I have in this series of sketches of my academic life often referred to the important role of cafes and bars. They have become over the decades part and parcel not only of the transfer of thoughts to manuscripts but also of who I am. I’m no fan of the current displacement of structural theory by identity theory, but I will accept that what I do is very much who I am, and I spend a fair amount of time even in retirement sitting in cafes and bars writing. Sharing this disposition with Norwegian colleague Aksel Tjora, we decided to put together a collection of pieces on the sociology of cafes that we eventually published in our Café Society in the year of my retirement, 2013. Given the continuing role of cafes in my life, a few additional remarks are indicated.
Café Society contains a number of interesting and engaging perspectives on the café as an historical and contemporary social phenomenon. I will not rehearse these here, but rather pick up on a handful of themes of personal relevance. First, a few preliminary points of context. Since its origins in the East, via the Viennese salons of the late nineteenth century, the Parisian retreats of Sartre and de Beauvoir, the coffee bars of London’s Soho, to the profit-seeking, tax-avoiding American chains of today, the café has emerged in Occidental modernity as an important social space. Several trends have been documented empirically:
- a rapidly increasing number of commercially viable cafes across contemporary Western (but not just Western) societies;
- a growing potential for these discrete and ‘bounded spaces’ to serve as third places;
- ready accessibility, extending beyond the affluent to accommodate the non-, un- and under-employed;
- a potential for cafes to be more than sites for sociablity or familiarity bonds;
- cafes as social spaces for multi-networking, stretching from weak to strong ties;
- cafes as possible resources for the enabling sector of civil society.
I want here to emphasise the last of these trends. The cafe is, as Ray Oldenburg discusses in our book, one of a diminishing number of ‘third places’, that is, places where people meet and talk (English pubs are another such place). Habermas has argued that in the eighteenth-century European cafes were providers of a space allowing for open and uncensored political debate and the ‘public use of reason’, a bastion of – admittedly, white, male and bourgeois – independent-mindedness. He rightly stresses that this was a limited and passing moment and that civil society and the public sphere have long since been neutralised and diminished. In my chapter I ask whether there is anything left of the café as a site of independent thinking. I recall visiting the famous Café Royale in Vienna – which in all honestly I didn’t much like, probably because it fell short of the café I had constructed in my imagination – which is famous for its clientele and the uses they made of it. The most well-known of all its users was Peter Altenberg, progeny of a rich Jewish, Austrian family and an ideal typical bohemian, an eccentric sponger whose life-size figure sits at the entrance of the café. Of more pertinence here, however, is that Trotsky and his friend Lenin were regulars who discussed politics and strategies at its tables. A contemporary painted a picture of Trotsky and Victor Adler, founder of the Austrian Socialist Party, deep in conversation at one table, while Lenin and Stalin, worked in their revolutionary manifestos at another.
Is today’s café a realistic candidate for what I call the ‘enabling sector’ of civil society? This concept of an enabling sector of civil society had its origins in a paper with the late David Kelleher in Critical Public Health in 2006. We argued that it is helpful to distinguish between an enabling sector of civil society, defined as a popular meeting place where public discussion, debate and agitation might have its origins, and a protest sector of civil society, representing an arena in which the contents of soundings in the enabling sector might spill over and transmute into more organised forms in pursuit of effective influence in the public sphere of the lifeworld.
After presenting typologies of cafes and café users in my chapter, I returned to this theme, asking what if anything remains of yesterday’s white, masculine and bourgeois, yet independent and politically oriented, input into the public sphere of financialised or rentier capitalism. I set out some contextual parameters. First, non-bourgeois solidarity is still likely to have its roots in social class membership; second, the short-term prospects of working-class consciousness leading to effective collective action for political change have receded since the 1970s; third, it is new social movements that may prove the most promising avenues of resistance to the neoliberal status quo; fourth, new social movement initiatives might yet trigger class-based activity; and fifth, the café, in the enabling sector, ‘is an as yet under-investigated site of (middle-class and working-class) political opposition (in the protest sector).’ In my defence, I was cautious and fully aware that ‘it is difficult to foresee a reprise of John Dryden’s role as fulcrum of public debate at Will’s Coffee House in seventeenth-century Covent Garden, counting the likes of Samuel Pepys and Alexander Pope among his avid listeners.’ It is, I insisted, the cell phone and virtual communication that establish rationale and framework for many an elite and oppositional actual encounter in what we would now call ‘platform capitalism’.
