We're All Starbuck*:The Barista as Worker and Cultural figure

The Double Shift had its moment on Brooklyn Coffee Shop 

 My first job, my first real job, was barista. Before that I had babysat, and done a bunch of odd jobs around the daycare center my mother ran, painting, assembling cots, making meals, which involved a lot of fish sticks and mac and cheese. I worked at Arabica: Coffee and Tea on Shaker Square (otherwise known as Chic-abica) during high school and on breaks during my first few years of college. This was before Starbucks came to Cleveland,  and thus before fancy coffee drinks went mainstream. While Arabica offered all of the espresso drinks, cappuccinos, mochas, lattes, etc., as well as various roast coffees from around the world, our average customer did not know about many of those things, and just wanted a "regular coffee." (which meant they got a medium roast coffee in a medium cup). Iced Mochas were popular though, basically as close as you could get to a milkshake without admitting that you were drinking a milkshake. I was a barista before coffee became the beverage that it is now. More importantly, I was a barista before a barista became a representation of work and a cultural figure.

What does it mean to say that the baristas is both a representation of work and a cultural figure? Here I am going to rehash a point I made initially in this blog, and later in The Double Shift. Work is said in many senses, there are multiple different things that people do as wage labor, from growing carrots to being the voice of a carrot in an animated television series. This multiplicity of different activities, and different people exceeds representation. It is impossible to picture work, but we do picture it all of the time, and, more to the point, that picture is often dominated by a particular figure, a particular image of work. These particular images can be images of valorization, mystification, or even alienation. To take a few examples, in the latter half of the twentieth century the hard hat, and with it, the construction worker became symbolic of the reality and difficulty of work. As Melinda Cooper has argued, Nixon and Reagan used this figure to not only exclude different people from the image of work, women, and anyone who was not white, but to make the worker appear to be someone closer to a capitalist, exploiting the porous divide between construction worker as wage worker and construction worker as independent contractor. In the nineties the cubicle worker became the general figure of alienation (particular the temp worker). These particular images of work are situated at the intersection of technological and economic changes of the nature of work, and political strategies of either cooptation (the hard hat as a worker/capitalist) or contestation (the cubicle as a figure of alienation). There is a kind of composition of the image of the worker that is not distinct from class composition. 

We are living now in the age of the barista. The barista is a strange figure for work, since as a service job, one primarily staffed by women, it often appears as "not real work." It is often placed against the other images, the hard hat and the cubicle, to point out how inessential its products are, and how easy the actual work supposedly is. That service work is not real work is not some new idea, hatched by online trolls. The history of wage labor is not one of a universal condition, the wage laborer but of a hierarchies of who gets to count as a real worker. The contested status of the barista is only the recent articulation of this hierarchy with its corresponding gender and racial hierarchies. 

How has barista become our figure of the worker? What are the technological, economic, and economic forces that have made the barista our image of work? First, there is the general predominance of service work, and with it emotional labor. This tendency explains some of the ambivalence toward the barista. Emotional labor, the performance of friendliness, happiness, and care, is fundamentally confusing for at least some customers. As a student in my politics of work class put it years ago (hence the dated reference) "check the missed connections on Craigslist, half of them are people who cannot distinguish friendliness from flirting." The anger that particular sections of the extremely online right has for baristas, suggest that this confusion creates a great deal of resentment. More importantly, such work is exhausting, and alienating for the one doing it. As Francesca Coin argues, service workers are one of the driving forces for the "great resignation" especially since Covid revealed the huge gap between the care they were supposed to demonstrate and the care that they given by employers. Starbucks, and coffee places in general, have also been at the focus of many of the union organizing drives that have emerged since Covid. 

