Aesthetic and Affective Experiences in Coffee Shops: A Deweyan Engagement with Ordinary Affects in Ordinary Spaces

Abstract:Can everyday spaces, such as coffee shops bustling with rapid activity, promise an aesthetic experience that remains untapped and undertheorized? If so, what kinds of communicative habits make the coffee shop experience aesthetically wholesome? To this end, I engage and extend American pragmatist John Dewey’s mission of recovering aesthetic experiences in habituated processes of living in his Art as Experience and interweave it with contemporary thought on affective experiences in ordinary activities. Ultimately, I present coffee shops as exemplars of everyday third spaces (spaces other than home and work) promising the qualitative immediacy of artful, affectively rich and embodied communicative experiences.