in effect observes that there are three ordering effects of the division of labour within the space of the manufactory: [F]irst, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many. (1950:9) The modes of ordering in the most simple manufactory involve a complex network of production that allow agents to be constituted through the division of labour, skill, time, scale of production, use of machinery, capital, and of course the market, which for Smith determines the necessary level of a division of labour. If we consider just the pin factory as a heterotopia, the contrast to domestic production and putting-out becomes apparent. The manufactory was a workshop designed for work and not for other domestic purposes.5 Its development may have come from a merchant already engaged in putting-out who wanted to set up a production process over which they had a greater degree of control and profit, or it may have come from a small landowner who had converted farm buildings into a workshop and who was the owner of the manufactory. Very few of the early manufactories were purpose-built; old farm outhouses, water mills and cottages would be converted into workshops (see Dobb 1947:264; Chapman 1970:237). All the same, they were spaces used primarily for a production which was beginning to be ordered separately from domestic life. In looking at the manufactory as a heterotopia, we can see that its effects lie in the new way of ordering

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production. One of the main effects of this new mode is related to the alliance formed by the capitalist with capital. To a much greater degree than before, the manufacturer invests in fixed capital. Because it was existing and often disused buildings that were frequently the basis of the sites for these manufactories, they required the investment of only small amounts of fixed capital. Some improvement to the buildings may have been necessary, along with a power source, probably a water mill, some machinery, and some connection to markets through a transport network. In the first half of the eighteenth century this would have been in the form of the turnpikes that were then being built; in the second half it would have been the development of canals that was most eagerly sought. The main effects of fixed capital were centralization of production in one space—a point that Smith does not make much of but which is at least implicit in his argument— and economies of scale resulting from the division of labour and the greater use of machines. Increasing volumes of fixed capital constitutes the workshop as a separate space for production. The manufacturer can oversee the work to a greater degree than in the putting-out system, can also determine the rate at which work is done, and can determine the nature and quality of the product. The second effect of this ordering is the relationship it creates between capital and the division of labour. Fixed capital, in allowing mechanized production to be concentrated in one place, allows for an effective division of labour, which would have been either limited in a household engaged in domestic production, or at best dispersed across a number of households in a region, to be increased and organized systematically within the workshop under the control of the manufacturer. A third effect of this ordering is the relationship between fixed capital and the use of time. The working day ceases to be one organized on the basis of tasks and is increasingly ordered on the basis of time (Thompson 1967), again under the control of the manufacturer. There are further effects that take place within the manufactory: the work of one worker by the division of labour and their relationship to another within this division of labour; the arrangement of the space of the manufactory to facilitate that division of labour; using the machine as a measure of time; a new relationship between time and space, in the sense that the time of the working day determines where the worker has to be; the transformation of the product of the worker into value for the capitalist; and so on. The main point of these and many more effects of this new mode of ordering is that the more that technology, capital, the division of labour and use of time and space involved in the ordering of production are concentrated in one site, the more that site is made an obligatory point of passage for production, the greater the degree to which a new mode of ordering society is performed within the factory as a space of production that stands in contrast to domestic production. Rather than see the development of manufactories and then factories as the utopia of the capitalist wishing to maximize profits and control the labour process, it is better to see them as effects of a utopic play that the

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manufacturer is better able to benefit from than the worker. In its inception, the factory was a nowhere, at most a ramshackle collection of old outhouses and disused mills. It becomes a somewhere, and that somewhere becomes the idea of a good place because of these relationships between fixed capital, division of labour and profit. The manufacturer is able to form an alliance with capital within the space of the manufactory whereas the worker is not, and is therefore not able to benefit from the mode of ordering that it expresses. That said, these early manufactories were not spaces of total freedom for the capitalists and total control for the workers. Instead, we are observing an ambivalent process which at the start was more one of a blind ordering of effects than a conscious desire to control production on the basis of a preconceived idea of social order. Factories as heterotopia created new freedoms as well as new forms of control, and it was only over a considerable period of time that this deferral between control and freedom was contained to the benefit of the capitalist. All the same, a utopics of production for the capitalist is there to be seen, as can be shown in the examples of two of the most famous manufactories in Britain during this period: Boulton’s Soho Manufactory in Birmingham and Wedgwood’s potbank at Etruria in North Staffordshire. THE SOHO MANUFACTORY While there are earlier examples of large manufactories in Britain, such as the Lombes’ silk mill built in Derby in 1717, Matthew Boulton’s manufactory at Soho in Birmingham, built between 1759 and 1766, is often seen as one of the most significant early prototypes because its scale made it so different to the organization of production at that time and its fame is also said to have had a major influence on later factory building. A further significant factor, associated with the idea of the factory as a maufactory with steam power, arises because it was Boulton, in partnership with James Watt, who later went on to build the early steam engines that powered many of these later factories. While the Soho manufactory included shops making these engines, the Soho foundry that went on to develop and build them commercially did not fully come into operation until 1795 (Roll 1968). Boulton is also famous for being one of the members of the Lunar Society, that group of men interested in the developments of science and industry which met in Birmingham in the latter part of the eighteenth century (Schofield 1963). He is in effect, along with men like Arkwright and Wedgwood, often presented as one of the heroic pioneers of the Industrial Revolution and of the development of the factory system. Boulton had been a partner of his father before he inherited the family business in 1759. That business had been part of the Birmingham hardware industry: a manufactory making metal buttons, buckles, and ‘toys’. In 1759,

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following his father’s death and that of his first wife, Mary Robinson, who left him a large amount of money, Boulton was able to develop his business beyond its then-current scale of a small manufactory located at Snow Hill in Birmingham (Goodison 1974). In that year, Boulton acquired the lease on a plot of land in Handsworth for £1000, obtained from Edward Ruston who had already developed a short canal from the nearby river to supply water to a mill he had built on the site (Smiles 1865:168). Boulton’s intentions were to increase the volume of goods he was currently able to produce at Snow Hill, cheapen the process of production, increase the range of goods and increase their quality in comparison with what was then the general standard in Birmingham (Smiles 1865; Goodison 1974). In order to do so, and apparently inspired by Adam Smith’s description of the pin factory, he sought to build a large manufactory, make extensive use of the latest machinery and develop a highly specialized division of labour. He also needed to develop a market for his goods. To this end in 1762 he went into partnership with John Fothergill, a man with extensive knowledge of overseas markets, who was to take responsibility for this side of the business. While there is little surviving contemporary evidence of the layout of the Soho manufactory, we know that it was large, multi-storied and able to accommodate the employment of up to about 800 workers. In acquiring the lease on the land, Boulton rebuilt the mill and built a manufactory in the Palladian style with a whole series of interconnected workshops, each to be used for the production of different goods. The manufactory cost Boulton £20,000. The range of goods that he was able to make on this site was indeed large. In 1768 he was making ‘buttons, chains, buckles, boxes, instrument cases, links and sleeve buttons, candlesticks, plated wares and braziery, belt locks, cane heads, trinkets, tapestry hooks, chapes, watch-hooks, watch-keys’ (Goodison 1974:11). He also went on to make Ormolu, or luxury gilt-metal ornaments, clocks, and, of course, some of the early steam engines, at the Soho manufactory. This manufactory was a site of an alternate ordering of production within the Birmingham metalwork trade which was at that time still dominated by the domestic system of production. Those manufactories that did exist often made use of extensive subletting of the premises to journeymen. Boulton’s intention was to create a manufactory under the control of one manufacturer, himself. He was the first to do this within the metal trade. He employed a range of different types of workers including parish apprentices (many of whom, it is believed, lived as well as worked onsite). Some local skilled workers were employed, but the most skilled often had to be brought in from further afield, often from the continent since the skills to make the most ornate goods were not available locally. There are, however, a number of instances where we can see that Boulton was not in total control of this new mode of ordering production. Labour recruitment, as in other instances of the early factory system, was a major

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problem, especially that of skilled workers. Another problem was industrial spies. While products could be protected by patents with varying degrees of success (see MacLeod 1988), the skills often had to be developed by the factory itself and the loss of a skilled worker to another manufacturer could lead to a loss of competitive advantage, since that worker would take knowledge of manufacturing processes and designs with them. One effect of the mode of ordering produced by the factory, therefore, was plagiarism. Production at Soho was organized around sixty different shops, each with their own division of labour, so there was also a spatial organization that was linked to this division of labour (see Reilly 1992:61). Another important aspect which demonstrates the novelty and indeed alterity of the Soho manufactory was the degree to which it became an internationally known tourist spectacle: Before many years had passed, Soho was spoken of with pride, as one of the best schools of skilled industry in England. Its fame extended abroad as well as at home, and when distinguished foreigners came into England, they usually visited Soho as one of the national sights. (Smiles 1865:176) As a heterotopia, we might say that Boulton had only limited success in being able to use the utopics that lay behind the manufactory to fulfil his ambitions. The space did allow for an extensive division of labour to be used; it also allowed for the production of a large volume and wide range of high-quality goods, and made effective use of machinery as sources of power. However, it also made a considerable financial loss and almost drove Boulton and Fothergill into bankruptcy. It was only Boulton’s inheritance and his ability to draw on the wealth of his second wife, and the gradual move of the steam engine part of the business into profit, that saved Boulton’s enterprise. In effect, he had not enough liquid capital and too much fixed capital. He was overproducing and not able to sell everything he produced as quickly or as effectively as was necessary. His system of stock control was weak, and factory discipline—which as we shall see has come to be seen by some as the main effect of the utopics of the factory system (Marglin 1982)—was lax, with no code of rules for conduct in the factory being produced before 1791 (Roll 1968:60). Skill shortages and the fear of losing skilled workers to competitors were a continual problem. Boulton also had problems, despite his fame and his social connections, in obtaining credit from banks. As a heterotopia, this space was only partially effective for Boulton. He was able to develop a new mode of ordering of production, but in some ways he was too effective for the market that existed and created a problem of overproduction. In other ways he was not effective enough, and despite the division of labour and spatial ordering of the works, he did not have a system of management that enabled him to control the production process as

