cafe theory

I am sick and tired of cafe theory. How about that for an assertive start? In fact what I get tired of, are the attempts to view the cafe, or usually the coffee-house, as a pivotal social institution in the development of modernity in Europe. I don't mean that it wasn't important - those who read Jurgen Habermas on the cafe, or who read Carl Schorske's work on Viennese coffee-houses, certainly are right that they played a role in creating political and aesthetic meeting-points. I just mean that the cafe risks being turned into an abstraction, in that nice cloud of verbiage. What strikes me about Parisian cafes, is just how diverse they are, and how the behavior people display in them runs over the limits of community center, political center, and so on... they remind me of just how fragile and limited our academic "maps" of these social spaces can be. So far, I've watched people complete Sudoku puzzles, make out, read books, type on laptops, greet friends, give tourists directions, get drunk, get high on caffeine - perhaps the only generalizations possible, is that people tend to know each other in the smaller cafes, not to know each other in the larger ones, and that they tend to use them like living rooms, for everything they don't have the space or inclination to do at home.

Just speculating for a moment: might one of the differences between the American and the French cafe, be that the French version has a more established place in the local culture, and is thus a less anxiety-provoking topic for the French than for the Americans, who worry when Starbucks encroaches on their territory?