Cafe culture, and all space is political
I have a theory that being surrounded by people makes me feel more social in that moment. I also get distracted by dogs in cafés
Before we settle into this week’s blog, have you got a hot drink? It’s Sunday morning for me, so I have a soy latte and I’m at the kitchen table. Don’t let the tranquil image below fool you—I’m actually listening to music at a volume loud enough to drown out the family morning rituals of dishwasher emptying, arguments about maths homework (yes, there is homework, yes, every week, yes, you have to do it), and a small interruption to my thought process to debate the complexity of replacing the broken plastic pipe that takes the washing machine water away from the house and is leaving a treacherous icy river slope between us and the outside world. I think it is easy—measure the pipe, get a new section, install. Apparently, it is not this easy. Have I thought about new brackets? The root cause of the pipe failure? No, I have not. But I find it quite easy to return to writing, knowing that a bracket is another simple thing to fix—and what is this delay in sorting out the deadly ice rink?
And this is why the mere thought of escaping to a café to sit and write feels like the purest of indulgences—almost romantic in its notion. It is probably the image of a writer used most in films. I do go to cafés, and mostly, I do not write, even if that is the intention. I end up on social media, and I have a theory that being surrounded by people makes me feel more social in that moment. I also get distracted by dogs in cafés. This wonderful fella let me feed him treats, and doesn’t he look smart?
I’m not in a café. I’m not showered, nor have I taken off yesterday’s makeup or brushed my hair. I’m currently in my husband’s dressing gown and slippers, which are better than my own (obviously), and importantly—surrounded by one million things to distract me from the task of writing. And this is the magic: being side-by-side with other people (with the confidence that well-practised tactics to drown them out brings) is the ingredient I need to write.
As much as I’m certain you are enjoying this window into my chaotic and fragmented writing operation, there is a podcast this week that has inspired the blog, so I’m changing things up. Usually, I would post the transcript of my podcasts into my Substack along with the audio. But this week, it’s an interview with two brilliant researchers, Tessa and Bre, from the University of California, Santa Cruz, who looked into the experiences of folk who use body doubling as a way to get ahead and get things done. If you want to know what body doubling is and you’re interested in ADHD, then I think it works much better in audio, so do take a listen by clicking on this link.
Tessa and Bre’s research mentions a number of psychological and sociological theories that could explain the mechanisms behind body doubling, and today’s blog is going down the trajectory of ‘diffuse sociality’—or, to give you a real-life example, writing in cafés, a topic that I thought would resonate with writers.
I’m going to start off with a statement: all spaces are political. Wherever you choose to read or write—or perhaps the spaces that are less than ideal but are all you have for some reading or writing time—are upheld by some sort of societal structures, norms, rules, and politics. Virginia Woolf is perhaps most well known for her essay on autonomy and space required for women to write creatively. I’ll confess now that I found it a very long and tedious essay when I first read it as an English Language A-level student. I had a bedroom of my own with a TV, a tape deck, zero responsibilities, and it has taken a full two decades for it to feel relevant. I always took that essay to mean that autonomy and room equalled singular creative silence for a busy mind and the money to sit quietly on one’s own. But as I reflected in last week’s post Ripples of Accountability
(when looking at Self-Determination Theory), good relationships balance and navigate closeness, autonomy, and boundaries. As a social psychologist, I am bound to say that we are inherently social—but it’s true.
This is where the idea of sociality is curious, because it speaks to the interactions and relationships in our life, but it’s also been explored through the lens of self-management practices that folk use—like body doubling or going to work in a coffee shop so that they are connected but alone.
