1. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by T. Burger and F. Lawrence ( Cambridge, 1989), 67-70. For later criticism, see C. Calhoun, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1996) and B. Robins, ed. The Phantom, Public Sphere ( Minneapolis, 1997).
2. For the concept of “the collective experience” and “the public sphere,” see O. Negt and A. Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, translated by P. Labanyi, J. O. Danie, and A. Oksiloff (Minneapolis and London, 1993), 1-53. Here, Alexander Kluge defines the public sphere as “the site where struggles are decided by other means than war.” This implies to a spatial concept, the social sites where the collective body, in this process, constituted “the public.”
3. This is partly related to the nature and contents of the sources we have so far. See A. Saraçgil , “L'introduction du Café a Istanbul (XVIe-XVIIe siecles)” and F. Georgeon, “Les Cafés a Istanbul a la fin de l'Empire Ottoman,” in H. Desmet-Gregoire and F. Georgeon, eds. Cafés d'Orient Revisités (Paris, 1997), 39-78. See also C. Kιrlι, “ The Struggle over Space: Coffeehouses of Ottoman Istanbul, 1780-1845,” (unpublished State University of New York PhD dissertation, 2001).