1 What Makes Life âRealâ?
âSociety has a center. There is a central zone in the structure of societyâ â so begins Shilsâs famous 1961 essay on center and periphery. Shils argues that centrality is tied to sacredness: the central is central precisely because it is close to the values that the society holds sacred. In this chapter, we discuss an opposite case: in the public discourse of contemporary Czech society, The Prague Café has become a familiar reference to the polluted, profane center from the sacralized periphery. Used heavily by populist, anti-elitist politicians but also adopted by media and understood by audiences across the country, the term has become shorthand for cultural and intellectual elites whose beliefs and interests are seen as opposed to those of the common working man.
In todayâs European countries, this is not an infrequent pattern. The political tensions between centers and peripheries have been discussed by a number of scholars (for example, Borras; Cramer; Wuthnow), and the ârevenge of the peripheryâ has become one of the key interpretative schemes for the surge of populist parties and movements (Dijkstra et al.; RodrÃguez-Pose). In the Prague Café case, however, we look beyond populist politics. We argue that, in the discourse, the key element that separates the anti-civil Prague Café from the sacred civil values of the periphery is its relationship to real life. The urban elites of the Prague Café are perceived to be out of touch with real life, while people who live in rural areas or outside of the metropolis are portrayed as
In this chapter, we provide a cultural sociological analysis of what the realness in real life stands for in the relationship between center and periphery in the Czech Republic. The analysis contributes to the ongoing debates on the spectralization of the rural, as it unpacks the taken-for-granted categories that uphold the hegemonic ânaturalnessâ of rural life. Drawing on literature on center and periphery, on anti-urbanism, and on cultural sociology, we analyze the countryâs media discourse about the Prague Café and identify its key roots in the social imaginaries of modernity. Above all, these include the ability to overcome resistance to the external world and to act autonomously in accordance with oneâs own ratio and experience.
2 Center and Periphery: Social Boundaries in Space and Symbolic Boundaries in Culture
The relationship between centers and peripheries can be described as an interplay between social boundaries set in space and culturally defined symbolic boundaries (Lamont and Molnár). Rokkan argues that, in all European countries, the nation-building process yielded a center-periphery tension between the capital region and peripheral regions, and that this tension was key in the formation of the political system. Jennings and Stoker, moreover, assert that there is a divide between citizens residing in locations that are strongly connected to global growth and those residing in locations that are not. This spatial divide is reflected in the values held: those living apart from the centers hold different values and might feel left out of the political vision for the state (Jennings and Stoker).
Peripheries, and rural peripheries in particular, have been a subject of much recent interest for social science scholars. RodrÃguez-Pose points out the power disbalance between centers and peripheries, arguing that peripheries have become perceived as âplaces that donât matter,â resulting in disappointment, distrust, and protest behavior. In a study of rural Wisconsin, Cramer refers to ârural consciousnessâ as an âidentity as a rural person that includes much more than an attachment to placeâ (17). She adds: âIt includes a sense that decision-makers routinely ignore rural places and fail to give rural
Along with social boundaries, symbolic boundaries play a key role in drawing the line between center and periphery. Shils argues that the center is not a spatial phenomenon, defining it instead as the place of political action and sole holder of the sacred central values and beliefs. These values and beliefs are represented and defined by central elites and institutions, which are perceived as custodians who should uphold societyâs sacred values (Shils 119). The stronger the authority is in a given system, the more its central values and beliefs are imposed onto peoplesâ everyday lives. Once we move away (symbolically) from the center, the appreciation for the authority starts to decrease â to a point where tensions between center and periphery start to arise. However, the periphery does not possess the power of political action (Shils 126) and this feeling of powerlessness leads to a feeling of exclusion from the central system and its values.
