THIRD PLACES: GENEALOGY OF А HETEROTOPIA IN CIVIL SOCIETY
Text topic: Tavern: That Magnificent Third Place
- genealogy
Text author: Душан Маринковић, Душан Ристић и Лада Маринковић
The subject of research in this paper is coffee houses as third places. They are approached and defined from the sociological and the genealogical perspective. When observed as a spatialized history of places, genealogy provides an adequate theoretical and methodological framework for this research. The main task of such genealogy is to research the spatialization of a certain type of sociability and social capital in civil society. We have indicated broader social and historical circumstances in the genesis and development of third places as well as their contribution in the processes of developing a new type of sociability and public reasoning. The rise of coffee houses through history is contextualized: within the framework of a new type of critical public as opposed to the representative public; within the process of division between the private and public domain; as a kind of undifferentiated space/discontinuity/heterotopia that, in the social geography of the civil society, stands vis-à-vis the existing social stratums and the future spatial and class division. In conclusion we claim that, although the third places were privileged social spaces, they were not the only or fundamental places important for the genesis of rational discourse. However, third places were of key importance in the processes of forming urban institutes, development of public spaces, public speech, civil liberties and legitimacy of rationality in the societies of Western Europe.