Next Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant: Micha Zweifel Makes New Time
Lisa Robertson
Dwelling for a while—so deliciously, so tentatively— within the social agreement called art, which here we will consider as an unlimited making, a seriously playful making which is liberated, through always renewing collective co-habitation, from the brutality of force (or is it rather the economics of force?)—even temporarily, but ideally for ever (where “for ever” would nonetheless upset every stability, every hegemony to come, would rekindle each appetite)—, we are free to rethink value in its relationship to time.
Why not live together in this convivial proposition for as long as we can? Something unanticipated may alight.
Who is this collective? What does this agreement concern? Have we solicited this contract, or has it slipped into our consciousness unnoticed, as might an atmospheric scent, the texture of a well-worn garment, or a habit of feeling? In our life of making things, we prefer passionate attachments, happened-upon communities, as difficult as such living-together can sometimes become. Is there a passionate collectivity with room for both delight and disagreement? We believe that there is, but usually we do not choose the company our play will keep. The many little clinamens that have thrown in our way the possibility of a meeting, a being together, are as unintentional as atoms. The collective swerves. The things we make swerve also, in their interpretability, their welcome, their stamina. Always something crucial escapes intention. In this way the works themselves are like subjects: quite unpredictable, even slippery. So they have a role in inflecting whatever community is. It’s not that they cause or determine their community, but that the way people come together is altered by art. This will be our premise. Quarrelsome, often foundering and imploding, we are the willing misinterpretors of the arrhythmic signatures carrying such ruckus to our perception, our badly scaled desire, and our trained sequences of exchange: some relationships are not received but muddled through, and their apparent lack of institutional frame does not ease or neutralize their complexity. Sometimes this is love. What difficult grace! We refer also to the dulled aching sensation of a space of absence where quite simply somebody or something unnamed is missing. There are collectives that have not yet declared themselves as such; they will recognize themselves only retrospectively, and so will be compelled to aestheticize their transmission. And some collectives do not share a time; some will be the contemporaries of their ancestors or of future communities only. Friction, as with unplanned wood, which leaves little inflammatory splinters beneath our skin, bringing our entire apprehension of the concept of surface into an involved questioning: such is our preference. Here is the incentive to think together with the materials.
The season has changed. We have called it a season, but it is an extremely long received speech tradition. It is buoyed with a learned emotion. There exist longterm hivernal moods. Time isn’t quartered and neither are elements. In some places there is no springtime, or no autumn. There may be three different summers of various humidities. Nevertheless here we are, in our elaborately nonchalant layers of garments, with our autumnal sentiments and detailed appetites. The sky has changed. We’re in it, beneath it, beside it, eating its overripe fruits, letting them blacken our teeth and the palms of our hands, spitting out the rot, metabolizing the slanted light, cleaving and roasting decorative gourds. Perhaps we regret the previous season or we long for some season to follow. We witness this nostalgia without judging it. Later we will undertake its analysis. Now we want a completely new season, an uncharted experience of time. We ache for a temporality that has not yet been recorded, that has never before been experienced. We’ll be the ones to supplement cosmology, to synthesize a fresh element. What are calendars to us? Our skin is dry and we want to eat roots. We climb slipshod steps to a metaphysical mezzanine, glimpsing the received season, with its mythologized nomenclature, downwards through the gaps between the planks. It makes us slightly dizzy, a dizziness not so much symptomatic of some hackneyed pathology as redolent with an anticipation of an ideal saturation. And we look up again, continue upwards, curious, careful not to trip on the slightly irregular surfaces. We arrive at the next spontaneous horizontal restaurant.
This is the fucking elegant future. Here is a replete pause in appetitive becoming. Here philosophy is a superfood that accentuates our synapses. Our hunger is a clock. What are we hungry for? We are hungry for time; time is the convivial medium. We want to taste it, savor it, devour it, rub it, bathe in it, both together and apart. This hunger links us with each other and with the things that anyone makes. Stepping onto the temporary mezzanine, we arrive at this robust yet contemplative synthesis. Unsuspected views open onto a previously familiar landscape. A frieze representing a mixture of archaic and invented customs invites us to linger. It is a restaurant because it proposes something newly shared and valued regarding the sensory manifold, in order to entertain us. (To entertain, says Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, means to treat at table, and to foster in the mind.) An altered duration is offered to the known, by grace of a work-a-day mysticism, for the sake of a newly opened critical pleasure. It is non-sequential and highly figured. What shall the restaurant restore? Most agile and beautiful, in its anarchic abundance, its swerving grace, its unmeasurable bliss, its scarcity and its relentlessness: the very time that we crave. A time completely outside regulation and measure, which pours from our bodies and opens our thoughts. Kant called time a synthetic a priori. Which is to say that time is a medium of all experience and cognition, both constructed and given, yet necessarily unsolicited. What connects concepts when experience doesn’t? A synthetic and active always-ness on which cognition depends. Time is intrinsic to our perception, and we have made it ourselves, as we have transmitted it, by continuing to speak and to eat together, by speculating on our observations and by making mistakes. But our part in time’s synthesis is not volitional. This is deeply frustrating and stimulating. Because we are stubborn and insatiable, we want to find a way to glimpse the very matrix of the a priori. By what means shall the restaurant restore time? How do we exit the metrics and savor the sensorium? Here the approach to the concept of temporal extremity is both architectural and gustative. Architecturally the restaurant is a speculum. It gently opens the intuition of sensing to patient broths, liaisons, amuse-bouches, stimulants and calmants and other clandestine potions, little poems, kitsch commemorations, light snacks, midnight suppers, collective breakfasts, O’Hara-esque lunches, anarchic collations, controlled decay, saltings and picklings, pungent reductions, and very temperately, exclusively in early research stages, synthesized foams: all of these on a raised carpentry platform, of elegantly utilitarian installation, already scheduled for dismounting. The restorative cuisine plays out its techniques, both received and invented, in idiosyncratic rhythms, in the synthesized medium of time, by posing questions, and permitting appetitive ornament. Taste is part memory and part synapse, enjoying as it gently but briefly expands a space of experimental conviviality.
It will be a season of the duration of an exhalation or a lucid dream and it will not be fixed in any recognizable sequence. The season will arrive when necessary perhaps. It will ornament necessity.
“It is high time to replace the Kantian question ‘how are synthetic judgements possible’ by another question: why is belief in such judgements necessary” Nietzsche claimed, at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil. To honor this moral proposition, we purposely yet accidentally yet dreamily synthesize a new season not just because we can, but because we too believe it is necessary. Our season advances the restoration of a convivial temporality that completely rejects force. We’ll raise a quivering platform to the continuance of shared accident and ornament. We’ll call this season a restaurant. It is a kind of grace; it models the experiment of consent. It may or may not be perceptible. You may enter this artifice at your pleasure. Falsity is not objectionable—to deny falsity, Nietzsche says, “would amount to a renunciation of life, a denial of life”. The fictive, which is to say the made nature of the spontaneous restaurant, the utopian season, the proposal of consent, requires us to act as if our fictions were necessary to flourishing. Because now is a good time to flourish together despite the totalizing frame of the general economy, not only in order to evade it or negate it, but to learn afresh how to value the difficult tenderness we discover in the temporary gift, the ludic contract.
Stay! We call
To the season
Which unfurls
Like a comic-strip