Kahve-Society

Further notes on the coffee-house:

If the Coffee-House appears to be a perfect analogy for the times, what does it demonstrate? The privatisation of public space, the nature of democracy, and the ethics of globalisation? The mixed realities of real and virtual space?

In a 'Cybercafé' (a mouse in one hand and a latte in the other), in a Starbucks or Coffee Republic (whose catchphrase is 'real life, real people, real coffee') a superficial life-style ambience has privatised the egalitarian spirit of the coffee-house model and replaced it with an expression of multinational capitalism. Think of the slave-labour conditions under which most coffee is produced, gross profit margins, the poor working conditions of temporary staff and the cynical business strategies of chain brands. Naomi Klein's No Logo (2001) describes the 'clustering expansion methods' of Starbucks who saturate an area with new coffee shops to destroy all competition (like a military campaign). Yet the CEO Howard Shultz says: 'It's the romance of the coffee experience, the feeling of warmth and community people get in Starbucks stores' (2001). The 'Third-World' make-over of Starbucks shops is especially sickening and makes it an obvious and popular target for anti-capitalist or anti-globalisation protest. In these contexts, the coffee leaves a bad aftertaste.

Contemporary coffee-houses reject an understanding of the historical references they evoke; the coffee-house as an expression of the 'Public Sphere'. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere written in 1962, Jürgen Habermas said that the development of early modern capitalism produced a new public engaged in political discussion through access to relevant information, publicity, publishing, café discussion, and so on. In seventeenth and eighteenth century London, coffee-houses were discursive spaces, even used as addresses to receive mail and post 'news' (early media forms in other words), and to house early communities of commercial and political interest. It is easy to see why this has been developed by analogy to the idea of the virtual coffee-house - Brian A, Connery, IMHO: authority and Egalitarian Rhetoric in the Virtual Coffeehouse (1997).

But why is there a cultural reluctance to come together, make argument and discuss politics in actual space? Compared to early coffee-houses, have media technologies simply served to limit the function of the public sphere? What about the current fashion for coffee-bars and cafés? Neo-liberal democracies say open debate is possible, yet regulate and control the spaces in which it might take place. Is the Internet different - a utopian zone 'revitalising the public sphere', where meaning and community can be recovered and where lost social value can be restored - the virtual coffee-house, if you like? How much is this really the case? Certainly the cyber-café is arranged to access online communities with almost total disregard for the potential community in the café space itself - everyone facing outwards with their backs to eachother. Even when you get online, communities work according to their own logic or rules as closed systems where participants must demonstrate the required attributes to join in.

Is it possible to conceive of a mixed reality coffee-house in this regard? A space in which open discussion is encouraged in virtual or actual space, that resists the privatising impulses of a profiteering café-culture, that is aware about issues around globalisation (uses fair-trade coffee not simply as a fashion statement), that reinvents itself as a critical discursive space - all this, and still serve good coffee?

download a pdf copy of Markman Ellis's 'An Introduction to a History of the Coffee-house: a discursive model', an extract from our 'A Coffee-house Conversation...' publication.