Cafe Culture, Intellectual Endeavor and the Ronin by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#5, DEC/2018-FEB/2019

As a singular and demanding mode of engagement with the world, writing involves the active cultivation of a solitude which all too often encourages either simulative hyperactivity or pious inaction in the face of an insurmountable mortality that situates the human condition. Indeed, struggle for survival, social priorities, economic considerations, pursuit of leisure, media overindulgence, fetishization of technology and the monotony of daily routine, are all potent vaccines with which to inoculate the implicated temporality of our existence against the possibility of embarking upon the sea of such solitude through intellectual endeavor.

Is it any wonder then that between the creative world of intellectual endeavor and the bewildered herd of rational animality there endures such a formidable abyss of lived experience? And in what sense is this contrast in existential disposition of human ‘being’ towards solitude, explicitly rendered problematic by the figure of ‘the Ronin-as-radical autonomous intellectual’ engaged in literary praxis while encompassed by the condensed plentitude of intersubjective resonance at a café? No doubt, writers can be notoriously temperamental and fickle about where and when to write, and what works for one writer can be a definitive roadblock for another.

To be sure, because of the lived duress generated by the lower economic yield that often accompanies autonomous intellectual endeavor, consistent sightings of such writers at work at a café are understandably rare. As such, you are more likely to find students working on papers or professors busy revising lecture notes than a creative intellectual engaged in writing. Does this mean that unless you are a student, professor or somehow chained to another type of literary utilitarian motive to write, that you have no ‘business’ writing? The Ronin writes from a spiritual autonomy of intellectual engagement that exists in constant jeopardy of lapsing into pragmatic, academic or activist registers of thought. And yet, what is it about the autonomous trajectory of intellectual undertaking that not only characterizes the Ronin, but also allows for such a rewarding and tumultuous love affair between writer and café culture to flourish?

The Ronin writes against imperial mainstream currents of professionalization and activism that succeed in threatening autonomous intellectual engagement with social extinction. Sartre relates the story of an imbecile who once wrote that in order to be an engaged intellectual he should join the Communist Party. [1] Now the ideological descendants of that same imbecile claim that in order to be an engaged intellectual you have to first become an academic, and then take advantage of social media platforms. Indeed, as Said makes quite clear, “the cult of expertise has never ruled the world of discourse as much as it now does in the United States, where the policy intellectual can feel that he or she surveys the entire world. . . . even though the United States is actually full of intellectuals hard at work filling the airwaves, print and cyberspace with their effusions, the public realm is so taken up with questions of policy and government, as well as with considerations of power and authority, that even the idea of an intellectual who is driven neither by a passion for office nor by the ambition to get the ear of someone in power is difficult to sustain for more than a second or two. Profit and celebrity are powerful stimulants.” [2]

As such, there is no need to regard that oft hurled epithet of being a ‘café intellectual’ as even the least bit insulting. Rather, is it not a worthy commendation befitting of those who choose to cultivate intellectual endeavor at the margins of time honored institutions of established power and sanctioned bastions of imperial legitimation?

For the Ronin is no officially credentialed expert at the beck and call of established power, wielding stone tablets of certification with the heavy hands of a pundit while in search of neatly packaged solutions to preheated problems towards preserving the good conscience of the imperial mainstream. Nor does the Ronin write within a preapproved discursive trajectory adhering to a fixed respectable discipline while amassing institutional legitimacy, social acclaim and prestigious awards towards careerist advancement.

However, neither is the Ronin a one-dimensional activist cathartically enamored with ‘protest-as-ritual event’ who begrudgingly writes to force feed loud pedestrian prose to the heedless masses out of sheer pragmatic need to organize political agitation. “That means clearly that we are writing against everybody, that we have readers but no public.” [3] No doubt, the Ronin writes against imperial consensus and its discontents with an aesthetic edge of emancipatory relevance and intellectual rigor that swords discerning readers from sedated public. For whereas both academics and activists serve vitally important social functions within the imperial mainstream-as-civil society, the Ronin’s decision to write ‘unprofessionally’ discloses a spiritual autonomy of literary undertaking that situates potentialities of intellectual endeavor beyond utilitarian considerations.

Indeed, “one does not write to earn one’s living.” [4] Now this Sartrean injunction against whoring out your Muse, does not suggest one cannot “earn one’s living” by writing, or even by teaching. Rather, it speaks to that creative intentionality which distinguishes intellectual endeavor from its reducibility to professional or activist pursuits, though it can and often does encompass both.