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effectively as required, something that was to be a problem for much of the early development of the factory system (see Pollard 1965). In effect, the skilled workers were also able to make some use of the manufactory as an obligatory point of passage which allowed them to exercise the power effect of their agency expressed as skill. WEDGWOOD AND ETRURIA Not long after Boulton completed the basic development of his manufactory (he was always adding to it at a later stage) his friend Josiah Wedgwood was to try something similar, and with greater effect, in the pottery industry in north Staffordshire about fifty miles north of Birmingham. Whereas Boulton took the inspiration for his manufactory from Adam Smith, Wedgwood took his, in large part, from Matthew Boulton (Reilly 1992:61). Wedgwood’s background was also similar in some respects to that of Boulton: he was born into a family of manufacturers, in this case potters; his father Thomas Wedgwood owned a manufactory, the Churchyard works in Burslem, which had become part of a family business that dated back to the late seventeenth century. He was apprenticed as a potter to his father but later left the family firm to go into partnership, albeit briefly, with Harrison and Alders in Stoke-on-Trent (Reilly 1992:8). He left them in 1754 and went into partnership with Thomas Whieldon at his manufactory in Fenton, also in The Potteries. He left to set up on his own as a master potter in 1759, with his cousin Thomas as a journeyman working for him (Reilly 1992:28). During his time with Whieldon, Wedgwood was able to spend time developing new products. His innovation in the use of clay, notably in improving the production of creamware, and in developing new styles and new products are what he is most famous for. During the period up to 1769 when his main factory, the Etruria Manufactory, was built, Wedgwood rented premises and was able to successfully expand his business. Like Boulton, he was to go into partnership, in this case with Thomas Bentley, a man who had extensive knowledge of the market for these products. A major part of Wedgwood’s success was in the firm’s ability to market and sell their goods, not only through the showrooms they opened in London, but also through social connections with the nobility and with royalty, who commissioned works from them and in effect became patrons, making Wedgwood’s products widely known and desirable to the emulating middle classes (see McKendrick 1982). The successful development of new products, production techniques and designs (Wedgwood was one of the first to move form the old Rococo style to the new neo-classical style in pottery, copying ancient vases from Greece and Italy brought back from grand tours by his noble patrons), and markets, along with marriage to a distant cousin Sarah Wedgwood, who had some wealth on which he could draw, allowed Wedgwood to expand his business even further.

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He decided to build his own manufactory from new so that all of his business could expand in the way that he wanted.6 He purchased the Ridge House estate on land between Hanley and Newcastle-Under-Lyme in 1767 for £3,000 (Baker 1991:18; Reilly 1992:45). He renamed the area Etruria, after discussion with his friend Erasmus Darwin, in the mistaken belief that the ancient pots he was copying were Etruscan. The manufactory was designed by the architect Joseph Pickford, with Wedgwood’s collaboration. It was built close to the nearby turnpike, and Wedgwood was able to have the Trent and Mersey canal, for which he had been a leading supporter and patron, against local opposition, built alongside the proposed site for his manufactory. He also built a large mansion for himself and a somewhat smaller house on the estate for his partner Bentley, as well as forty-two houses for some of his workers (Baker 1991:18). As with Boulton’s manufactory, the frontage was in the Palladian style. To a greater extent than Boulton, Wedgwood was concerned with the rational organization of the space of his factory. Separate rooms were built housing both different parts of the production process and different products. The main division was between ‘useful wares’, or table ware, and ornamental wares, notably vases. While Wedgwood is famous for this rational ordering of space in pot manufacture, he did not invent it. Manufactories dating back to 1732 had been making use of separate throwing rooms, handling rooms, rooms for glazing, sorting and saggar-making, as well as kilns for firing (see Weatherill 1971; Baker 1991:12). Like Boulton, the issue with Wedgwood is not so much one of invention as of scale, and in his case, effectiveness in the new way of spatially ordering the production process. As well as ordering space, Wedgwood, for whom the whole issue of order was much more apparent in the utopic of his factory than for Boulton, Etruria was involved in an alternate ordering of the division of labour, time, skill, products and the production process. The utilization of social networks to create a market, alongside a greater emphasis on fixed capital allowed Wedgwood to develop his manufactory at Etruria. As with Boulton, Wedgwood made extensive use of the division of labour, something that had been developed in pottery manufacture prior to that date although not on the same scale or with the same level of organization (see Weatherill 1971). He also had the same sorts of problems as Boulton with skill shortage, recruitment and industrial espionage (McKendrick 1961; Hillier 1966). The space of the manufactory was set out so that each subsequent production process was to be found in the room next to the previous process. Specialist workers, many of whom were women, who often had to be trained up from apprentices, worked on particular specialist tasks in this process. The workers were ordered, therefore, both by their skill and by their spatial position within the factory. A fixed hierarchy of skills was put into operation together with a strict system of discipline, something that was lacking in Boulton’s manufactory. Wedgwood is also often credited with inventing an early clocking-in system, suggesting that the ordering of time was a significant

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part of the mode of ordering his manufactory performed, as well as doubleentry book keeping so that he could implement a system of stock control and monitor profits and losses (McKendrick 1961). Wedgwood was better able to benefit than Boulton from the social ordering that his manufactory generated. He successfully organized his manufactory in such a way that its main purpose, the creation of wealth, was achieved. That is not to say that Wedgwood did not encounter problems that he was able to easily overcome. Many of his workers were still influenced by the ordering of production within the domestic system. Despite a strict regime of factory discipline and a code of practice and system of fines that was implemented to enforce it, Wedgwood still encountered resistance from workers, who would turn up late for work, stay away during local fairs or wakes, or often turn out substandard products. He also had technical problems, especially in the manufacture of new designs or new techniques that led to high levels of expensive wastage of materials. The main point, however, is that Wedgwood’s was the most clearly developed ordering of production of pot manufacture along factory lines at that time. He developed a market advantage that no others could compete with. Those who later went on to become successful competitors, Spode, Doulton, Minton and so on, all did so by moving over from an ostensibly domestic ordering of production to factory production. SOCIAL ORDERING AND THE FACTORY Both Boulton’s and Wedgwood’s manufactories were examples of the alternate ordering of production, alternate to both the domestic systems of handicraft production and putting-out. They were heterotopia that allowed the expression of the utopics of industrial capitalism: division of labour and specialization; efficient and cost-effective use of fixed capital, notably machinery used for production; organization of time and space; work discipline; increased output; diversification of product; development of new markets; and competitive advantage over rivals. The drive was not the creation of a social order as an end in itself but an ordering of production in order to maximize profits. It is clear from these two famous examples which straddle the line between manufactories and factories, that what they did was produce a new mode of ordering rather than a new order. To some extent these utopic elements that lay behind the factory system were already present in domestic production; they were not invented by the early factory masters. Their success, which itself varied, was in being able to bring together spatially all of these elements in a new type of space, a heterotopia, and allow the mode of ordering to be expressed more effectively so that it might be turned into the desired profits. The ordering that the factory developed was one that drew on changes in modes of ordering production in earlier domestic production, and it was a

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process that continued to develop rather than an order that suddenly came into being by replacing earlier modes of ordering. The factory was a heterotopic space that emerged and eventually became the dominant mode of ordering production, an obligatory point of passage, by the middle of the nineteenth century. It brought together more effectively than did other existing modes the main actors in the development of capitalism: fixed capital in the form of machinery and new technology as well as the buildings, new sources of power, a variety of products with available markets, workers, managers and owners. Their actions within the space of the factory produced the ordering of production—a division of labour, time and space, work discipline, skill and attitudes towards work—in a direct manner, and indirectly or as further consequences, a whole range of social effects—on markets, towns and cities, transportation systems, social classes, political interests and so on—which go into the making of a utopics of modernity. To support such a claim it is necessary to consider in more general terms some aspects of this ordering that went into the development of the factory system, and reconsider some of the key debates that have surrounded it. THE FREEDOMS OF FIXED CAPITAL Chapman’s use of insurance records as a major source of data on the number of early factories remains one of the key points of discussion of the use of fixed capital within the development of the factory system (1970). He has shown that early investment in factory production came mainly from merchant capital (1970:248). In the development of early factories, certainly before the steam engine began to be used in the majority of factories, the levels of capital required were small. The money used to generate that fixed capital often came from wealth generated through putting-out or through inheritance or marriage, or if a person owned land, by mortgaging that land. Prior to the 1770s, from which time the development of the factory system is dated, capital had been invested in farming, commerce and in stocks (Pollard 1964). Most of the capital was raised without outside help from banks who were often reluctant to lend on what were seen as novel and risky enterprises. It was quite common for partnerships to be developed to raise capital, as was the use of loans from wealthy members of one’s social network. This relatively low level of fixed capital had an impact on the type and scale of factory that could be developed. Chapman identifies, for instance, three main types of cotton mill, often taken, as in the case of Marx, as the original type of factory: 1 small factories that were often converted from previously existing buildings such as mills, or by placing machinery such as spinning jennies and carding machines in converted cottages;