3 The Periphery and Anti-urbanism
The resentment peripheries hold against urban centers has historically been expressed in various forms of anti-urbanism. In its canonical form, established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anti-urban sentiments were not aimed at the urban form itself but at the social relations that cities represented: these included ruthlessness, indifference, anonymity, and instrumentality, as summarized in Simmelâs classic figure of the blasé urbanite. In Europe, this view was rooted in the Romantic tradition and in Rousseauâs thoughts on the corruption of urban life. In the US, nineteenth-century thinkers like Thoreau and Emerson popularized the idea of a retreat from polluted urban life to pure, sacred nature and countryside. In both cases, against the backdrop of rapid and chaotic urbanization, a set of binary distinctions emerged (Horgan), contrasting the moral values of the city (indifference, competition, loneliness, ruthlessness, cynicism, etc.) with those of the country (care, cooperation, community, solidarity, sincerity, etc.), with the latter distanced both spatially (out of the city) and temporally (in the past). The metaphor of Babel has repeatedly been invoked (Hummon; Lévy) to refer to the moral shortcomings of the urban population: their pride, confusion, and hubris. Here is Siegfried Kracauer:
The individuals of the big city streets have no sense of transcendence, they are only outer appearance, like the street itself, on which so much
is going on without anything really happening. The swirl of the characters resembles the whirl of atoms: they do not meet, but rather bump up against each other, they drift apart without separating. Instead of living connected with things, they sink down to inanimate objects: to the level of automobiles, walls, neon lights, irrespective of time, flashing on and off. Instead of filling space, they follow their own path in the waste-land. Instead of communicating through language, they leave unsaid what might bring them together or pull them apart. Love is copulation, murder is accident, and tragedy never occurs. A wordless and soulless coexistence of directed automobiles and undirected desires ⦠(qtd. in Kaes 187)
While this moral anti-urbanism has not died out, it has recently merged with a new wave of protest from the peripheries against the centers. Following the 2016 Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as president, The Guardian published an oft-quoted commentary titled âFrom Trump to Brexit, Power Has Leaked from Cities to the Countrysideâ (Beckett). The voting in the UK and US has been described as a protest of rural peripheries against urban centers (Wuthnow), and election maps in many countries of the Global North show a familiar pattern: large cities painted in one color, and the rest of the country in another. Together with the perception of rural life as more authentic (Bosma and Peeren), anti-urban sentiments have activated a defensive reaction (Bell): the rural is seen as vulnerable and threatened by the arrogance, disdain, and power interests of urban elites. These elites are seen as alienated and incompetent (PospÄch 2021), yet at the same time powerful enough to wreak havoc on the rural hinterlands, where true values are stored and maintained.
Anti-urban ideologies and sentiments denounce the artificial, alienated life of the city and sacralize the realness of life in rural areas: Recently, the notion of real life has been unpacked by Norquist, who studies the proliferation of anti-tech discourses that decry technology as âsomething other than real life.â Norquistâs observations on the meaning of realness in anti-tech discourses are related to those in anti-urbanism, but there are also important differences. The anti-tech discourses refer to a life mediated by technology as inauthentic because mediation disrupts the link between the self and the world. In anti-urban discourses, this link is considered to be disrupted by a number of different factors, including the corrupting influence of money and power (Conn and Stillwell; Slater). The mediated relationship produces socially incompetent, awkward people, the anti-tech discourse says. The urbanites of the anti-urban discourses are, in many ways, the opposite: highly socially competent, slick,
This may sound strange. Are anti-urban discourses suggesting that urban people have given up on their true selves? How so? Arenât city bookstores filled with books on how to find your true self? Arenât there expensive courses and seminars that promise to help city people find their own, individual and unalienated way of life? Indeed, there are, but the problem lies elsewhere: in The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch observes that the narcissist is constantly in the process of searching â but wherever she goes in her search, she always finds only herself. In their travels, in their work, in their desire for adventure, urban narcissists are not encountering the outer âreal world.â Rather, they are trapped in a never-ending inner search for their selves. A rural farmer will plough the field because the fields need ploughing. It doesnât matter who does the job; the seasons have turned, and the job must be done. An urban gardener, on the other hand, will keep her garden according to her own personal preferences: traditional garden, Asian-style or permaculture? The urban garden is an empty page, waiting to be filled by the image of its owner. It doesnât demand anything itself: it is there to express the urban self, to show urbanites who they really are.
