Intimacies at the bar top: a socio-spatial approach to the public sphere from its everyday practices

Abstract

This work stems from the results of a PhD about bars, restaurants and cafeterias in a European city: Madrid. The theoretical purpose of the research was to question the hegemonic liberal notion of a rational, reflexive and abstract Public Sphere (which emerged in 18th Century Coffee Houses according to Jürgen Habermas), and to propose an embodied, situated and ordinary depiction of it. On the other hand, the methodological purpose was to apply an empirical and socio-spatial analysis to allegedly abstract political concepts such as Democracy, Conflict, Publicness, or Power, analyzing how the city inhabitants use them and how they come into live phenomenologically, in a constant interaction with bodies, things and situations. Bars were chosen as a case study due to their everyday relevance and “intermediate nature”: private spaces with public concurrence and the right to refuse admissions. Exploring this “intermediate nature”, three key concepts that often appeared in the fieldwork (consisting in semi-structured interviews, observations and cartographies) constantly challenged public atmospheres: privacy, domesticity and intimacy. Each of these concepts was applied to different situations and sets. This contribution focuses on the latter (intimacy), and will explore how int imacies are constructed, allowed and monitored in these semi-public spaces. It will delve into how intimacies can even appear among strangers; who has the right to create intimate atmospheres and who suffers from them; how f inally the production of intimacies is often a key strategy used by marginalized groups to create resistance choreographies, propose counter-publics, and question the violence of hegemonic public and semi-public spaces.