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2 water-powered mills, often purpose-built boxes, three or four stories high on a long and narrow pattern (see Tann 1970); 3 steam-powered mills, larger in scale and making greater use of machinery (Chapman 1970). In the first instance, the emphasis would have been less on a new space for the ordering of production and more on a re-ordering of an existing domestic production. The greater the level of fixed capital involved, the more important became the space associated with the ordering of production. The emergence of this new mode of ordering was achieved not only through a process of converting old premises to factory-style production but also through linkages between factory production and domestic production (see Berg et al. 1983; Berg 1985; Lloyd-Jones and Lewis 1988). The recent reevaluation of the role of the domestic system in the Industrial Revolution’ has made much of this link, but often in order to challenge the idea of a rupture in systems of production with the dramatic move to factories. It makes less, however, given this symbiosis between domestic production and factory production, of the impact that factories had on continuing domestic production and putting-out networks. In other words, it challenges the idea of the factory system as a social order but in doing so does not give due recognition of the factory system as a social ordering that was involved in the re-ordering of domestic production and was indeed also subject to an ordering by that older system. The main point that Berg and others make is that industrial change has to be situated in local cultural contexts, but she rather romantically treats these as alternate orders, or more specifically like marginal spaces, spaces in which people had a degree of autonomy, found in the form of forgotten modes of production (1985:86). An alternative approach would be to suggest that the factory, which did come into existence in the late eighteenth century in Britain, even if it did not begin to dominate capitalist production until the 1840s, and that as an alternate mode of ordering had an effect of domestic production which, while it did not replace or undermine it, was certainly involved in its reordering. In particular, there was a transformation of the domestic system through the effects of fixed capital. In an industry like cotton, this involved on the one hand the introduction of machines such as the spinning jenny and carding machines into the domestic production environment, and on the other the stimulation of putting-out in the areas surrounding the mills where unfinished machine-made goods were put out to be finished by domestic producers. FACTORY DISCIPLINE AND CONTROL In accounting for the development of the factory system, I have indicated above that the two main arguments advanced in the past have been that on the

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one hand technological changes have been seen as the cause of the move to factory production, and on the other, an ostensibly Marxist argument, that social relations, of which technology was a part, were the reason that factories began to emerge in the late eighteenth century in Britain. A further extension of this position on social relations, following the work of Braverman on the development of the labour process and its relation to capitalism, has been that the control of the workers, in this century through scientific management and deskilling, has been the main reason for factory-based production (1974; see also Marglin 1982): [T]he agglomeration of workers into factories was a natural outgrowth of the putting-out system…whose success had little or nothing to do with the technological superiority of large-scale machinery. The key to the success of the factory as well as its inspiration, was the substitution of capitalists’ for workers’ control of the production process; discipline and supervision could and did reduce costs without being technologically superior. (Marglin 1982:295) In the context of the early development of the factory, this argument takes the position that it was not so much profit that was the motive for factory production—in many cases putting-out remained more profitable—but labour discipline through factory routine and the inculcation of a capitalist work ethic. For my purposes, factory discipline as part of the utopics of the factory is seen as organizing a new mode of social ordering rather than imposing the idea of a social order. The factory organizes the heterogeneity of production in new ways within a new type of space. The agency of the capitalist is not separate from this process but is performed through the actions of the manager or supervisor and also through the architecture, the machines, the division of labour and through the use of time and space. In looking at the factory as a heterotopia there are four issues that need therefore to be highlighted: the labour process; management and supervisory surveillance; the organization of time and space; and the development of the work ethic. Those who owned these early factories found it very difficult both to recruit labour and to keep workers from leaving because they disliked the disciplinary regime of factory work (see Bendix 1956; Pollard 1965; Thompson 1967). It has been argued that the model for these early factories were the Bridewells and workhouses of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939; Ignatieff 1978; Melossi and Pavarini 1981). During that time, a period of labour shortage, these prisons were used as economic institutions. Beggars and criminals incarcerated in them were not put there so much to be disciplined as moral citizens as they were in later nineteenth-century prisons (Foucault 1977) but in order that they could be made to work profitably. Existing Elizabethan poor laws, which made labour somewhat immobile, and the slow recovery of earlier population decline,

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meant that there was no reserve army of labour on which manufacturers could draw. Instead the ‘masterless men’ who populated these early workhouses would be put to work or hired out to manufacturers (Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939). A system of discipline was required to force people to work against their will. The emergence of factories in the late eighteenth century occurred under different social conditions to these earlier workhouses. This was a time of rising population in which there was a labour surplus. The argument that has been put forward has been that the early need to enforce labour discipline was retained during a time of labour surplus and that the early factories employed a disciplinary regime to enforce capitalist control over the workplace and establish the authority of the capitalist in the extraction of surplus value (Melossi and Pavarini 1981:44). In this type of account, factory discipline becomes an expression of the class-conscious agency of the bourgeoisie. The reality of factory development, however, is somewhat different. Factory masters like Arkwright, Boulton or Wedgwood found it very difficult to recruit labour. The early factory workers tended to remain those who had no other choice (see Weber 1927:174; Pollard 1965:164). They were often pauper apprentices, young children from the local poorhouses who could be apprenticed cheaply and relieve the parish of having to cover the costs of poor relief, prisoners from the prisons, homeless migrants from Scotland and Ireland, and to a lesser extent unskilled or unemployed workers from surrounding industries (Bendix 1956; Pollard 1965). The disciplinary regime to which they were subjected was opposed by skilled workers who would either not work in factories, often left soon after joining, or continued to resist the work regime and insisted on practising established cultural traditions such as Saint Monday (see Thompson 1967; Reid 1978) or attending local fairs and wakes, as well as working with traditional work patterns that did not fit with the ordering mode of the factory. For Marxists, the issue then becomes one of overcoming this resistance through depressing wages through the use of a reserve army of labour such that workers had no choice but to work under factory conditions. Weberians, like Bendix, have seen the issue as more to do with inculcating a work ethic of time-thrift by overcoming the traditionalism of working-class culture. Discipline, by this account, had to take on the guise of traditionalism and elicit the support of the workers in their own control, such as through the use of hierarchies in supervisory arrangements and through a paternalistic attitude by capitalists and managers towards their workers (Bendix 1956). In both of these cases, factory discipline is presented as the design of a conscious capitalist class seeking to impose a laissez-faire ideology. Another way of seeing it, one that perhaps fits better with the somewhat unplanned and ad hoc manner in which factory discipline was introduced, would be to see it as an effect of the alternate ordering that is performed through the factory as an obligatory point of passage for a utopics of production. Factory discipline was an ordering rather than an order. It was an ordering expressed

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not only through the use of corporal punishment against apprentices, work rules, piece rates and fines for breaking the rules of the workplace, but also through the effects of the division of labour, the use of machines and the ordering of time and space. While the division of labour undoubtedly performed a deskilling and allowed control over the production process by the capitalist, it also created new skills. The problem of labour recr uitment and retention was predominantly among those with skill specialism. Factory owners such as Wedgwood often had to train their own workers from apprenticeship (McKendrick 1961) and then found that their ability to exert factory discipline was limited because they were to fearful of losing their skilled workers and the trade secrets that they might take with them to competitors (see Pollard 1965:167; Chapman 1967). The extent to which machinery disciplined workers needs also to be considered, while there are cases of the machine setting the pace of the work, piece rates and the limited aspirations of workers to earn beyond a certain point, as well as market fluctuations, all have to be seen as ways in which the pace of work could be limited. A further issue is that of factory management. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the seeds of scientific management began to really be planted. Despite the concerns of owners like Wedgwood who perhaps had a clearer idea of factory management than most, this, like the other disciplinary techniques of the early factories, was often ad hoc and experimental rather than the clear expression of a classconscious intent. While there was some prior experience in management— given earlier putting-out, subcontracting and management of such things as agricultural estates or government departments—management during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not serve as much of a model for early factory management since it had something of a reputation for inefficiency and fraud (Pollard 1965:22). Owners, unable to manage the factory itself because of its scale, had to employ managers and supervisors to do so. As with the workers, they often had no previous experience and had to learn on the job. Many of the early managers were friends or relatives of the owners rather than trained managers. The main issue in recruitment appears to have been less one of skills to do the job and more one of trust. Managers, as implicated in the ordering of the factory, had to be involved not only in establishing and managing a disciplinary regime but also for the recruitment of labour, training, control over production and accountancy, and they had to be accountable both to the owner and to customers. The manager, as a subject position, was just as much an effect of the ordering of the factory as he was the instigator of that ordering. It is not that factories did not perform a disciplinary regime which sought to subject the worker and the production process under the control of the capitalist. It was just, as I have argued throughout, that this took the form of an ordering process which was the expression of a utopic effect of an alternate mode of ordering that developed within a new kind of space, rather

