Discuss Amongst Yourselves

I was struck by the following passage in Will Oremus’ recent Slate article about coffee’s “third wave”:

“Their search for a better cup has given rise to a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious. Stumptown of Portland, Ore.; Intelligentsia of Chicago; and Counter Culture of Durham, N.C., don’t just sell ‘dark roast’ and ‘light roast.’ They sell coffees like Stumptown’s Indonesia Sulawesi Toarco Toraja, which is grown by smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website. The beans come with descriptors like ‘fair-trade,’ ‘single-origin,’ and ‘shade-grown,’ and sport ‘flavor profiles’ that would make Robert Parker blush. They’re roasted and brewed with obsessive attention to details like the extraction rate and brewing ratio, which are separately optimized to bring out the best in each bean.” (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/crosspollination/2014/03/blue_bottle_coffee_vcs_search_for_the_new_starbucks_starts_in_san_francisco.html)

In reading this, I was overcome by two primary emotions, the first of which feelings was surprising in the way that discovering you are bleeding when you aren’t aware of a wound is. I have only recently discovered the pleasures of coffee, having for years believed that “I can’t handle coffee,” which belief ran so deep that I listed it on the “25 Facts About Me” that everyone was filling out on Facebook a few years ago. (In retrospect, the “25 facts” fad was likely a narrative ur-form of the selfie, like novels presaging movies. The book, of course, is always better than the movie, and “25 Facts” trumps the selfie. Making it doubly depressing that if I posted 25 new facts about myself every week on Facebook it would come off as raging narcissism, whereas the posting of selfies as new profile pictures is an easy ticket to 25 “likes” or more. Fortunately, I can embed all the new facts about myself I like in this blog, which is symptomatic of merely mild to moderate narcissism, and therefore well within cultural norms.) But after several slow and steady years of building up caffeine tolerance via Irish and English breakfast teas and cultivating a willingness to endure an afternoon of mild shakes and low grade anxiety (given that I felt that way all the time before giving up gluten, crashing off of coffee is sort of nostalgic), I am a newly minted member of coffee nation. (Note: If you can meaningfully apply the suffix “nation” to a term, as you can with coffee or e.g. the Red Sox, then the group in question has already lost its soul.) But I had no idea I had fallen “truly, madly, deeply” for coffee until I read the quoted passage and felt a wave of sadness as I realized it will never again be possible to simply enjoy a good, or even a very good, cup of coffee.

The Slate article focuses on Blue Bottle, a San Francisco-based purveyor of coffee that has attracted some serious venture capitalist investment. Oremus’s slant is that Blue Bottle might turn out to be Apple to Starbucks’ Microsoft. Massive and rapid growth seems a bit unlikely for a business that handcrafts each cup of coffee, a practice which, if nothing else, puts a natural cap on prospective sales, but growth, of course, is the name of the venture capital game. When pressed for an explanation of how Blue Bottle will survive the natural pitfalls of corporate expansion, Blue Bottle founder James Freeman explains to Oremus “his goal is not to keep quality constant—it’s to keep improving it, even if that means growing more slowly than he could otherwise.” (ibid) The growing slow part of the equation is all well and good, but it is the first part, the part about constantly improving the coffee, which is so sad. Because what Freeman and the entire third wave of coffee have forgotten is that a cup of coffee can only be so good. And, even more importantly, this is good enough.

If there is one cliché at the heart of late capitalism, “When good enough isn’t good enough” may very well be it. Originally intended as an ode to the pursuit of excellence, it has become a diagnosis. The original meaning, the understanding that excellence is always within reach, has been twisted into a forgetting that perfection is always beyond our grasp. “Constantly improving the coffee” is also an echo of constantly growing the economy, the failure to recognize the limits of flavor reminiscent of the failure to recognize the limits of growth. If our great wisdom traditions tell us anything, it is that this very moment, the eternal here and now, is “When good enough is good enough”; see both Tibetan Buddhism’s “Basic Goodness” and the Book of Genesis: “Then God looked over all he had made, and He saw that it was very good.” In reading about third wave coffee, one gets the feeling that on the seventh day, the barista worked straight through the night.

But, as noted, sadness wasn’t the only emotion in play as I read the quoted passage. It also felt awkward, like accidentally walking in on your roommate having kinky sex with his or her partner. In describing “a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious,” Oremus has missed the mark; third wave coffee makers and consumers haven’t found religion so much as they are indulging a fetish. To be clear, this isn’t equivalent to a straightforwardly sexual fetish as exhibited by e.g. New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, whose foot fetish videos, endearingly produced with the full cooperation of his wife cum foot model, found their way onto the internet. Instead, third wave coffee is entangled in the process of sexualized commodity fetishism, a Marxist concept that sounds dense and complex, but is actually rather simple. It is, in a nutshell, an explanation of how we end up desiring consumer goods. And third wave coffee is fraught through and through with this misplaced desire.

Commodity fetishism can sound rather bland, and hardly worthy of the term fetish, until we acknowledge its sexual underpinnings. Note the difference between the two following definitions of the term:

1) “The psychological phenomenon of commodity fetishism, which ascribes an independent, objective value and reality to a thing that has no inherent value- other than the value given to it by the producers, the seller, and the buyer of the commodity.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism)

Yawn.

And 2) “Marx said that fetishism is ‘the religion of sensuous appetites,’ and that the fantasy of the appetite tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the desires of the worshipper.” (ibid)

Now we’re getting somewhere! And perhaps, seen in this light, Oremus is correct, and third wave coffee does indeed involve religious reverence. But in aiming for (sexual) self gratification, it is a debased form of religious worship. (This is not to suggest that there is anything debased about Rex Ryan’s conjugal relations with Mrs. Ryan; sexual fetishes are apples to sexualized commodity fetishism’s oranges. And if an apple a day keeps divorce away, bon appétit.) In worshipping commodities like third wave coffee, we have made a graven image out of our own desire. (Full disclosure- I have my own commodity fetishes: automobiles and, of all things, tennis racquets, which I like to justify to myself by imagining them as substitutes for lightsabers. But really.)

The old saying goes that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Just so, Eros is as bound up with its opposite, aggression, as yin is with yang. Thus it comes as no surprise that third wave coffee, the new sexualized commodity fetish par excellence, is rife with aggression as much as it is with sex. The clue here is the “smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website.” To interpret the clue, we turn to Robert Cluley and Stephen Dunne’s explanation of the turn from commodity fetishism to commodity narcissism:

“Consumers who claim to be ethically concerned about the manufacturing origins of commodities, nonetheless behaved as if ignorant of the exploitative labour conditions under which the workers produced the goods and services, bought by the ‘concerned consumer’; that, within the culture of consumerism, narcissistic men and women have established shopping (economic consumption) as a socially acceptable way to express aggression.” (ibid)

What is most important about both Cluley and Dunne’s description, as well as its glaring example in the form of Stumptown’s smallholder farmers’ faces, is that this is a veiled aggression. Veiled, most of all, to the aggressors themselves, who, in consuming “fair-trade” coffee not only deny their inescapable culpability in the (literal) sins of globalization, but imagine themselves as rebels against the very system that has no better symbol than a $4 cup of coffee. All of which brings to mind the conundrum facing African Americans: would you rather live where the racism is overt (i.e. the American south) or covert (e.g. Boston)? In this case, would you rather live amongst the wolves of Wall Street, or amongst the wolves in sheep’s clothing inhabiting San Francisco cafés (or your local third wave coffee shop)?

Time for decaf, indeed.