MDMD4: Those Damnable Whig Coffee-Houses

[Paul Nightingale]

Fantasising wildly, I would like to imagine the p-list is a kind of virtual
coffee-house. I hope, however, it has more in common with the C18th variety
described by Sennett, less with the multinational version that seeks to take
over every high street in the world. However, the fiction that social rank
doesn't matter has to be put into context. Who, exactly, gathered to talk
about what? Terry Eagleton (in The Function of Criticism, London: Verso,
1984) discusses the role played by the coffee-house in the formation of
oppositional (bourgeois) politics: "Modern European criticism was born of a
struggle against the absolutist state. Within that repressive regime, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the European bourgeoisie begins to
carve out for itself a distinct discursive space, one of rational judgement
and enlightened critique rather than of the brutal ukases of an
authoritarian politics. Poised between state and civil society, this
bourgeois 'public sphere', as Jurgen Habermas has termed it, comprises a
realm of social institutions - clubs, journals, coffee houses, periodicals -
in which private individuals assemble for the free, equal interchange of
reasonable discourse ..." (p9).

Just like the p-list, in fact. The point seems to be that talk = criticism,
that is to say, a challenge to court society. Eagleton continues: When
Macauley remarks that Joseph Addison 'knew how to use ridicule without
abusing it', he means in effect that Addison knew how to upbraid the
traditional ruling class while keeping in with it, avoiding the divisive
vituperation of a Pope or Swift" (pp10-11).

No jokes about zippers, then? Shame. Satire is acceptable because it can
masquerade as free speech without actually challenging authority. The new
Whig establishment, for example, will simply alternate with the old Tory
establishment in providing the government of the day. "The hallmark of the
English public sphere is its consensual character: the Tatler and Spectator
are catalysts in the creation of a new ruling bloc in English society,
cultivating the mercantile class and uplifting the profligate aristocracy"
(p11). The aristocracy is allowed to reinvent itself to stave off the threat
of popular revolution.

Very generally, Eagleton's argument is that criticism, by definition, has to
be oppositional, it has to be a form of dissent. The establishment of a
literary canon in the C19th and early-C20th (when, in Britain, 'Englit' was
allowed into the university) undermined the anti-establishment role that
criticism might play. Jumping ahead to Eagleton's conclusion: "Modern
criticism was born of a struggle against the absolutist state; unless its
future is now defined as a struggle against the bourgeois state, it might
have no future at all" (p124).