For some strange reason, 'public houses' or 'pubs' are sort of hidden secrets in the history of philosophy. Endless pages have been written about how cafés and coffee houses historically has functioned as thinking spaces facilitating, fascinating, and inspiring the work of artists, thinkers, and writers (1). For this reason, they have been constituted as central institutions to intellectual history, not least in Europe, places that were both written in and written about. Even if sociologists for long have been interested in pub culture, then at least to some degree, pubs do not seem to have been given the same general intellectual attention (2). This lack of attention is an oddity - not least if we take into consideration the social function pubs have had historically, and that they continue to have.
But first a step back. The history of public houses can be traced back to Roman Britain tavernas, but the term itself only first appeared in the late 17th century to distinguish public ale houses, inns, and tavernas from private clubs and establishments. However, it was only in the 19th century that the pub as we know it today appeared, becoming a focal community meeting point of social interaction. As indicated, opposed to private clubs, these places were open to the wider public, and is often referred to as a place where people from different classes, races, genders etc. could meet, mingle and interact. In other words, a space, a place, where the different parts of society and the public were represented.
But the story goes further than that. As Jurgen Habermas established in his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), it's not only that cafés and coffee houses were places where an already existing 'public' could meet and discuss. Instead, performatively, these spaces were crucial for the very public sphere to evolve or come into existence. There is no question pubs play a similar role It's not only that such places host already given publics - instead, they are vital for the construction of such publics, for establishing a 'public life', and for the creation of public spheres. They remain "third places", in Ray Oldenburg's sense of the term, places between home and work, between kinship and labour, that allows for the emergence and negotiation of a certain
'sense' of life in public.
Here we reach the core of what pubs are and what they do. Of course, pubs are places of somewhat frivolous behaviour, of surprising bodily encounters, of cry and laughter, of joy and sorrow, of drinking, dancing and daring. They are places where you grow up, you grow old, you grow cross-eyed, whilst time-travelling with your friends ("Do you remember when we ..."? or "Let's definitely do that that!"). But whilst being so, most importantly and generally, they are places that sensibilizes you to public life - even when you have lost all your senses, and when it all doesn't make sense anymore! - and that, through this creates the possibility of public existence, both individually and collectively.
For this reason, one can neither underestimate the important function of the pubs as social institutions - and neither can we neglect pubs as spaces deserving detailed artistic and intellectual attention. Again, as places where you both sensitize and negotiate (the limits of) what it means to be amongst others, they are crucial for maintaining a mode of collective life that we cannot take for granted, as Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man (1977) warned us, even before the poisonous, hyper-individualizing project of neoliberalism really took off.
Therefore, we should also worry when public houses today are declining and disappearing - and we should celebrate, when artists take on their shoulders to investigate their many nuances, as Peter Doyle does in this fascinating series of paintings. How do these sensibilization-processes unfold, how is public existence portrayed, performed, perceived and put together? Or, to use a metaphor from painting, how is it composed? This remains a crucial question for both art and theory, at a moment where publics appear more polarized or fragmented than ever before - and hence the importance of Doyle's artistic exploration here, and its ode to life in public.
- Nikolaj Schultz, May 2025
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1 See e.g. Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine & Jeffrey H. Jackson (2013) (Eds.) The Thinking Space. The Café as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy and Vienna, London: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
2 See Guillot, Apolline (2021) "The Philosophy of Pubs", The Philonomist.