And yet, what is it about the café that ultimately attracts swarthy outsiders, epistemologically disconsolate rebels and metaphysical heretics of the normative gaze? If it is true as West asserts, that “the contemporary Black intellectual faces a grim predicament. Caught between an insolent American society and an insouciant Black community, the African American who takes seriously the life of the mind inhabits an isolated and insulated world.” [5] Then perhaps, by providing a constantly changing and varied plenum of social proximity to an intersubjective resonance of everyday people, might café culture somehow mediate against the severity of isolation that afflicts the lived trajectory of intellectual endeavor? One has but to recall that even Malatesta, unimpeachable in the anarchist orientation of his rebellion against established power, never apologized for indulging in café culture towards furthering his radical undertakings, even while on the run from police. [6]

Still, there is nothing inherently meaningful about the lived correlation between the Ronin and the urban archipelago of cafés that situate such disciplined cultivation of literary praxis. However, it is this very meaninglessness which is the condition of possibility for the Ronin to impose actual meaning through literary praxis upon the café itself as a contested territory for creative undertaking and intellectual endeavor.

Indeed, is it not this exacting ambiguity of meaning that often discourages writers from taking advantage of the café? Inundated with distractions of Spectacle and hyperproliferation of information, how does the contemporary writer resist the temptations of ceding too much time and agenda-setting legitimacy to the pedestrian punditry of social media? Although obviously a protean apparatus of imperial surveillance, no one can dispute the naked communicative efficiency of social media towards expanding the scope and heightening the urgency of intellectual endeavor, even while it necessarily discourages the enigmatic rigor of philosophical thought to appease the instant gratification of the bewildered herd.

As such, writers in this contemporary era necessarily encounter difficulty finding creative refuge within the condensed plentitude of intersubjective resonance that informs café culture and ultimately challenges the careful cultivation of that solitude which accompanies literary praxis.

And yet, it is in overcoming prohibitive obstacles to thought that inscribes intellectual endeavor with an indelible aesthetic vigor of spiritual autonomy and creative intentionality. Indeed, overreliance on the external trappings of idyllic serenity meant to entice and pamper insight introduces a distinct constellation of limitations towards potentially demeaning the radical imagination.

It is rare of course to find any writer, including the Ronin, arguing against the clear effectiveness of cultivating solitude in the privacy of a study, retreat or office space. Though not every intellectual has such resources at their disposal, and for this reason the café becomes an invaluable advantage. However, it is even rarer for a writer to embrace the egalitarian potentialities of creative duress associated with café culture and still resist ceding the emancipatory relevance of intellectual rigor to a condescending accessibility of thought which claims to reach the masses by mirroring forth an abiding spiritual deference to authorized structures of meaning. Wright reminds us that “these tasks are imperative in light of the fact that we live in a time when the majority of the most basic assumptions of life can no longer be taken for granted. Tradition is no longer a guide. The world has grown huge and cold. Surely this is the moment to ask questions, to theorize, to speculate, to wonder out of what materials can a human world be built.” [7]

Indeed, harmonious acclimation to the normative gaze gives vent to a mediocrity of thought by loyal retainers of the status quo who preserve the good conscience of the imperial mainstream-as-civil society within a literature of average situations by refusing to interrogate the conditions of its possibility. The attractiveness and ‘common sense’ reasonability of writing like everyone else, especially when you are trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, is extremely difficult to overcome. Such rationality produces riveting displays of discursive conformity as the essential experience of intellectual freedom. “It is when he is acting like everyone else that he feels most reasonable . . . it is in displaying his conformism that he feels freest.” [8] As such, by assisting in naturalizing the social coherence of imperial topography, the purveyors of this literature of average situations fundamentally veil the lived experience of coloniality in the Raw through their work.

And yet, at the café there are no veils between the watchdogs of established power and the everyday people they hold in such contempt. The condensed plentitude of intersubjective resonance within the café can even mediate against the disdain of these imperial eunuchs by ultimately condemning them to a Sartrean ‘hell of other people’ as an inescapable gaze and constant reminder that their privileged relation to established power exists only at the lived expense of the wretched of the earth.

For what is a café, if not a canopy towards sheltering all manner of human subjectivity through the very possibility of dialogue, no matter how banal, poignant, elevated or contentious? And is not the Ronin, by interrogating the Real and enunciating Revolt through literary praxis, involved in an intensive dialogue within a metaphysical circumference of philosophical contemporaries, discursive precursors, potential readers and hostile public?

No doubt, for even by doing no more than effectively serving coffee and tea in a timely, pragmatic and utilitarian manner, housed within an atmosphere that encourages intersubjective resonance, the café enables a qualitative spontaneity of informal dialogue and intentionality of unabridged reflection as lived potentialities of intellectual endeavor accessible to everyday people, and thus infinitely suitable to the intellectually engaged temperament of the Ronin.

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? and Other Essays, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988) p.23.

[2] Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2004) p.123.

[3] Sartre, p.214

[4] Sartre, p.164

[5] Cornel West, “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual”, included in bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, (Boston, South End Press, 1991) p.131.

[6] Enricco Malatesta, At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism, (Freedom Press, 1922, 2005).

[7] Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing”, included in Richard Wright Reader edited by Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre, (New York, Da Capo Press, 1937, 1997) p.49.

[8] Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, (New York, Collier Books, 1945, 1962) p.108.