Swallowing Down Burning Coals: Chaos, Impertinence and Treason in the Coffee House
Arpit Kumar __________________ “Yet these will o’er their Jewish Liquor, About Religion Jar and Bicker; And rave till grown as Piping Hot, As the dull Grout o’er which they sot.” ~Ned Ward in ‘Vulgus Britannicus: or, the British Hudibras’ At first sight, the world of the long-eighteenth century English coffee-house is immediately comprehensible and familiar. A meeting place for friends, for leisurely reading and talk over a cup of coffee, for the occasional discussion of news and politics – it is a metaphor for culture itself. The coffee-house has also always lingered in the background of literary criticism of the long-eighteenth century as a space frequented by the likes of John Dryden, Samuel Pepys, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. Addison and Steele promised to bring out philosophy out of its sheltered and closeted life to the crowds of the coffee-house. It was recorded thus in accounts of the literature, culture and life of the long-eighteenth century until the publication of Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere(1962; trans. 1989) where it became much more – the focal point of an emerging formation, the bourgeois public sphere, where strangers gathered, outside the structures of the traditional authority of the church and the state, to converse over matters of ‘common concern’ in a manner that nurtured ‘rational critical deliberation’ and eventually validated the legitimacy of institutions of authority. In such a framework, the coffee-house was seen as a converging point for the various energies of modernity – print, secular sociability, consumption and commerce, the scientific temper and a training ground for democracy. In Terry Eagleton’s Function of Criticism, the coffee-house and the various discursive projects that formed around it gave birth to modern criticism itself. These are claims that have since been variously substantiated, contested and, in some cases, rejected but the fascination with coffee-house culture has not only endured but rather blossomed in the twenty-first century. Markman Ellis published The Coffee House: A Cultural History in 2004 that documented the travels of the beverage from the Levant region to London (in 1652) and its life thereafter whereas Brian Cowan published The Social Life of Coffee (2004) where the early life of coffee among the virtuosi and the wits is considered in depth. These relatively recent publications build on the work of other historians of the coffee-house, chief among them is Aytoun Ellis who described the eighteenth century coffee-house as ‘penny universities’ to emphasize the role it played in the education and improvement of the eighteenth century public. A whole host of other literary critics and historians have analyzed coffee-house culture with their own points of emphasis. Lawrence Klein has documented the significance of the coffee-house in the process of defining a culture of politeness that, he believes, existed in the long-eighteenth century. Emma Clery locates the world of the coffee-house at the center of a discursive deployment of the category of the feminine in association with commerce to illustrate its consequences for the social and cultural landscape of England. These interventions have revealed a greater complexity the coffee-house as it becomes more than a transcendental space of reason but rather appears as a space that was as much of the past as of the future. One can attempt to derive from, and build upon, these interventions that have complicated the nature and function of the coffee-house. This complexity lends itself to an extended analysis of the conceptualization of the public sphere, picking up from Jurgen Habermas and his critics, to deepen the concept so as to be able to accommodate a less homogeneous interpretation of coffee-house culture. The fact of the matter is that Habermas’ idealization of the long eighteenth century English ‘bourgeois public sphere’ gets complicated in the face of direct empirical and conceptual queries that prove beyond doubt that it systematically excluded participation. The conflation of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘homme’ is more than misleading; it’s an attempt to pre-empt and settle the boundaries of the public sphere. It doesn’t merely exclude participation but it pre-defines what constitutes ‘matters of general concern’ and the forms in which they can be ‘discussed’ and ‘deliberated’. These aren’t new problems for those critics who foreground and emphasize Habermas’ Kantian orientation.[1] A detour through Shaftesbury, however, may allow us to develop a closer understanding of the kind of individual subjectivity that sustains Habermas’ proposed public sphere. The politeness and civility of the utterances emerging from the coffee-house suggest a notion of refined and virtuous publics but this chapter will attempt to articulate another template which displaces civility with contestation, controversy and conflict. Nancy Fraser’s critique of the Habermasian public sphere demands a radical re-opening of the public sphere in relation to the participation and issues of a diverse set of stakeholders. It is important to recognize that the diversity of stakeholders doesn’t merely imply a diversity of interests; it also implies a diversity of discursive styles, a multiplicity of languages and an obfuscation of normalized lines of behaviour and action. At all times, in any given ‘public sphere’, understood as a coming together of utterances in dialogue, a gradual concretization of boundaries occurs which results in the identification and categorization of certain utterances as standing in violation of the public sphere. These utterances expose, therefore, the limits of any imagined/real notion of open publicness and become touchstones in the testing of the strength of an actually existing public sphere. In this chapter, the attempt will be to highlight such utterances that emerge from the margins or from ‘the outside’ of the public sphere in such a fashion that they are immediately perceived as threats. In doing so, the focus will be upon multiple dimensions of discourse: the thematic and substantive content of what is said, the ways and means of expressing (styles, genres, and rhetoric) and the difficulty, therefore, of retaining the template of ‘rational discourse’. This multiplicity and discursive variety has always been an integral part of the matrix of language itself but its visibility increases manifold in the age