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than a conscious design based on some idealised capitalist utopia. This can also be seen when we consider the temporal and spatial dimensions of this disciplinary ordering. Time, as E.P.Thompson has famously pointed out, is implicated in the mode of ordering within the factory (1967). He does not speak of modes of ordering as such but his comments on the shift from task-orientation in domestic production to time-orientation within factory production and the introduction of time-thrift to the processes of producing, amount to the same. Time becomes a currency in the factory, something that can be turned into products and hence to value for the capitalist, and something that is turned into wages for the worker. The factory produced an ordering of the regularity of work in synchrony with the temporality of the production process (Thompson 1967:71). This temporal ordering of work was performed through the division of labour, the pace of the machine, the ordering of the working day and its technologies (clocks, bells, clocking-in). That it was an ordering process rather than an achieved order is acknowledged by Thompson: In all those ways—by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; bells and clocks; money incentives; preaching and schooling; the suppression of fairs and sports—new labour habits were formed, and a new time-discipline was imposed. It sometimes took several generations (as in the Potteries) and we may doubt how far it was ever fully accomplished: irregular labour rhythms were perpetuated (and even institutionalised) into the present century, notably in London and in the great ports. (1967:90) Thompson’s observations can be read as suggesting that time-discipline was performed, like those other forms of factory discipline, through the new ordering space that constituted the factory. Factory discipline required clocks and bells just as much as it required a system of human management, sanctions against those who resisted its disciplinary rules and a division of labour. The physical arrangement of the space of the factory, something less often discussed than its temporal relations, were key to this ability to perform a new way of ordering time. As Biernacki has recently pointed out, the most significant point of control over factory production, especially in Britain where labour was seen as a commodity rather than a capacity, was the door or the gate (1995). To a lesser extent the central courtyard, often found at the back of the main factory building (see Tann 1970; Markus 1993) was also a controlling point, but the door as a mode of ordering was most significant. The door becomes one obligatory point of passage within that of the factory as a whole. Primarily, the door was used to order time and movement. By controlling entry to and exit from the factory, the manager was able to exercise, to some degree, factory discipline. Workers had to be at work, had to have passed through the

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door by a certain time or they could be locked out and not be paid, or they could be fined for lateness. Workers were subject to sur veillance and disciplinary control more at the entrance to the factory than when they were at work at the machine. Biernacki goes on to suggest that this control of the door also had important symbolic properties (1995:122). It was used not only as a mode of ordering the time at which workers would be at work but also served as a symbolic threshold suggesting that the worker was now in the space of the capitalist rather than their own space (Biernacki 1995). The early factories, notably the cotton mills, were often built as boxes shut off from the outside world. They often lacked windows on the ground floor, and had a central courtyard; and the main entrance was often round the back so that it could not be seen by passers-by. The reasons for the fortress-like design can be explained in a number of ways. First, very few of the early factories (few of which have survived because much of their interior was constructed of wood and therefore often a fire risk) were designed by trained architects. Boulton and Wedgwood are the exception in this instance. It was more common for millwrights, engineers rather than architects by training, to design and build the factories. If there was any architectural embellishment it was often the use of Palladian features around the entrance and little else. Second, the production process, rather than labour discipline, often determined the spatial layout of the factory. The division of labour and the requirements of organizing the space so that there could be a continuous flow of production was one reason for the layout, but others included the necessity of keeping certain parts of the production process separate. Wedgwood, as we have seen, organized his factory into spaces making useful wares and spaces making ornamental wares. This was not done simply with the intention of deskilling workers, although that may have been one of its effects. Equally some workers would have been given new skills. But the main purpose behind this subdivision was more mundane. Wedgwood separated the production of creamware (white clay) from black basalt (black clay) from jasper (coloured clays) in order to avoid different production processes contaminating products from another (Baker 1991). Third, the factory was often built like a fortress or prison, not so much as to instill labour discipline in those within but to keep others, notably competitors and their spies, out. The ordering of space, while it was involved in the ordering of the work process and labour discipline, was not a totally ordered spatial regime for the worker; instead it was much more heterogeneous in its effects, of which labour discipline was just one. Indeed, the ordering modes of the factory might be said to have inspired the idea of the panopticon as an order in Bentham’s mind rather than the other way around. Samuel Bentham, Jeremy’s father, devised a spatially organized assembly line in his manufactory for the manufacture of ship’s biscuits, which was a source of inspiration for Bentham on his ideas on spatial ordering within the prison. The disciplining of prisoners followed the line of biscuits. Even in those rare nineteenth-century cases where the principles of

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the panopticon were introduced into factory design, such as in the Belper Round Mill in 1816, this was not always done entirely with the idea of labour discipline in mind. In this case, creating segments within a panoptical arrangement that could be closed off from one another is believed to have been introduced in order to reduce the risk of the spread of fire (see Fitton and Wadsworth 1958:221).7 CONCLUSION: THE UTOPICS OF THE FACTORY The issue of ordering is central to the ‘story’ of the factory. From its presentation in Blake’s vision of the ‘dark satanic mills’ with its evil mill owners and wretched child labourers, through Wright’s representation of it as a space of the sublime, to the humanitarian experiments such as Owen’s New Lanark, and to the regulated, time-managed factories with assembly lines of the Fordist era, the representation of the factory as a space has been a utopic one. However, utopics are not the same as utopia. The factory has expressed the utopics of laissez-faire capitalism: that which makes its owners and manufacturing nations rich. The factory has therefore a variety of different logics of social ordering, but they can all be located within a utopic spatial play. Basically what all of these visions have in common is a view of the factory as a space in which a better future is shaped, and that better future is largely defined in terms of the ability to make increasing profits through a more regulated ordering of production. I have tried to show in this chapter how the factory, as a heterotopia, performed an alternate mode of ordering production to that found in earlier forms of production. I have agreed in general with the argument put forward by Berg and others (1985) that the factory should not be seen as a break with earlier forms of production such as domestic production and putting-out, but as a continuity that, because of the combined network of effects that made up the factory, made it come to be seen and eventually to dominate as an alternate mode of ordering production. Utopia are imaginary constructions of a social order that may be put into practice or remain as ideas. Utopics, on the other hand, are the uncertain spatial play of ordering effects in heterotopic spaces. I have sought to demonstrate that through the examples of the Palais Royal, the masonic lodge, and here with the case of the factory. While there were examples of factory-based utopian experiments such as Owen’s New Lanark, these were small-scale, often counter-modern in their intention and relatively ineffective in the ordering of modern societies when compared to the utopic effects that characterize modernity. It was not factories as utopian experiments but factories as a set of utopic effects that sought to express the desire for the best means of generating profit, which stand out in this instance as part of the spatial dynamic of modernity. While this utopic might well have drawn upon ideas of social order such as that associated with changing conceptions of poverty and individual, laissez-faire contractual freedoms, it was the effects of ordering the

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division of labour, the spatial and temporal organization of the workplace, the use of higher levels of fixed capital, notably in machinery and non-animate power sources, along with the organization and control of the work process that made up this mode of ordering. The issue, as I stressed in Chapter 3, was that heterotopia ordered through similitude rather than resemblance. Rather than stand for something else, as utopia do, heterotopia stand in juxtaposition, as an alternative way of ordering which contrasts with their surroundings. The tourists who went to see Arkwright’s mills in the Derwent valley realized this; they revelled in the sublime, an expression of this similitude, derived from the height of modern industrial achievement as contrasted with the wilderness of the Peak District. The fact that for a long time the factory was taken as the symbol of the Industrial Revolution and that symbol was turned into a history of dramatic change, stands as testimony to the dramatic heterotopic effect that the factory had at the time it emerged. Its scale, its novelty, the fear it inspired, its associations with the workhouse and the prison, and the novelty of the conditions of production that it developed, all illustrate this heterotopic relation. But it was not the factory as an alternate order, not as an established thing, but as an alternate ordering that is the key to understanding the effects that the factory had. The effectiveness of the ordering of production in the factory, while not certain or uniform, and certainly not free from resistance to its logic, allowed it: first, to influence the way production was carried out within the domestic system; second, to produce distinct spaces with which the domestic system could not compete; and third, to come to dominate the mode of production within industrial capitalism. In more recent times, the arguments about a capitalist modernity have tended to move in the opposite direction. The rigidities of factory production and its economies of scale produces ordering effects that are no longer responsive to so-called post-Fordist demands for flexibility in an era of niche markets. The return to cottage industry and high-tech domestic production is promised (see Piore and Sabel 1984; Harvey 1989). Perhaps. Whether or not this is our industrial future, the argument I have put forward here is still applicable. This new small-scale production has its own utopics and is a (proposed) new mode of ordering production and not a new order. To whatever degree it succeeds that ordering will be performed as an utopic ordering rather than an order through the spatial networks in which it is heterotopically established in relation to the Fordist factories of the past.

