Coffee and Commodities
I love coffee. I love the sweet, bitter, and acidic notes mixed together in perfect harmony with a dollop of cream or milk. I love its aroma on rainy mornings mingling with the smell of wet asphalt from a midnight rain. But, perhaps most of all, I love everything about and around coffee – anything tangential or adjacent to this alluring substance. Indeed, my love for this commodity is inextricably tied to numerous other experiences – watching Premier League football, reading James Joyce, and chatting with friends and family about nothing in particular. For this reason, I have turned to contemporary philosophy’s enfant terrible Slavoj Žižek and his theory of caffeine-free, diet Coke as the embodiment of Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a.
A brief disclaimer: much of Žižek and Lacan’s work remains unintelligible to me. Yes, even after four years of liberal arts study, I still struggle to comprehend what Lacan means when he says that the square root of negative one equals a phallus. But, for the sake of this blog’s survival, I will try my best to paraphrase Žižek’s argument for why caffeine-free diet Coke embodies Lacan’s objet petit a. According to Žižek, neither taste nor nutritional value accounts for why we consume caffeine-free diet Coke – any ostensible nutritional value being suspended and its key taste-marker, caffeine, being removed. Instead, what accounts for our fascination with this commodity is not its use-value but, per Lacan, its surplus-value of enjoyment. Indeed, paradoxically, drinking diet Coke only fuels our desire for more and never truly quenches our thirst. Ultimately, Coca-Cola’s slogan, “Coke is it!” rings true for Žižek because it signifies jouissance – that ecstatic pleasure unmatched by quotidian enjoyment.
For me, coffee occupies a similar position as the object of pure happiness which ultimately leaves me craving more rather than entirely satiated. Additionally, coffee offers me the further utility of being able to keep one foot firmly planted in the bourgeoisie and the other firmly planted in the proletariat. On mornings where I’m longing for the purity of blue-collar labor, I will drink my coffee black and reminisce about commercial salmon-fishing in Alaska. And on other mornings where I desire the dark academic aesthetic of The Secret History, I might put a dollop of oat milk in my cup. In both instances, what compels my consumption is not the drink itself but the correlative experience.
Marx’s commodity fetishism is perhaps useful to combine these seemingly disparate strands of java-centered analysis. Marx argued that we mistakenly view value as intrinsic to certain commodities without recognizing the labor that conferred value on the product in the first place. For example, how often do people admire expensive diamonds in jewelry stores without thinking about the labor exploitation that went into harvesting these precious gems. From now on, perhaps I should remember the labor went into preparing my morning cup of joe. In any case, coffee is it!