There is an implicit anti-urbanist (and anti-elitist) take in Laschâs work: the farmerâs field is real because it has its own demands and its own logic of the vocation â the Weberian Beruf â that one must respect. The urbaniteâs garden is not real because it serves as a clothing rack for its ownerâs ego. In anti-urban discourses, city dwellers are full of themselves and of their egos. And where else in the Czech Republic would you find more bloated egos than in the countryâs capital â Prague?
4 Against the Center: the Prague Café
In the Czech Republic, the term âPrague Caféâ became a popular designation for an imaginary group: the countryâs elite with high levels of education and cultural capital. The underlying idea is that these people have a lot of free time â perhaps too much of it â which they use to have discussions in the expensive cafés of Prague. The term was popularized by the countryâs populist ex-president, MiloÅ¡ Zeman, during his presidential tenure between 2013 and 2023, but it has a longer history. The first known references to the Prague Café date as far back as 1933, when the Czech conservative magazine Venkov complained about the cultural patterns âwhich grew out of Prague Cafésâ and led the left-leaning youth away from âreal problems of the nation and the stateâ
We want to raise the levels of awareness of the workers. In every factory, we have workers who are aware and those who are indifferent. The latter need to be made aware. However, there are also notorious fluctuants in the factories, who are not better than elements from cafés and who must be dealt with. We must see where parasitism begins.
(Tabery n. pag.)
After the post-war period, the term largely faded away from public discussion, only to be rediscovered after 2010 by those whose political careers were based on fueling the resentment of the peripheries towards urban centers. From these populist circles, the term has entered the countryâs media as a popular designation for an affluent, educated, out-of-touch elite.
We will argue that the critique of this elite is strongly tied to the popular notion of real life. To do so, we will use the tools of cultural sociology (Alexander 2011). Cultural sociology is interested in examining how cultural practices and meanings emerge within public discourses and what hidden underlying structures can be found within such discourses as the one on real life. The key setting for public discourses is the civil sphere, a space of solidarity which is essential for maintaining democratic societies (Alexander 2006). In this sphere, the community is culturally defined, with this definition resting on an underlying binary structure of the civil (good, sacred) versus the uncivil (bad, profane). In the case of the Prague Café, we can see a reversal of the symbolic boundary observed by Shils. Instead of representing sacredness, the center, represented by the Prague Café, stands for the profane, the polluted, and the anti-civil. The argument against the Prague Café is moral and its key element is its lack of anchoring in real life. The Prague Café refers to a life which is, in a fundamental sense, not real, and therefore not deserving of recognition in terms of the values of civility. Life in the rural periphery, away from the Prague Café, is, on the
To understand the idea of real life from the point of view of the wielders of the anti-urbanist discourse, we have studied the underlying meanings of the Prague Café as a concept which helps people make sense of the world in which they live. To do so, we analyzed over 400 news articles and TV broadcasts that referred to the âPrague Caféâ, collected using the Newton Media database. We looked at articles published between 2010 and 2023 as it was around 2010 that the term started to become strongly present in public discourse. Our dataset was comprised of articles from a wide range of Czech media outlets and news websites, and we selected these articles based on the relevance score generated by the database. Due to the nature of the political interests fueling the anti-elitarian narrative, populist-leaning media, like the online daily Parlamentnà listy, are overrepresented in the dataset.
5 Analysis
Underlying the qualities attached to the pure periphery and to the polluted center is a core distinction between the real and the unreal. Thus, the main question addressed in our analysis concerns the manifestation of reality and unreality: What is understood as âreal lifeâ and what is it that makes rural life âreal,â as opposed to the âunrealâ world of the Prague Café?