Chapter 7

The space of the horizon

The question I have been asking throughout this book is ‘how might we think of modernity and social ordering in relation to its spaces?’ I have tried to answer this through the example of three spaces, the Palais Royal, the masonic lodge and the factory. In each case I have described these spaces as heterotopia, spaces that through their relationship to other spaces, represent modes of alternate social ordering that have come to be taken as some of the conditions of modernity. The social ordering to be found in each of these spaces is itself the effect of utopics, the spatial play that exists when agents try to turn a no-place into a good place. In putting forward this argument I have also tried to weave my way between two different sets of ideas that have been attached to space. The first has been that which sees it as a regime that controls, disciplines and orders. The second is one that focuses on resistance to that order, from the margins that represent transgression and liminal change. I have used Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to challenge both of these positions, not by rejecting them out of hand but by looking at what happens when you bring them together. For Foucault, such spaces can be spaces of total order or total resistance, the two castles I spoke of in Chapter 3 (1986a). Heterotopia have an ambivalence within them that allows us to focus on the idea of process rather than structure. In particular, it allows us to consider modernity in terms of an ordering that never comes to rest but which vacillates between ideas of freedom and control. This means not only that the space of modernity is inherently open to resistance and difference, but that it is indeed constituted by it. It also means, however, that resistance and marginality cannot be seen as separate from, or opposed to, the process of ordering. As well as the three main spatial examples discussed in this book, I have, in passing, also considered a few more: coffee-houses, markets, castles, ships and so on, I want to add one more to that list: horizons. To do this I shall again draw on Louis Marin and his discussion of utopia. In a paper written shortly before his death, he explores, through the example of America, the ambiguities in utopia, again associated with the difference between no-place and goodplace that make up the term u-topia (1992). In this paper it is the frontier and 139

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the horizon that are the key spaces that define the utopia that is America (see also Baudrillard 1988). Like Foucault’s heterotopia they are spaces of the limit, but a limit that is never reached: The limitless horizon is one of the main characteristics of the romantic landscape, an indefinite extent related to the display of a transcendence at this extremity where it seems possible to have a glimpse of the other side of the sky, a ‘beyond space’ encountered through the poetic and rhetorical figure of the twilight, in terms of which a bridge seems to be established between the visible and the invisible. (Marin 1992:407) He goes on: In the case of the island of Utopia, the frontier is the infinity of the ocean, its boarder, a boundless space. Utopia is a limitless place because the island of Utopia is the figure of the limit and of the distance, the drifting of frontiers within the ‘gap’ between opposite terms, neither this one nor that one. (1992:412) For me these ideas about the horizon are all about the space of modernity. It is a boundless space of connections, the unreachable point of possibilities that offers a glimpse of the ‘other side of the sky’. It is a space into which social relations are extended, beyond their own limits, into a gap that is betwixt and between, unlocatable, unrepresentable and impossible. And yet that gap is a obligatory point of passage for different forms of social ordering. It is a space of integration and disintegration, of combination, resistance and disorder. It is a space of ordering. It is also a space of an impossible striving for an imaginary beyond in which all of that uncertainty will be resolved and a form of closure achieved. Yet no matter how quickly one moves towards it, the horizon always recedes from us at the same speed. To reach the horizon would be to achieve a social order, an order in which order and goodness, order and resistance, agency and structure were in harmony. For Marin, as for Foucault, Utopia/modernity contains within it a totalitarian dimension, that which lies at the horizon, but it also contains within it the fact that we can never reach that horizon, the refusal of that totalitarianism, the endless hope for a better life, in full knowledge that this hope will always be disappointed but that such a disappointment will be the basis of a new hope. Modernity defers and that is all. Except that it leaves traces of itself that can be followed. The utopics of modernity and the ordering effects it establishes are made up of a play between assemblage and deferral within an uncertain heterotopic space. When Marin starts with a deconstructive reading of More’s Utopia, focusing on the play of difference between the ou/eu-topia that More introduced within this signifier, he is talking just as much about modern

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societies. Matin’s main concept, as we have seen, is ‘the neutral’ which develops out of this tension of meaning within the term utopia. What should be clear by now is that Marin’s ‘neutral’ has much in common with Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’. The realm of the neutral stands outside as something separate but also as a transition. The neutral stands apart, it constitutes sites of difference within a process, a neutralization, and from this neutralization emerge new social orderings. Heterotopia, as the spaces of this ordering, are the spaces in which agents seek to use these utopics in order to ontologize the gap between the noand the good. They seek a bridge, or a ship across to the horizon. But we know that this ship is a ship of fools. Heterotopia are spaces of the ‘not yet’ as Ernst Bloch might have called them, spaces that seek to turn that ‘not yet’ into a ‘there’ but never achieve their place in an order of things. They create a neutral space that establishes a mode of ordering out of an assemblage of the incongruous and different that seeks to represent and to order in line with ideas about the good. Through its assemblage of the Other, heterotopia defer the difference of other ways of representing and ordering. The realm of the neutral is the realm of social ambivalence. This ambivalence has been used to suggest something quite different in recent urban and cultural studies. It has been argued, albeit through the use of different concepts, that ambivalence be taken more as an illustration of the conditions of postmodernity than of modernity, and that we can see this by looking at some of the spaces of postmodernity. Whereas modernity is said to have sought to have eradicated ambivalence, postmodernity seeks to celebrate it. In one of the key early papers on postmodernism, Frederick Jameson provided us with a spatial description of this celebration of the incongruous and ambivalent in the form of the Bonaventure Hotel (1984). This hotel, built like a futuristic labyrinth, eclectic and playful in its spatial organization and use of architectural style, was linked for Jameson with a new period of capitalism, late capitalism (see Mandel 1975). This type of space, a metaphor for the cultural logic and its urban expression within late capitalism, called for new forms of cognitive mapping, new ways of seeing, and a new critical perspective on space and society (see also Soja 1990; Jay 1992; Zukin 1993). However, we can ask the question ‘how different is the Bonaventure Hotel from the Palais Royal?’ Both were spaces of consumption, both represent a different mode of ordering, both perform new forms of agency and both allow us to look at modes of social ordering which they express in alternative and novel ways. The difference, perhaps, is one of the specificities of the utopics involved, but even that is not always clear. The point I have tried to stress about the Palais Royal along with the other spaces I have discussed, is that heterotopia are relational rather than ontological, and second, they are not specifically about forms of difference in themselves but the relationship between that difference and alternative modes of ordering the social. For this reason heterotopia as a concept has to be seen as existing in

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a tension with utopia. Modernity does not so much eradicate ambivalence as defer it; it uses it in new modes of ordering which may have the appearance of an order but no more than that. Heterotopia come into existence when utopian ideals emerge in spatial play and are expressed as forms of difference which offer alternative ideas about the organization of society. Utopia have never been simply about freedom but rather new types of perceived freedom produced through new modes of social ordering. In taking the example of the Palais Royal we can see that this space provided utopic expression for those moderns who sought to use it as a space of difference (see Billington 1980: Chapter 2). We have come to think of the space of modernity as being exemplified by Bentham’s utopian ideal of the panopticon and of the so-called great confinement of the mad and criminal during the eighteenth century, associated with the Enlightenment thinking of that era. However, through difference, utopics are expressed as modes of ordering rather than orders. The gap remains a gap that has no ontological ground no matter how hard people may strive to close that gap. Heterotopic spaces like that of the Palais Royal facilitated a crystallization of agents and subjects that were distinctly modern and distinctly concerned with new modes of social ordering. This ordering took many forms and could be concerned with both control and freedom. The idea of modernity emerged in places like the Palais Royal. The main impetus within the Palais Royal was not to create an alternative good society, but out of its similitude emerged new forms of social identity, a consolidation of interests and perceptions about a new ordering of society. The Palais Royal was a site engaged in the alternate ordering of consumption, entertainments, public discourse, social and sexual encounters, sedition and revolutionary activity. The ideas for a new society and the overthrow of the old were not only discussed there but expressed through the types of sociality that were to be found in this socially mixed, fashionable, tolerant and playfully inventive space, free from many forms of tradition. While former differences of social status or gender were not completely done away with there, the space provided a degree of freedom unprecedented in France. This was not, however, a space of total freedom, but a combination of market, forum, coffee-house, arena, brothel, spectacle and place of theatrical entertainment, each of which developed new codes of behaviour that can be described as modern. This was the locus in Paris for the consumer culture of the eighteenth century, just as the Bonaventure Hotel has come to be seen as the locus of the consumer culture of postmodernity. Its social composition was heterodox and ambiguous; this was after all a royal palace, an architectural spectacle of power, but one given over to the conditions of the market and popular entertainments. One could just as well be talking about the Bonaventure Hotel. After the Revolution the Palais became the Palais et Jardins de la Revolution, yet it also became the meeting place of the royalists in that aftermath. Napoleon

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established the Tribune in the Palais Royal after he came to power, and at the start of the nineteenth century the site became the location of the Bourse de Commerce. After the revolution of 1830 things turned full circle and the Palais was given back to the Orléans family. It remained a site whose significance shifted and was not easy to pin down. Today it is the site of the Ministry of Culture. In reality its significance was that it acted as the Other space in the lead-up to the 1789 Revolution as a place of new freedoms and new controls where new modes of social encounter and exchange could prevail for some time after (see Balzac 1971). The Palais Royal was modernity before the fact. Although those freedoms were expressed principally in the idea of this being a space for leisure, consumption, entertainment and discussion, it was from here that they were to spill out into the surrounding streets during the Revolution and become the beginnings of a new mode of social ordering. The Palais Royal was not created as a utopia but it expressed a utopics about how society might be ordered. That ordering emerged from this uncertain and ambivalent space and the social encounters and practices that developed there. The conditions of modernity can be taken as an extension of these principles, a social ordering which remains uncertain and ambivalent and imperfect. The Palais Royal acted as a space that gave people a taste or a glimpse of modernity before the fact. As Geist suggests: It was a bazaar, not a marketplace of one branch of trade but an allencompassing bazaar where everything could be bought, from the rarest luxuries to the commonest junk. It was a bazaar which, in the preindustrial age, still upheld the concept of unity. When carried into the new century, this unity was shattered into numerous forms—the fair, world exhibitions, department stores, and arcades. (1985:458) That unity however, is the unity of difference. The Palais Royal acted as a place existing in contrast, where people could be different. At the time of the Revolution that difference emerged from behind its walls and became triumphant. The utopics that were expressed within this capitalist space became the principles upon which a modern society was to develop not by design but through orderings of that difference as it emerged from the heterotopic experiences of spaces like the Palais Royal.

