Why is purchase pleasure? (Part 3)
More similar to the second entry than the first, this post will explore something that doesn’t quite live in purchase itself, but that purchase has found a way to live in, such that purchase and leaving one’s house are, if not synonyms, then at least slant rhymes.
The Degradation of Public Space
Do you remember places? That was a popular meme from early in quarantine, but take a second and recollect with me the places we used to frequent.
My places were the coffee shop, Barriques, across the street. A bar called The Whisper House. When feeling frisky, or like I wanted to get away from the house and go someplace urbane, I would go to State Street and I would wander around an Urban Outfitters or park at Colectivo. My places in high school and in college included The Dragonfly Teahouse, which served boba, and The Spectrum, an outdoor mall, every place a place you could shop.
This isn’t to say that all of my social space was mediated through shopping. I had a favorite trail outside of my apartment that I liked to walk. Museums are still at least vaguely public spaces, though most make you pay admission. But, on the whole, if you want to go to an indoor place in America, you should expect to pay money. Libraries are an exception, but as a space they are not conducive to fraternizing, and are quite often closed on weekends.
A habit a number of my friends have had, and that I had, was to head to a coffee shop with a laptop and park and do work. This rarely had anything to do with the coffee—Barriques, which took so many of my weekends, had middling cold brew and lacked bagels. For many, it is a desire to be some place, to be a flaneur a moment, to amble, to sate wanderlust without airfare. It’s a human desire. We like novelty, variety, and we are a migratory mammal. (That we, unlike a real flaneur, then sit down and hog about on the wi-fi, or “work” if we are in the creative class, shows how even our leisure time has been carved up into time to be sold, and in cracking open our laptop at a coffee shop we reach some new zenith of capitalist life: the first humans to consume and produce coterminously.)
These are our social spaces. And I have enjoyed them over the years. I miss these places; many were dear.
But it leads to more expense, more consumption. We drink coffee not out of a desire for coffee, but because if we want to be among the public, the basic principle of civic life, this is the thriftiest way to do so.
One could of course argue that we are purchasing access to the space and so, in a way, this is not a time when the pleasure of purchase is outsized relative to the joy of consumption. I will concur. Yet—it’s always conjunctions with us writers—we have made a world where a purchase is compulsory to satisfy an urge unrelated to the purchase. And even if the coffee is the price of admission, one is still in a coffee shop, and so one has the temptation to purchase more, so that a coffee becomes a coffee and a sandwich and something light for dinner. It creates an easy avenue to purchase things we will, after the fact, realize we didn’t really need. It creates an avenue for consumption to turn mindless.
Mindless consumption I have argued against, but it is this privatization of public space I find most insidious. Public space, le droit a ville, the agora, all of these things matter to me. Private spaces restrict our freedom. Much scholarship and debate exists on this topic, but since this is a blog post, I will simply link to a survey on the literature compiled by a professional, Judit Bodnar’s Reclaiming public space. The side effects of dying public space can be seen on pages 2096 through 2097, where Bodnar notes that the right to freedom of speech does not extend to shopping malls, so codified by the US Supreme Court in 1972. Yet, if I wanted to get my neighbors’ eyes on something, my first instinct would be to pin a flyer in a coffee shop, a place where such pamphleteering has no legal standing. Architecture is hostile, racial discrimination sculpts access to American public parks, public space recedes and recedes fastest from the poor, and so, like in previous iterations of this blog, the issue is not in purchase, but the world in which our purchases are situated.
Buying a cup of coffee shouldn’t be the price of existing publicly in the city. I miss places, but I fear they only miss my wallet.