Some Notes on the Phenomenology of the Starbucks

It is often said that certain places are all the same. One of the unashamedly (non)-distinguishing features of a place like Starbucks is that it remains the same despite its spatial location. Orientation and continuity are afforded in a foreign city by knowing what qualities imbue the coffee house in advance. Against the backdrop of unfamiliarity, familiarity is conceived as the indissoluble motifs and identical pastel colours of Starbucks are encountered. In such a situation, we can pretend to be anywhere whilst simultaneously being somewhere.

So long as the outside remains excluded, then Starbucks thus aspires to universality in its interior spatiality. Avoiding an indeterminate idiosyncrasy, which would harbour a discontinuity between individual stores, (though being careful not to sacrifice the impression of being inviting and moreover localized), Starbucks thus falls from a particularized distinctiveness. Instead, it fulfils Edward Casey’s definition of site as “having no internal differentiations with respect to material constitution” and so “levelled down to the point of being definable solely in terms of distances between ‘positions’ which are established on its surface and which exist strictly in relation to one another.” That they are often confused with one another only emphasizes their supposed vacuity and so reinforces their presence, not as a place, but as a site. Yet, despite this vacuity, must their capacity to retain, enhance and sustain memory be undermined?


The resistance against homogeneous site (partly Augé’s non-place, partly Foucault’s ‘other space’) is invariably bound with the apparent conflict between spatial variation and mass produced space. This is embodied in the myth of Simonides. In a labyrinth, very little is remembered and disorientation is gained as one dead end meets another. Further, a place which fails to house obvious distinctions will lost sequentiality and instead promote uniformity. That uniformity lessens the potential for memorability is logical insofar as memorable place relies on “distinct potencies” to preserve memory. A multiplicity of diverse attributes might well furnish a place with the means to house memory (Bachelard: “if the house is a bit elaborate…our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.”), but this does not entail that an indistinct location is incapable of housing memories.

Casey speaks of ‘points of attachments’. This is how place becomes the vessel for memories. The “efficacious cues for remembering”, manifest themselves as particular features which counter the inanimate half-life status of the site. Thus: site – I prefer to think in terms of a parking lot – becomes place through the imposition of definite features on it. It is, as it were, a subtraction (or negation) of site which implicates place. A characterful site is an intimate one which allows us to be familiar with it. The standardization of Starbucks withdraws its placelessness (homliness tends to evade it) only through a partial or complete destruction of what constitutes that standardization. In the meantime, it remains uncanny. A site which aspires to ‘enforced inclusion’ necessarily falters. But in the aspiration, an ersatz sense of home is conceived. Points of attachment, however, need not be involved in a rhetoric of presence. To think otherwise is dogma. Casey, for instance, is keen to suggest that only individuation constitutes a presence in its own right. Site disproves this as the leveling down of variegation constitutes a presence of its own. In short, diversity is often a negation not only an addition. Often, it is the emptiest vessel which proves most fertile in terms of remembrance.