Notes

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The French Revolution (undated), 41. Historical View of the French Revolution (1890). See for example Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1971). It is interesting that ‘financiers’ should be seen as both part of the elegant coterie who occupied the Palais Royal, and also be included among those Others such as prostitutes and libertines. No doubt ‘financier’ may mean something different in each case; however, it is perhaps also a reflection more of the ambivalent status of the financier at this time, not fully having overcome the stigma of usury, while becoming increasingly important to an emergent bourgeoisie and central to the creation of its public sphere. I am grateful to Bob Jessop for this observation on an earlier version of this chapter. Law is not the only one to speak of ordering rather than order. A range of interpretive sociologies from phenomenology, ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism have also done the same. See also Canguilheim’s discussion of the normal and the pathological (1978). Earlier accounts that tended to adopt this view of modernity defined themselves not as postmodern but as critical theory (see for example Adorno and Horkheimer 1979; Debord 1983). For a critique of the idea of the great confinement of the mad in England during the eighteenth century see Porter’s Mind Forg’d Manacles (1990a). For Porter the ‘great confinement’ if it occurred at all, was later than Foucault claimed, in the midnineteenth century. I discuss the significance of this public sphere in more detail in Chapter 5, which deals with freemasonry and the masonic lodge during the eighteenth century. See also Hirschman’s discussion of the reasons-versus-passions debate and its relationship to the emergence of a bourgeois civil society during the eighteenth century (1977). This book, along with that of Stallybrass and White (1986) offers important alternatives to the idea of the bourgeois public sphere as solely constituted by practices of rational discourse put forward by Habermas (1989).

CHAPTER 2 1 2

The work of Foucault, which has had a major influence on these issues (1977, 1983, 1986, 1989a, 1989b) is not discussed here but in detail in Chapter 3 below. Given the significance that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia plays in this book, I have devoted Chapter 3 to a discussion of Foucault’s work on space. 144

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Some, notably Shields, have suggested that ‘spaces of representation’ is a better translation than ‘representational spaces’ for this third term (see Shields 1991). See Shields (1991:54–8). There are strong similarities here with the situationists, notably Debord’s idea of creating situations as political events to challenge the banality and alienation of everyday life in the capitalist city (1981; see Plant 1992). For an important discussion on the way that theatre influenced the development of trustworthiness in market situations see Agnew (1986). Recent hysteria about football hooligans is just the latest example of such a process. Recent anthropological work has begun to suggest that there may be four rather than three stages to a rite of passage: entry, separation, margin and reaggregation, with the middle two both defining different aspects of liminality (see R.Werbner 1989:140ff.). I understand actor-network approaches to be saying that we should look at the actions (and related issues of power) of human or social actors and non-human actors located within heterogeneous networks that make those actions possible (see Callon 1986; Latour 1988; Law 1986, 1994). Networks are made up of human and non-human actants (often referred to as materials); networks of heterogeneous materials (Law 1994). That said, I do not intend to adopt an actor-network approach in this book, nor its conceptual framework in total. Instead, my use is more limited, restricted to considering ordering as a process that is focused in particular spaces or obligatory points of passage. My focus is on the idea of the heterogeneous network and its spatiality and not on the actant as such. In particular he uses the imagery from Tolstoy’s account in War and Peace of the Napoleonic campaign and its Russian resistors.

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The relationship between utopia and ambivalence is the main theme of Chapter 4 below. This is one of the uses that Foucault makes of the term heterotopia; he also talks of them as the opposite of this. I discuss this issue below. I discuss the panopticon as a metaphor for modernity in Chapter 4 below where I look at how it has been used in debates about modernity and its utopianism. I used the concept in this way in my doctoral thesis ‘The geography of the Other: lifestyle, performance and identity’, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University (1993). Oxford English Dictionary Volume VII, 2nd edn, (1989), prepared by J.Simpson and E.Weiner, 191; Oxford: Clarendon Press. Although the whole of The Order of Things can be taken to be about heterotopia, that term is applied to the transitional and transitory beliefs of what Foucault rather ambivalently called the classical age, standing between the Renaissance and modernity. See also Lévi-Strauss’ comments on mythical thinking in relation to issues of bricolage and homology (1966). There are also more recent examples, including the ideas of psychogéographie found in the writings of the situationists (Debord 1981; see also Plant 1992) and in the ideas of the tactics of everyday life in the city in the work of Michel de Certeau (1984).

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Notes See also the writings of Raymond Roussell, the other surrealist writer, along with Magritte, on whom Foucault was to write a long essay, Death and the Labyrinth (Foucault 1987). For Genocchio the term heterotopia from Foucault is read through Derrida’s concept of difference (1976). For a discussion of the cultural significance of the underground see Rosalind Williams’ Notes on the Underground (1992). The Internet would be a good example of a heterotopia in this regard. It is a site which cannot in the conventional sense be located in one place, but an endless and multiple set of relations between sites constituted through a myriad of ever-changing connections. It is fast becoming an obligatory point of passage. I am grateful to Routledge’s anonymous reader of the first draft of this book for comments on this particular text and its importance to my argument.

CHAPTER 4 1

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Although there has also been work on the library (Chartier 1994), the museum, and other exhibitionary sites (Altick 1978; Bennett 1995) it is the coffee-house (Stallybrass and White 1986) that takes this issue of ordering and relates it to a discussion of a particular social space. The main exception is approaches within ethnomethodology. My interest here is specifically with Bauman’s analysis of modernity and not with this more recent issue of postmodernity. I discuss the position of the masonic lodge within this public sphere in Chapter 5 below. See Felicity Heal on changing patterns of hospitality (1990). I develop this point in more detail in my discussion of the motivations behind the emergence of freemasonry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Chapter 5 below. This book is about ordering and space. I do not attempt to look at ordering and time here but this is not to try and play down its significance to this process in association with social ambivalence. For a discussion of the ordering and time see Borst (1993), Adam (1990), Thompson (1967) and Elias (1992). I would like to thank John Law for making this point clear to me.

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Bacon, of course wrote The New Atlantis, and the interest in Solomon’s Temple which is found there was a preoccupation of many Christians of the middle ages as well as Renaissance philosophers. It is, however, somewhat surprising that Bauman does not discuss the carnivalesque, except perhaps obliquely through his comments on the control of working-class sports and pastimes (1987). It is perhaps also significant that in his major study of civilization and manners, which are linked to the process of state formation, Elias has little if anything to say about popular culture or the carnivalesque (1978). It is as if there is no Other to the court which played a significant role in the transmission of manners and tastes down the social ranks. See for example Schofield’s study of the Lunar Society based in Birmingham (1963).

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13

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As well as drawing on Freud’s theory of sublimation, Stallybrass and White use Elias’s work on the civilizing process to make this argument (1978). Elias demonstrated, through a discussion of manners books from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries, how what were once seen as natural, notably bodily functions such as yawning, spitting and farting, first become subjects of interest, then taboo, before finally becoming almost impossible to speak of. Another major influence was Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958). There is more than an echo of Hegel’s views on civil society in this position, where rights first held by individuals alone later come to be transformed into collective but sectional rights within civil society before becoming universal rights embodied in the Prussian state (1967). It is also important to note that this public sphere was distinctly gendered, excluding women from opportunities within it (see Elshtain 1981; Pateman 1988; Davidoff and Hall 1992: Chapter 10). This position of Weber’s has always puzzled me. While this is not the place to develop a critique of Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the central tenet of Weber’s position appears to be that the puritan is fundamentally fearful of social ambivalence and that this ambivalence is manifest not only in the uncertainty of one’s position in the next world—that uncertainty is also projected onto the expressive world of human emotions and feelings. The Weberian perspective appears to suggest that individuals, in order to believe in their predestination, shun the world of earthly feelings and pleasures, treating them as sinful, and retreat into their own inner world and into the striving to produce signs of their election through ascetic behaviour. But this flies in the face of what we know about the highly charismatic, expressive and sect-like character of Protestantism in its many for ms. Weber’s discussion of the routinization of charisma, in contrast to the position that he develops in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Capitalism, effectively develops this engagement-with-ambivalence argument. Weber’s argument on the routinization of charisma has more than a passing similarity with the position on communitas, structure and anti-structure developed by Turner in his discussion of Rites of Passage (1969). Effectively in recognizing what Bourdieu would call symbolic capital as a sign of trustworthiness (1984). This is perhaps an early example of what Giddens describes as trust in expert systems, which he sees as an important feature of modern societies (1990). These two books have only recently become available in English translation, but they are both around thirty years old; Haber mas’ work written for his Habilitation in 1962, and Koselleck’s work published in 1959. Surprisingly, Sennett does not really have anything to say about freemasonry in his discussion of the public sphere (1986), neither do Stallybrass and White (1986). German freemasonry, especially in the form of the Illuminati, adopted a radical Enlightenment vision at first (see Billington 1980:93–9). But it later shed much of this Enlightenment influence and became much more mystical and esoteric in outlook. Lessing, himself a freemason, shows his disillusionment with the organization as it went through this shift, through his Ernst and Falk dialogues (1927). Habermas seems to be adopting a similar view to the organization in his own brief discussion. Stevenson also makes this point (1988a). Jacob and Stevenson are clearly the two leading contemporary historians of freemasonry. Their interpretations of its significance, however, could not be more different. For Jacob, freemasonry is seen wholly as a product of the Enlightenment, whereas for Stevenson it is

148

Notes much more a remnant of the thinking of the Renaissance found in the midst of the age of reason. But neither seem to acknowledge that it may indeed be more of a hybrid. And no-one, to my knowledge, has yet adequately explored this ambivalence.