Real work is hard and tangible. The dichotomy between real work and pseudo-work is an oft-repeated motif. The Prague Café is associated with lazy good-for-nothings who do not understand real work and spend their time discussing utopias. Here is a prominent anti-EU commentator, writing for a widely read online tabloid:
Some naive individuals from the Prague café expect that eventually normal work will be completely eradicated, everything will be produced in computer-controlled 3D printers, and everyone will just repeat euro-optimistic phrases in hipster centers.1
Real knowledge is lived, not learned. Realness comes from first-hand experience. When referring to the former mayor of Prague, Adriana KrnáÄová, an author claims that she âhas spent her entire life in non-profit organizations, [and] came to Prague only because it was easier to find large sums of money here.â5 NGO s are considered out of touch with reality, and working for them is equated to not having the real-life experience of suffering, as is the worry-free life of academia. This quality of being out of touch is identified in the speeches and texts produced by members of the Prague Café: âtheir articles often seem to me like they are from a different planet, like the writings of diligent students or some Kafkaesque officials who, in an impregnable office, create certain blueprints for a fictional, better world.â6 The experience of people from the
Realness of experience is, implicitly but necessarily, connected to the experience of deprivation in the under-serviced periphery: âIn snow, in rain, in blizzard, they wait for the only bus that will get them to work or to school.â7 This association of real experience with lacking services underpins a discourse of societal polarization. The common-sense stereotype of the spoilt younger generation appears against this background when an author suggests that young peopleâs eligibility to vote should not start at 18, but only after having completed five years of âreal work.â8 He rethinks his suggestion subsequently, pointing out that he knows a lot of young people who âeven at their age, got a good beating from life, and they had the chance to find out what itâs about.â
Real language is iconic, rather than symbolic. It unites people and doesnât divide them. âCalling a spade a spadeâ has become a rallying cry for populist politicians worldwide, and the anti-elitist discourse of real life incorporates it. Real language is not clouded in opaque symbolism. Rather, it speaks directly and clearly. Unreal language is symbolic, euphuistic, intricate, and, above all, empty. References to âempty wordsâ and âempty phrasesâ abound in the discourse on the Prague Café. What is empty cannot have any value: âIntellectual empty talk doesnât buy you a liter of diesel of a kilogram of pork.â9 The distinction between real and unreal language also serves another function: through language, one can discern between what is ours and what is foreign. This opens the door to attacks on imported â and, therefore, unreal â language structures:
For all their seriousness, âWestern snobberyâ and âpolitical correctnessâ appear ridiculous to us. Importing âWestern standardsâ often ends up in a farce. However, these developments have seen some success after all: the bearers of this success are the Prague Café. But attempts to spread this (philosophy) to the whole country donât work.10
Real language also plays an important social role. It serves to unite people, rather than divide them. Miloš Zeman, the populist former president, is lauded
These are the people who bring constant discord, criticism, and negative emotions among others, all the while being convinced that they are superior to everyone else. So, they are deniers of democracy, who divide democratically equal citizens.12
âInstead of coming together, cooperating, helping, and improving the country, they prioritize disputes, hatred, inventing obstacles and problems,â an author complains about the Prague Café.13 Language that is considered real thus plays a constitutive role in the social drama of the civil sphere as uniting people. Unreal language, on the contrary, plays the role of the villain in the social drama (Smith and Howe): it sets people apart from each other and breaks down solidarity.
Real life is not just about you. In their relationship to their collective self, the people of the Prague Café embody what Lasch calls the narcissistic personality. These people have âtheir arguments and their cliques,â14 and are obsessed with themselves only.15 Variously described as self-centered, attention-seeking, and egoistic, they live in a world which appears very real to them, but which becomes laughably unreal when seen from the periphery. Like the narcissist who encounters himself wherever he goes, those in the Prague Café make everything about themselves. The world they inhabit is so thoroughly separated from reality that they lack any other measure apart from themselves. Living in a world populated by images of themselves, members of the Prague
Real values are in decline. The anti-urban discourse of the Prague Café, and the anti-tech discourse studied by Norquist share an underlying civilizational pessimism. Wherever one looks, the real is oppressed by the unreal: its values, its beliefs, its relationships. This constant feeling of oppression is personified in the dramatic figure of the dissident, a historically important one for the Czechs,18 which, however, has been rhetorically hijacked by populist politicians of the left and right. What links this figure with the anti-urban discourse of the Prague Café is a concern about the decline of the real world:
But who is it bad for? Simply for nihilists raised in a valueless environment under the influence of nihilistic ideologies prevalent in todayâs ideological mainstream. Simply for the âPrague caféâ crowd.19
The thoughts and ideals of the Prague Café are seen as prevailing in the âideological mainstreamâ â meaning in the symbolic city center, the center of power (Dietz). The people in the periphery do not possess a great deal of power but they know what real values are and they can rationally approach and solve problems and solutions that the elites from the Prague Café spend months pondering with no real solution in sight. As rational people, they feel that the real world is under threat from all sides: âThe problem is that if a personâs brain starts functioning and they begin to process and compare facts normally, such an individual becomes completely lost in the hipster-corporate-correct world.â20 The skepticism towards current developments thus provokes nostalgia for real values, which are seen as in decline. This nostalgia attaches itself easily to rurality, perceived as representing the better past, compared to the questionable future (PospÄch 2014).
