Hermenaut mourns the demise of Joe , Starbucks's attempt to use the commercial creativity and corporate efficiencies of the new economy to revitalize that worn-out institution, the literary magazine. It has come to the attention of Hermenaut's investigative team that, as Joe neared its end, Starbucks executives briefly flirted with the notion of turning it into an academic journal, with Stanley "There's No Such Thing as Free Speech" Fish as its editor. Rummaging through the piles of new acquisitions in Harvard's Widener Library recently, librarian Matthew Battles found the page proofs from what would have been the first issue of a bold venture. We reprint Fish's introductory editorial salvo below.—eds.

It goes without saying that we academics hate Starbucks. Why we hate it is just as obvious: because it's about us. Starbucks gives the untrained and unwashed the opportunity to savor dark, flavorful coffees while heatedly discussing (or at least thinking about discussing) all the Big Issues. And that's something we academics don't want to share. And for that reason, we're quite careful to make sure we can't be seen as potential Starbucks customers. Witness the coffee pot, stained and insouciant, sitting in nearly every tattered faculty common room in the country, its foul brew souring defiantly on the hot plate as the seminar perks away in a decaffeinated stupor.

It's too bad, really. For Starbucks offers so much for the contemplative academic, so much chemical, but also intellectual, stimulation. As I assume the editorship of Joe, then, the time to reflect on the possibility of a rapprochement between Starbucks and academic culture manifests itself as opportunity. Toward that end, let's take Starbucks' latest and most compelling invention, the Frappucino.

The ad for the Frappucino is itself a marvel, deceptive in its simplicity: it's just a blown-up image of the drink itself, gloriously haloed and photoshopped. But how it towers there, how it glistens, the dark coffee arrayed among gobs of milkfat that seem to jitter with a caffeine-addled Brownian motion! In the ad, the Frappucino looks less like a deliquescent confection than brain matter itself. Its pate of whipped cream chastely tonsured with a ribbon of chocolate sauce, the drink seems not merely to beckon, but to think. We're compelled to confront Frappucino (from within our system of conditional subjectivities) as a friend in potentia. In each Frappucino, that is to say, we encounter an Other, a subjectivity, a Thou who cries out to be understood. The whole thing sweats with the cool power of its thought.

But Frappucino certainly doesn't think about the social history of coffee, nor its human ecology. The oppression and environmental devastation wrought by the production of coffee, cream, and sugar; the ozone depletion of refrigeration systems; or the dubious nutritional value that sweet'n'frothy coffee drinks offer the consumer—these things are not disclosed to Frappucino, for they have to do with its origins, its nature and ontology; these things are as occluded from the view of Frappucino as our own origins are from ourselves.

So what, exactly, could Frappucino be thinking? There's a whole discourse swirled into this beverage. This radical emancipation is interdisciplinary (in a good way), synthesizing all the contradictory energies of the post-Enlightenment. Frappucino's roots lie in the Enlightenment, and its frilly tendrils bask in the tropical heat of the colonial encounter. Here we have the savor of coffee—mysterious, seductive, it's the culinary embodiment of that Hobbesian state of nature which is nasty, brutish, and short; yet we have also the sweetness of sugar embodying the Rousseauistic notion of the Noble Savage, refined and concentrated from the raw, brute cane in a process mirroring the civilizing tendency of colonialism itself; and, finally, we have cream, the fruit of the pastoral, its silky, unblemished surface reminiscent of the skin of milkmaids saved from the marring pox by Dr. Jenner's benevolent prick, the Vaccine. And the whole thing is energized and frothed into system by the techno-miracle of refrigeration: it's the cooling action of Freon, ultimately, that liberates the subjectivity of Frappucino, that bodies forth its soul.

The term cappucino, it's worth remembering, derives from the Italian word for the creamy-brown peaked hood worn by the Capuchin monastic order. Founded by a Franciscan monk who felt that his order had strayed too far from the rigorous austerity of the Friar of Assisi, the Capuchins emphasize hardship and poverty over all; the order distinguished itself in tireless ministrations to victims of Europe's many plagues, and they were as important to the Counter-Reformation as the Jesuits were, consolidating the rule of the Church among peasants while the Jesuits became confessors to the elite. Is it merely ironic that a drink of such voluptuous, velvety delight should share a name with a monastic order whose asceticism is legendary? Or does etymology point us in another direction: to the realization that there is a Coffee Way, a kind of monastic submission to the rule of caffeine addiction, the willingness to risk, no, to force oneself to face the prospect of burgeoning cholesterol levels? The inclusion, in Frappucino, of the French word frappé only serves to drive this home; for though in its most relevant sense frappé merely means chilled, its derivation is from frapper, to hit, to beat, to strike—which would seem to encode the severity of monastic self-flagellation even more deeply in the beverage.