CHAPTER 6 1 2 3

4

5 6 7

Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night, oil on canvas (see Klingender 1968:207; Daniels 1993:45). Schoolboy description of the origins of the Industrial Revolution, quoted in Ashton (1948:58). While Berg provides ample evidence for the continuation of non-factory forms of capitalist production, she is perhaps a little unfair in the way she presents some of these earlier writers. While the factory is often the central focus of their concerns with the Industrial Revolution, even the most heroic accounts are full of examples of continuity and the persistence of putting-out and domestic production alongside the factory. As with any simplified account this requires some qualification: there were earlier examples of large production sites, notably arsenals, dockyards, workhouses and some large manufactories, and notably supported by royal patronage (see Markus 1993:249; Ashton 1948). The main point is that they remained as manufactories rather than factories proper in Marx’s terms. Something of course which could not be said for later factories which often incorporated dormitories for their workers. But Wedgwood continued to use earlier premises for the production of some goods after the Etruria factory had been built. Another interesting architectural feature of the late eighteenth-century cotton mills was the replacement of wooden beams by iron, again to reduce the risk of fire more than allow for greater architectural innovation. The inspiration and model for this use of iron is said to have come from the Palais Royal (Fitton and Wadsworth 1958:201–3).

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Index

Abrams, P. 11 absolutism 95 actor-network theory 21, 35–7, 145n Addison, W. 29, 78 agency 4 Agnew, J. 14, 30, 63, 64, 77, 82, 83, 105 agriculture 120 Altick, R. 65 ambivalence: and the bourgeois public sphere 77–9; and postmodernity 141; and social ordering 12, 55–65, 69, 70 Anderson, J. 89 anomie 12, 59 anthropology 20 antiquarianism 86 Aragon, L. 44 architecture 61–2, 73, 86–7, 98, 106–7 Arkwright, R. 109 Artaud, A. 43, 45, 46 Ashmole, E. 85 Ashton, T.S. 110, 112, 113, 115 asylums see carceral institutions Augé, M. 47 Bachelard, G. 20, 43, 50 Bacon, F. 72, 74–5 Baker, D. 128, 136 Bakhtin, M. 3, 21, 29, 64, 78 Balzac, H. de 143 Bataille, G. 43, 44–5 Baudelaire, C. 44 Baudrillard, J. 140 Bauman, Z. 10, 12, 37, 55–6, 57–61, 62– 3, 70, 74, 77, 82, 86, 120 beach, as marginal space 25, 28 Beck, U. 10 Beecher, J. 18 Bell, D. 7, 21, 83

Belper Round Mill 137 Bendix, R. 132, 133 Benjamin, W. 2, 3 Bennett, T. 40, 65 Bentham, J. 12, 21, 41, 52, 60, 63, 137, 142 Bentham, S. 137 Bentley, T. 127 Berg, M. 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 121, 131, 137 Berman, M. 3, 10, 21, 44, 64 Bhaba, H. 4, 20 Bienvenu, R. 18 Biere, A. 12, 58, 59, 64, 77, 120 Biernacki, R. 110, 135, 136 Billington, J. 5, 14–15, 16, 17, 76, 107, 142 Blanqui, L. 113 Bonaventure Hotel 141, 142 Bondi, L. 7, 27 Boulton, M. 110, 124–5, 126–7, 127 bourgeois identity, production of 15–16, 30, 31, 84, 101 bourgeois public sphere 77–84, 90–7 Bradshaw, S. 14, 15 Braverman, H. 110, 118, 132 Breton, A. 44 Brown, ‘Capability’ 62 Buck-Morss, S. 3 Burford, E.J. 14, 17 Burke, P. 23, 78 Cabbalistic thinkers 73 Calladine, A. 110 Callon, M. 21, 35, 36, 118 Campbell, C. 31 Canguilham, G. 43 capital, fixed 130–1, 138

159

160

Index

capitalism 68, 113, 118, 130, 138 carceral institutions 12, 21, 42, 52, 54, 57, 60–1, 63, 111, see also panopticon Carlyle, T. 1 carnivalesque 28–32, 78 Carroll, J. 83 Carter, E. 20, 41 Castle, T. 29, 64, 65, 81, 82 Chambers, I. 40, 41 Chaney, D. 28, 34 Chapman, S. 122, 130–1, 134 city space, women’s relationship with 26 Clark, T.J. 3, 44 classical-grotesque duality 29–30 coffee-houses 14–17 Cohen, J. 91 Cohn, N. 59 Conan, M. 3, 5 Connor, S. 40, 41 control 52–3; factory 132–7; and freedom 11, 12, 40, 52, 53, 54, 57, 139 Cooke, P. 20 cultural geography 4, 20 Curl, J.S. 72, 73, 84, 87, 97, 98, 106 Daniels, S. 109 Dark, S. 1, 5 Davis, J.C. 74, 75 Debord, G. 47 Delaney, J. 40, 41 Deleuze, G. 40 Delieb, E. 110 Derrida, J. 11, 67 Desaguiliers, J. 88, 89 Desmoulins, C. 5, 6 Deusche, R. 27 difference 7, 56, 139; and Otherness 51 discipline, factory 132–7 Dobb, M. 110, 113, 115, 116, 120, 122 domestic production 114, 119–22, 131 Domosh, M. 7, 27 Douglas, M. 20, 29, 49, 57, 64 Durkheim, E. 4, 12, 20, 57, 58, 102 education 59 Elias, N. 6, 51 Ellis, A. 14, 17, 78, 82 Engels, F. 110, 112, 113 Epstein, K. 100 Etruria manufactory 127–9 Evans, R. 57, 111

factories x, 13, 71, 109–38 Farnie, D.A. 110 Favero, D. del 47 Faÿ, B. 75, 76, 88, 95, 96 Featherstone, M. 4, 28, 29, 31 feminist writings 20, 26–7, 41 Fiske, J. 29 Fitton, R.S. 109, 110, 137 fixed capital 130–1, 138 Fothergill, J. 125 Foucault, M. 3, 6, 21, 39–40, 59, 118; on carceral institutions 12, 21, 42, 57, 60–1, 63, 111, 132; on freedom and control 12, 52, 57; analysis of heterotopia viii, 8, 18, 42–3, 45–6, 48–9, 50, 51, 70, 139; on resemblance and similitude 9, 67; on spatiality 4, 12, 20, 40, 41–3, 48–9, 57, 110–11 Fourier, C. 18 Fraser, A. 59, 64 fraternity, and freemasonry 97, 100–1, 104, 105 freedom: and control 11, 12, 40, 52, 53, 54, 57, 139; and order 32, 34, 51–3, 54 freemasonry x, 71, 75–7, 84–108 French revolution 5–6 Freudenberger, H. 115 Fricker, J. 110 Frisby, D. 3, 10, 44 Galerie de Bois 5 Garfinkel, H. 34 Geist, J. 2, 5, 143 Genocchio, B. 8, 40, 41, 42, 46–8 Giddens, A. 10 Giles, C. 110 Goodall, I. 110 Goodison, N. 110, 125 Gould, R.F. 84 Grana, C. 3 Gregory, D. 4, 20, 41 Gregson, N. 28 grotesque-classical duality 29–30 Guattari, F. 40 Guralnick, M. 98 Gypsies 63, 64 Habermas, J. x, 2, 13, 21, 58, 71, 76, 79–82, 91–2, 95–6, 101 Harkness, J. 43, 50 Harvey, D. 4, 20, 41, 138

Index Hegel, G. 21, 102 Held, D. 79 hermetic thinkers 73 heterotopia viii–x, 7–9, 12–13, 27, 39–54, 68, 70, 139; (manu) factories as 114, 122–9, 138, 141–2; masonic lodges as 97–106, 108; Palais Royal as 7–8, 10–11, 13–18 Hetherington, K. 7, 21, 40 Hillier, B. 128 Hirschman, A. 77, 84, 106 Hirsh, A. 22 Hirst, P. 95 Hobbes, T. 58, 92 Hobsbawm, E.J. 100–1, 115 Holocaust 62 Honour, H. 61, 62 horizons 139–40 Hubert, H. 44 hybridity 7 Ignatieff, M. 132 individualism, bourgeois 83 individuality 92, 101, 107 industrial revolution 112, 113, 115–19 intellectuals, and social order 57–8, 59–60 Internet 146n Isherwood, R. 2, 5, 81 Jackson, P. 20 Jacob, M. 76, 84, 86, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96 Jameson, F. 141 Jay, M. 79, 95, 141 Jones, G.P. 76, 84, 85, 86, 87, 98, 99, 101, 104, 107 Jones, M. 99 Joy, E.T. 98 Kafka, F. 39, 40, 53 Keith, M. 7, 20, 21 Kennedy, E. 95 Kirchheimer, O. 59, 77, 114, 120, 133, 231 Klingender, F. 109 Knoop, D. 76, 84, 85, 86, 87, 98, 99, 101, 104, 107 Koselleck, R. 71, 89, 91, 92–4, 103 Kruft, H. 61, 73, 86 Kumar, K. 11, 56, 72