In Habermasian terms, the gap between the ‘formal’ democracy of parliamentary process and ‘substantive’ or participatory democracy has been exposed for what it is. Moreover, to pick up on an ongoing theme in my work over the years, if social class has increased its objective salience or causal power over people’s circumstances, it has indubitably lost much of its subjective salience or causal power for identity-formation. Oppositional consciousness is likely to be revived, I suggested in my chapter in Café Society ten years ago, ‘at a remove from extant elites, and maybe, via conversations, arguments, compromises, shared interests, and ad hoc and local campaigning, serendipitously, amidst the proliferation of outlets of our ‘café society’.’ It is an argument that has possibly regained some traction via the spontaneous formation of local WhatsApp Groups during the recent COVID-19 lockdowns.
Looking back, I would not dismiss these suggestions. Clearly, the likely contribution of café society to system decolonisation/lifeworld rationalisation should not be exaggerated. There may yet be some milage, however, in the transmission of ideas and action from an enabling sector of civil society with its roots in the private sphere of the lifeworld to a protest sector firmly lodged in the public sphere of the lifeworld. Cafes are one possible mediating site.
A few personal notes on my own continuing predilection for writing in cafes might be in order. I have even written a poem or two about this (see my Rhythmic Musings, ‘published’ courtesy of my daughter Rebecca, who also designed and produced the volume). With appropriate apologies to more practised poets:
Alone in Company
Solitude is not loneliness
and familiarity comes in many guises.
I nudge the cafe door and check
the table with the plug is free;
quick, stake my claim!
I drape my bag on the chair,
hook up the charger
and stay vigilant at the counter.
Strange how we apportion trust
among anonymous inner-city strangers,
let instinct trump reason.
Word is my laptop is my friend.
I relish the bustle around me,
hear and don’t hear the chatter,
the guffaws, the squawks of chairs
levering in and out.
A companionship of papers and jottings
to the right, cappuccino to the left.
I usually have a plan, maybe several:
it’s the book today, though there’s
a chapter whispering impatiently
in my ear and the omnipresent threat
of seduction by blog.
The phone’s a prop, as once was my pipe
before the smoke was banished in public;
(in any case I was biting through the stems
and they made my canines wobble).
Check the news, cricket scores, Twitter,
Facebook: catch up with virtual friends.
There! I said solitude is not loneliness.
There’s nothing like ‘an independent’,
wooden tables and benches and whatnot,
but in truth I can settle on chequered plastic:
kitted out with exercise book and biro I drafted
my first textbook pieces over coffee and chips
in a Wimpy on Waterloo Station in 1980.
Four decades on and no space left for Luddites:
I can barely write or read my longhand now.
Before we were ambushed by COVID
I spent six hours most laptop Wednesdays
Writing my way through the cafes
In Tottenham Court Road, Guildford, Dorking,
And I loved it.
Café society bestows the gift of absence
In presence; silence in a landscape
of shifting bodies, clearing of tables,
stacking of dishwashers and passing gossip;
and there’s just that smidgeon of sociability
to reach out for if and when,
but on my own terms.
These lines catch once more something of what I find attractive about writing in cafes, summed up in the phrase ‘alone in company’. I have always liked writing in the midst of hustle and bustle, with the omnipresent option of engaging with others, but on my own terms. I have a confession to add though. Aksel Tjora and I planned a companion volume to our book on Café Society to be entitled Bar Society, and I have yet – nearly a decade later and despite drafting a proposal – to finalise our plans and to attract a publisher.