6
Our analysis has shown that people use realness and unrealness to make sense of the perceived split between the elitist center and the lagging periphery. There is real work and unreal work, just as there is real knowledge and unreal knowledge, and real language and unreal language. These distinctions are not ontologically valid, but they are meaningful for their users, allowing the latter to make sense of the world in a way that assigns them superiority. In cultural sociological terms (Alexander 2006), there is a deep binary opposition underlying the discourses about the Prague Café, separating the real from the unreal in a strongly valuated hierarchy.
Alexander argues that underlying binary structures are intrinsic to every civil society. The real-unreal distinction might be observed in different social contexts, such as the anti-tech discourse (Norquist) or the current conflicts surrounding social movements against climate change: climate anxiety, for one, is an example of an emotion often not considered âreal enoughâ by anti-environmentalists. Here, ârealnessâ is subject to a socially approved legitimacy: some emotions are ârealâ because they are considered legitimate, while others are not (Durnová). In the case of the Prague Café, the factors which are asserted to make something real are more diverse: physical tangibility, first-hand experience, but also the ability to bring people together rather than set them apart. Is there anything that provides a common background to all these ascriptions of reality?
One suggestion comes from Hanâs work on virtual worlds: for Han, the unrealness of virtual experience lies in its easiness. What is real, on the other hand, is never easy. Real life resists. This appears to be the case, too, for real work and real experience as conceived within the Prague Café discourse: overcoming resistance is a criterion for realness, as long as the resistance is provided by an object. A narcissistic resistance â such as when two cliques of the Prague Café argue about their made-up problems â does not count. To confer reality, resistance must come from an external object. Such a perspective covers some of the notions of realness employed in the Prague Café discourse, and it also links the discourse to power dynamics, by invoking a variant of the Hegelian dialectics of the master and the slave: while the slave achieves self-consciousness through his contact with the external world, and through overcoming the resistance of the latter, the master, whose life depends on the work of the slave, loses touch with reality and eventually becomes enslaved by the labor of the other (Hegel). The story of the Prague Café is loosely based on this model: the urbaniteâs loss of contact with reality will be her eventual undoing.
The opposite to herd-like behavior is autonomy. Wagner considers autonomy to be one of the key âimaginary significationsâ â underlying myths â of modernity. Within the discourse of western modernity, the value of autonomy does not have to be proven; steps towards individual autonomy are automatically considered valuable, because of what they are aiming at. A dependent, herd-like conduct, on the other hand, is considered uncivil and profane (Alexander 2006). Realness, then, lies in autonomy: one obtains real knowledge through experience with real work. One is expected to use oneâs own (real) language, rather than a learned, artificial one. One must encounter the world as an autonomous subject does, rather than look for reflections of the self like a narcissist. The emphasis on the autonomous individual, as opposed to the well-established expectation of rural life as communitarian, may seem paradoxical. Yet, it has an inner logic that has been well-described by Silva: those on the periphery feel that they have been mistreated by institutions and left to fend for themselves. Making a virtue out of necessity, they subscribe to neoliberal ideas of individual power and autonomy as they feel they only have themselves to rely on.
None of this is to say that the anti-elite sentiments expressed through the Prague Café do not have political or economic causes. Indeed, much of the frustration and resentment contained in rural consciousness comes from a lack of opportunities, economic deprivation, and a sense of political powerlessness.
Acknowledgments
This research has been supported by a Czech Science Foundation (GAÄR) grant no. 22â12477S, âThe urban and the rural: a cultural sociology of a societal polarisation.â
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