We're sliding into dangerous territory here—for as Nietzsche teaches, the religico-legal mandate of self-hatred always threatens to normativize slave behavior. The Capuchins knew this, of course; they proffered the peasants an empowering, reflective spiritual paradigm instead, customized, as it were, to the serf's newly discovered individual soul. Like the hardy Capuchins pursuing their vocation among the peasantry, then, Frappucino makes manifest the subversive potential of coffee—for the Frappucino comes in many sizes and flavors, of course; Starbucks presents the emancipated consumer with a whole cohort of beverages to suit her own individual inclinations. And isn't this the same subversive energy that Bach fretted about in his Coffee Cantata, after all, in which the seductive delights of the coffee house turn a chaste mädchen's attention decisively from the legitimating, albeit ultimately restrictive, bonds of marriage. How many variations on this story are playing out among Starbucks customers at this very moment? How many of these young coffee addicts have liberated themselves from the strictures of a bourgeois upbringing by their addiction to caffeine, by the consumable bohemia on offer at Starbucks?

Here we find a tiny green post-it note with the Starbuck's mermaid logo in the left-hand corner, with the note "this paragraph not for publication" scrawled in a bold hand—M.B.

Watching a Starbucks coffee consultant as he measures and titrates, sifts and pours, following the scientistic script that will lead inevitably to Frappucino, I realize that this is less a culinary experience than a pharmacological one—and while it is entirely licit and approved, I can't help feeling it's a bit transgressive after all. Starbucks (and this is just why academics hate it) makes its pitch to the Romantic I in each of us—that sophisticated, world-weary aesthete who demands an experience that is radically individual, a kind of gourmet solipsism that says, I am at home in this sad, darkling world of my own creation. And yet what I witness in the making of my Frappucino is not the stuff of individual experience: it's rather an isolated node in a vast, distributed system of mass production. As the Starbucks associate hits her marks, checks all the relevant boxes on the side of my cup, I can't help feeling let down, out of the loop, insufficiently incorporated into this vast scheme. For it's only now that I realize that I don't know how to order Frappucino properly; and that my own Tall Mocha Frappucino has arrived without the noble dome of whipped cream I had hoped for.

Drinking as thinking: in Spinozan terms, what registers as drinking in the world of men is actually a mode of thought in the world of Frappucino. With each percussive slurp in my world, the machinery of cool contemplation clash and align in that other. Frappucino's soluble synapses contract and compute, the arrangements of caffeine and milkfat and cocoa and H2O shift, calculate, spin endless complexity out of the essential simplicity, the finitude that is Frappucino. And what is Frappucino thinking? It's not contemplating Hobbes or Rousseau, nor hair shirts, nor the play of counterpoint; Frappucino is thinking me. With my every slurp, Frappucino thinks me into being. In the heart of Frappucino drinking I have the vision of the energies of coffee itself liberated. It's like Milton's vision of the fires of hell: "Yet from those flames no light,/but rather darkness visible." I am with Lucifer in the midst of his great Fall:

From morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,—
A summer's day; and with the setting sun
Dropp'd from the Zenith like a falling star.

And then—just like that—it's gone, the caffeine sparkling through me like quarks in a bubble chamber, leaving meteoroidal trails as it dissipates. Serotin re-uptake begins to slow and congeal; I'll come down soon; all this will cease. I realize that in the past, I have participated in this process of academico-legalistic judgment myself, that I have disdained Starbucks, that even now I long to be recognized as an academic superstar of the very sort that customers come to Starbucks in order to imagine being themselves. I'm chastened and reflective—refreshed, even. Just as the ads told me I would be. The question, then, is how to make this experience normative. How do we ensure that everyone, academic or otherwise, learns to benefit from the intellectual refreshment Frappucino offers? Well, that's the job of Joe, of course. And it's my job, now, too.