Second, we can situate the figure of barista, and Starbucks in particular between two general trends; first, the expansion of the brand itself, which made espresso drinks, different roasts, and different types of bean mainstream, and, with that, the way that has made the itself brand almost synonymous with a kind of third space, a place that is neither work nor home, just as such spaces are disappearing. Starbucks is not just a particular brand, a particular coffee place, but metonymically stands in for an actual public place, for the public sphere, where people can interact. This is perhaps why it has become the space of a hyperpolitics that is usually reserved for online spaces, in which every holiday, movie, or event elicits some kind of symbolic political activity, such as hashtags, little flag emojis, or blacked out profile pictures. In Starbucks is is the names on the drink order that have become hyperpolitical, become the place for everything from union organizing to memorializing Charlie Kirk. It seems that every issue, from open carry to black lives matter eventually finds itself in Starbucks. Forget about a soapbox, the blank space on a Starbucks cup is what remains of our public square. 

The combinations of the ambiguities of emotional labor, hyperpoliticization, and the collapse of third spaces have made the barista not just an image of work but a figure of politics as well. We could argue that these two sides reflect the dominant, service work, or work involving relating to people, as the dominant form of work for many in the US and other so-called developed countries, and the emergent, the hyperpolitcs that intertwines brands, identities, and symbolic gestures, or to use the terms of the video above, "performative." There is a residual element of the barista as well, to complete Raymond Williams three terms for grasping a conjuncture. The barista is also, oddly enough, the last remnant of the cultural gatekeeper jobs, like the video store, and record store clerk. I know that this is odd to say since the last two actually did the work of literal gatekeeping, telling people about movies and music, or judging their choices. It is not so much that the barista does that, introduces people to new beverages or judges people for ordering a café macchiato in a to go cup (that is an Arabic reference). It is more that the barista, or at least its image, is the place of intersection between two different economies, what we think of as the standard economy of money that allows one to afford a daily ten dollar drink and an economy of cool. This is why the figure of the barista always comes with blue hair, tattoos, and pronouns, she, or rather they, are considered to a representation, or remnant, of some kind of bohemia. A waiter or waitress is supposed to more or less lose themselves in the job, in the service they provide, so much so that what they do outside of it is more or less unthinkable, but a barista is supposed to be someone who does something else, they are in band, make art, or write poetry. When I worked at Arabica this image was cultivated by the coffee shop itself, which held poetry readings, and hung art by baristas. A barista has a life outside of their job, and that is part of what makes their job such a figure of controversy. 

Videoheaven (which as of this writing is still streaming on the Criterion Channel has some great observations on the video store clerk

Brooklyn Coffee Shop, the online comedy series on which The Double Shift made an appearance, doubles down on the gatekeeping and cool aspect of the job, Brooklyn functions as a modifier to make it clear that we are dealing with a hip place. Its two baristas, Thyme (played by Pooja Tripathi) and Cale (played by Darryl Gene Daughtry Jr) are self-parodies of cool, they gatekeep everything and everyone. It is worth pointing out that while the video store clerk has many cinematic and television images (just see Videoheaven) and the record store has High Fidelity (both the film and series), the barista became a cultural figure without a dominant representation in popular culture until now. Until Brooklyn Coffee shop came along there has been no movie or television show focusing on the barista (but I could be missing something). 

 

Of course the other figures of cool, the video store clerk and record store clerk are both more or less extinct, washed away in the icy waters of streaming services. The barista is still there, but barely holding on against the replacement of social spaces by apps. Thus, to complete the overdetermined image of the barista is to situate the figure at the intersection of the transformation of not just the transformation of work, but also the transformation of political and social space. The barista is both a figure of the service economy, and of what remains of publicness, of social relations as the latter is fragmented into so many apps. I am not sure I have a conclusion here, but I am reminded of the passage from Marx, central to The Double Shift, where he discusses the intersection between transformations of work and politics. I will end with that, It is what Thyme and Cale would want based on their reading list. As Marx writes in that passage, 

"The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of production to the immediate producers—a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power—in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of the state in each case."

All of this which might be a long way of saying, all those jokes about baristas not really working, and all of those attempts to get one's politics recognized on a coffee cup, might tell us more about where we are economically and politically than we might think, so tip your barista generously, it is tough to work in "the hidden basis of the entire social edifice," to be an overdetermined figure at the intersection of post-industrial austerity and the structural collapse of the public sphere. 

*= I decided to go with a Moby Dick reference, but in the manner of C.L.R James, where we are all onboard the Pequod which is doomed capitalism.