It’s quite obvious to me now that the first time I read Virginia’s essay, I didn’t get it. (And my continuing view and worry when I read and talk about great works of literature and scientific endeavours in journals is that it takes a lot of effort to really understand everything that is being said. And that looks like re-reading. Seventeen-year-old me was more interested in passing my driving test so I could escape the room of my own and drive to clubs and dance wildly with strangers to The Prodigy and Moby. So, here we are.) I’m re-reading it properly this time, and this is the quote that stood out for me when thinking about the role of sociality and body doubling in getting ahead and getting things done:
“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
What I’m now taking from that essay is the whole politics of space and the interconnectedness of relationships in whatever we create. This is the subject of Brave New Neighbourhoods, a book by Margaret Kohn written in 2004, which calls for the protection of public spaces. In it, she also argues that there are ‘lessons for debates about the architecture and regulation of cyberspace,’ given that internet chatrooms at the time were largely run by major media companies. Timely reading, given the recent policy changes on social media platforms and the temporary disappearance of TikTok over the weekend because a nation banned it. Notable too that these media heads will be attending the presidential inauguration. Brave New Neighbourhoods considers what can be done to protect and revitalise our public spaces—a question that comes around for our online spaces too.
What is curious for me is the way sociability through cyberspace is constantly revitalised and reshaped. I think I had just joined Substack when Threads appeared, and I remember being excited about documenting that moment and the possibility that it would be a better place than Twitter. And then I promptly fell out of love because it was a wall of noise.
The parallels between online spaces and physical spaces like coffee shops are intriguing, though. Cafés are privately owned (for the most part). How much of the ambience is brought by the customer or the owner? I think a lot about the way our environment influences us and vice versa. Based on one ethnographic study of a coffee shop, researchers in Brazil propose that places of consumption are social organisations around three processes: the fabrication of spontaneity, the fluidity of spatiality, and the fertilisation of dialogue. The research really speaks to the reciprocal action that occurs between people in spaces. It also captures, through spontaneity and fertilisation, the in-betweenness of being alone in a coffee shop, as well as the possibility of interaction (with dogs or humans, presumably!).
If you’re interested in the philosophical underpinnings of space, then Henri Lefebvre believed that capitalism produced abstract space. So, our Metas and Tesla leaders produce and reproduce abstract spaces and platforms. We create representations of space—whether they exist or not—how we talk about ambiguous cyberspaces, for example, and then the phenomenological or lived experience, which is the aspect of space and time I am most interested in as a social psychologist. (I’ve read even less of this work than Virginia Woolf, so I’ll come back to it when I understand more.)
I hope that today’s blog has brought an interesting lens on café culture and body doubling. In the podcast episode, we explore the theories that might explain body doubling and discuss the benefits of side-by-side working.
Today’s footnote and final thoughts: there will always be single voices and collective action. I was interested to read the editorial in this month’s Vogue with the lawyer Monica Feria-Tinta, who represents the planet. (We need more Monicas! ) She’s quoted as saying, “The law is alive, it is not static…” and her view of change, through a litigious legal lens, is that it comes from the bottom up. It feels a little simplistic, but I thought this was intriguing, given our thinking spaces are political, and it reminded me of an interview with the sociologist Richard Sennett ‘Being present in our problems’ for Serpentine Galleries (worth a read for the illustrations and artwork alone!)
And finally, I have re-stacked two articles over the weekend as they appeared side by side in my email notifications: Carole Cadwalladr on the noise that comes from the top down,
and the second article, via Caroline Criado Perez, on what happens when women read about male overrepresentation in political leadership.
It feels like a call to action that we must continue to take up space—all spaces—spontaneously, loudly, and fluidly, and fertilise the thoughts of the collective.
Eagle, T., Baltaxe-Admony, L. B., & Ringland, K. E. (2023). Proposing body doubling as a continuum of space/time and mutuality: an investigation with neurodivergent participants. The 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3597638.3614486
Fantinel, L. D. and Davel, E. P. B. (2019). Learning from sociability-intensive organizations: an ethnographic study in a coffee organization. BAR - Brazilian Administration Review, 16(4). https://doi.org/10.1590/1807-7692bar2019180142
Kohn, M. (2004). Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203495117
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell.
Woolf, V. (1929). A room of one's own