Cafe Society Observaed
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Cafй society is something that many of us as customers and/or social theorists take for granted. Cafйs are places where we are not simply served hot beverages but are also in some way partaking of a specific form of public life. It is this latter aspect that has attracted the attention of social theorists, especially Jьrgen Habermas, and leads them to locate the cafй as a key place in the development of modernity. My approach to cafйs is to ‘turn the tables’ on theories of the public field and return to just what the life of a particular cafй consists of, and in so doing re-specify a selection of topics related to public places. The particular topics I deal with in a ‘worldly manner’ are the socio-material organisation of space, informality and rule following, but first a little history.
Cafй and bars came to replace the streets as the primary place for the common gathering of town and city residents in the late seventeen and early eighteen centuries in Britain Germany and particularity nineteenth century France and Italy. Historical sociologists such as Jurgen Habermas (1989) have rooted grand claims about the rise of the public sphere in amongst everyday world of coffee houses in Britain, salons in France and table societies. These were places, according to Habermas, where a new form of public life involving politics, letters and culture could emerge from the previous opposition between the private realm of civil society and the family, and the public sphere of the state and the court. Coffee houses were places where affairs of the state, national events of the day, notorious court cases, political scandals and civil etiquette were discussed and argued over. They were places where sociable reading occurred, since it was the reading of journals and periodicals in the cafes that provided the basis for the talk of public life that occurred (Haine 1996). Coffee houses, as Habermas elegantly celebrate them;
“Preserved a kind of social intercourse that, far from pre-supposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether. The tendency replaced the celebration of rank with a tact befitting equals. The parity on whose basis alone the authority of the better argument could assert itself against that of social hierarchy and in the end carry the day meant, in the thought of the day, the parity of “common humanity”. Private gentlemen made up the public not just in the sense that power and prestige of public office were held in suspense; economic dependencies also in principle had no influence. Laws of the market were suspended as were laws of the state. Not that this idea of the public was actually realized in earnest in the coffee houses; but as an idea it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim. (Habermas 1989, p36)
This would have been my second week here, same table, same chair, same view, and oddly same actions inside the cafй within the grounds of informality, rule following and space. When I had my first visit at the Lindt Cafй, I was a stranger to that place therefore from my side I was ‘formal’, however after two weeks, I would definitely say that the best place to try and learn about informality