161

laboratories, and the ordering of science 36–7 labour, division of 112–13, 116, 117, 134, 138 labour process 132–4 labour theory of value 117 La Fontaine, J. 90 Landes, D. 110, 113, 115 landscape gardening 62 Langford, P. 76 Lasch, C. 83 Lash, S. 10 Latour, B. 10, 12, 21, 35–6, 50, 67, 68, 118 Law, J. ix, 7, 10, 21, 28, 35, 36–7, 70 Lea, J. 112 Lefebvre, H. ix, 4, 20, 21–4, 41, 47, 56, 70 legislation 55–6, 58 Lévi-Strauss, C. 9, 50 Levinas, E. 8 Levitas, R. 11 Lewis, M.J. 113, 131 Lillywhite, B. 99 liminal rituals 33–4 liminal space 4, 24 liminality 4, 32–4, 38, 49, 68, 70 liminoid rituals 33–4 Lloyd-Jones, R. 113, 131 Locke, J. 92 Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans 1–2, 15 Lowenthal, D. 61 Lunar Society 124 Lyon, D. 40, 41 McCulloch, D. 11 machinofacture 116–17, 118 McKendrick, N. 110, 127, 128, 129, 134 Macleod, C. 126 MacPherson, C.B. 82 Maffesoli, M. 31 Magritte, R. 9, 43 management, factory 134–5 Mandel, E. 141 Mannheim, K. 11 Mantoux, P. 110, 113, 114 Manuel, R E. and Manuel, E P. 11, 74 manufactories 115, 116, 117–18, 119–29 Marghieri, I. 3, 5 margin-centre binarism 25, 26, 27–8 marginal space 4, 7, 21–38, 68, 70, 139 Marglin, S. 115, 126, 132

162

Index

Marin, L. viii, x, 11, 12, 18, 38, 52, 53, 56, 57, 66–7, 69, 139–40, 141 market place 28–32, 77–8 Markus, T. 60, 63, 110 Marx, K. 4, 10, 21, 22, 110, 113, 115, 116–17, 118 Marx-Sombart theory 115 masonic lodges x, 13, 71, 72, 76–7; as heterotopia 97–106, 108 Massey, D. 4, 20, 27, 41 Mauss, M. 20, 44 Mayall, D. 64 Melossi, D. 112, 120, 132, 133 memory, art of 73 Mennell, S. 81 Michelet, J. 1 Mol, A-M. Money, J. 100 moral ordering 72, 75–6, 77, 80, 83–4; and freemasonry 89–90, 93, 94–5, 97–106 moral rights 92–3 Moray, R. 85 More, T. viii, 11, 66, 72, 140 Nadeau, M. 22 neo-classicism 61–2, 98 neutral space viii, 11, 66–7, 68, 69, 141 New Atlantis (Bacon) 72, 74–5 Newton, I. 72 Newtonian science 62, 87–8 obligatory points of passage 68 occasionalism 94–5 order 7; and freedom 32, 34, 51–3, 54, see also social ordering Orléans, Philippe Egalité, 1–2, 15 Otherness 4, 7, 8–9, 43–4, 47, 51–2, 56, 67; and the spatiality of women’s resistance 26–7 the Other 7 Owen, R. 110, 137 Ozouf, M. 18, 23 Paine, T. 106 Palais Royal ix, 1–6, 10–11, 13–17, 18, 19, 22–3, 28, 35, 37, 50–1, 53, 142–3 panopticon 11–12, 21, 42, 52, 60–1, 63, 137, 142 paradoxical space 27, 34, 37, 41, 47, 70 Pavarini, M. 112, 120, 132, 133 Penrose, J. 20

Pepper, D. 11 Perkins, H. 110 Phalanstery 18 Philippe Égalité, (Duc d’Orléans) 1–2, 15 Philo, C. 41 Pickford, J. 128 Pile, S. 7, 20, 21 pin factory, as heterotopia 122–4 Piore, M.J. 138 place 20 place myths 24–5 Pollard, S. 110, 118, 127, 130, 132, 133, 134 pollution 64 Porter, R. 57, 63, 76 postcolonialism 4 postmodernity 4, 9, 141 power 4; spatiality of 20–1 Prendergast, N. 3 prisons see carceral institutions private sphere 80, 92, 93 property rights 92 public debate 80–1, 103 public sphere 77–84; and freemasonry 90–7, 103 putting-out system 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 131 Rabinow, P. 3, 4, 62 Redlich, F. 115 Reilly, R. 110, 126, 127, 128 representational spaces 22–4, 47, 70 representations of space 22 Repton, H. 62 resemblance, as mode of ordering 9, 43 resistance 4, 7, 20–4, 31, 32, 67–8, 139; Palais Royal as site of 5–6; and subjectivity 21; women and 26–7 Rétif de la Breton, N. 5 Richelieu, Cardinal 1 Riesman, D. 83 rights of individuals 92–3 rites of passage 32–4 rituals, liminal and liminoid 33–4 Roberts, J. 76, 85 Rogers, C. 14 Roll, E. 124, 126 romanticism, political 94–5 Rose, G. ix, 4, 7, 20, 21, 27, 34, 37, 41, 47, 48, 61 Royal Society 72, 75, 78, 86 Rudé, G. 5–6

Index Rule, J. 115 Rusche, G. 59, 77, 114, 120, 132, 133 Ruston, E. 125 Ryan, J. 26 Rykwert, J. 62, 73, 74, 86, 87, 98, 106 Sabel, C.F. 138 sacrifice, human 44, 46 de Sade, M. 5, 39, 40, 52–3 Said, E. 8 Saint-Huruge, Marquis de 6 Scaff, L. 10 Schaffer, S. 36 Schmitt, C. 91, 94–5 Schneider, H. 101 Schofield, R.E. 124 science 72, 75, 78, 87–8; ordering of 36–7, 62 Scull, A. 57 secrecy, and freemasonry 91, 102, 103 self, cult of the 83 Semple, J. 63 Sennett, R. 2, 13, 14, 63, 64, 71, 76, 77, 79, 82–4 Shapin, S. 36, 75, 78 Shaw, W. 85 Shields, R. ix, 4, 7, 20, 21, 24, 27, 28, 29, 31, 37, 41, 68 ships, as illustrating heteropia 48–9 Sibley, D. 4 similitude, as mode of ordering 9, 43, 50, 138 Simmel, G. 10, 100, 102 Sirrac, Comte de 3 Smelser, N. 110 Smiles, S. 110, 112, 125, 126 Smith, A. 112–13, 116, 117, 122 social ambivalence see ambivalence social control see control social ordering: and actor-network theory 35–7; and ambivalence 12, 55–65, 69, 70; and domestic production 119–20; and the factory system 111–14, 123, 129–30; and the industrial revolution 115–19; and the intellectuals 57–8; and marginal spaces 31–2; and modernity 9–11; modes of 8–9; and state formation 57, 58, 59–60; temporal dimension to 21; and transgression 29–30, 31, 34–5 social spatialization 24 Soho manufactory 124–7

163

Soja, E. 20, 40, 41, 141 Solomon’s Temple 71, 72–4, 87, 88, 97, 98 space(s) 4; city 26; in the factory 135, 136–7, 138; Foucault on 4, 12, 20, 40, 41–3, 48–9, 57, 110–11; liminal 4, 24, 33–4; liminoid 34; marginal 4, 7, 21–38, 68, 70, 139; neutral viii, 11, 66–7, 68, 69, 141; paradoxical 27, 34, 37, 41, 47, 70; representational 22–4, 47, 70; representations of 22; social constructionist theory of 24–6; symbolic 32–7; third 4 spatial practice 22; and utopics 65–9 Stallybrass, P. 14, 15–16, 29, 30, 31, 56, 59, 63, 64, 78, 79, 82 state formation 57, 58, 59–60 Stevenson, D. 76, 84, 85, 86, 97, 98 Stewart, L. 88 Strathern, M. 35 Stukely, W. 86 subjectivity, and spatiality of resistance 21 surrealism 9, 43–6 symbolic spaces 32–7 Talmon, Y. 11 Tann, J. 110, 131, 136 technology 112, 115, 118, 132, see also machinofacture Tester, K. 3, 44, 63 Teyssot, G. 40 theatre of cruelty 45, 46 third space 4 Thomas, J.M. 88 Thompson, E.P. 110, 119, 123, 132, 133 Thompson, P. 118 Thrift, N. 4, 20, 21 time orientation within factory production 135–6, 138 Tönnies, F. 57 Toynbee, A. 113 transgression 7, 20; and the carnivalesque 29–30, 31; and liminality 32–4 Trevor-Roper, H. 59 Tribe, K. 113 trust, relations of 78, 79, 83, 84 Turner, V. ix, 4, 20, 21, 24, 32, 33, 42, 49, 68, 90, 97 Ure, A. 112, 117 Urry, J. 4, 10, 20

164

Index

utopia/utopianism viii, 11–14, 52, 53–4, 56, 139–40, 142; and freemasonry 94–5 utopics viii, 11–14, 55–71, 139; of the factory 111–12, 137–8; and Solomon’s Temple 72–4; and spatial practice 65–9 vagrancy 64, 120 Valentine, G. 7, 21 van Gennep, A. ix, 4, 32, 42, 49, 90 Wadsworth, A.P. 109, 110, 137 Walkowitz, J. 26 Ward, J.T. 113 Weatherill, L. 128 Weber, M. 4, 10, 57, 58, 80, 82, 93, 110, 133, 147n Wedgwood, J. 110, 127–9, 136

Wedgwood, T. 127 Weisberger, R.W. 90 Werbner, P. 33 Whieldon, T. 127 Whimster, S. 10 White, A. 14, 15–16, 29, 30, 31, 56, 59, 63, 64, 78, 79, 82 Williams, M. 110 Wilson, E. ix, 4, 20, 21, 26, 27, 41, 81 Wolff, J. 3, 26 women, relationship with city space 26 work ethic 133 workhouses 132–3 Wright, J. (of Derby) 109 Yates, F. 72, 73, 86, 97 Yeo, E. and Yeo, S. 23, 30, 59, 78 Young, A. 2 Zukin, S. 20, 141