Be Careful, The Top Plate is Very Hot or The Death and Life of Licensed Family Restaurants

Is food poisoning the purest form of affect? Lying awkwardly on the cold tile floor of the bathroom, bleach-stained towels folded into makeshift pillows, my body becomes an experiment in feeling without thought. Oftentimes, thinking only makes matters worse. While I could recollect the full inventory of items ingested over the past forty-eight hours, conjuring their images, tastes, scents, and textures is liable to send me into a perspiring effort, felt squarely in the diaphragm, to keep things down. Why go through the long list of potential causes when one always intuitively knows? Logically, the culprit could have been almost anything, but somehow the body has a way of identifying its assailant amongst a flurry of possibilities. Accompanied by Canada Dry and a sleeve of stale soda crackers, I endure the undulating waves of bacterial intensity that resist all forms of clarified articulation.

In these moments of intensity, the subject starts to fade away or become superimposed with an altogether different form of being. The self lapses into something purely visceral, consisting only of immediacy and response to stimuli. The stomach takes over, and we wade in a pool of feeling whose experience has not yet been altered by the rigid structures of cognition and words. In Brian Massumi’s seminal essay “The Autonomy of Affect,” the philosopher constructs an argument for the unassimilable nature of affect, which he uses synonymously with intensity. He distinguishes affect from emotions, which are “subjective content, the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal.”¹ Whereas emotions are “qualified intensities,” affect is a distinctly unqualified experience of an event that “is not ownable or recognizable, and is thus resistant to critique.”² Affect still accounts for social conditions and contexts, but it organizes them differently than subjective articulations of emotion which unfold in the microseconds after the onset of affective intensity.³ Affectual experience is precognitive, not so different from what we might call a gut feeling. Whether moved by affect or food poisoning, there is always the potential for externalization, but in the preceding moments we feel the situation playing out in registers incompatible with the subject’s desire for clarity.

In many ways, Massumi’s argument can be distilled as such: affect is not ownable. We experience it on a short-term lease, only so long as we can resist describing it through our own subject position. Once articulated—once owned—it dispels its potential and transforms into something legible. In Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994), we see the deferral of ownership in order to sustain these muddy affective registers, if only for a brief point in time. A film in two parts, its A-side details the romantic toils of Hong Kong police officer He Zhi Wu as he laments a recent breakup with his girlfriend, May. Hanging around the Midnight Express food stand, the officer dials up old flames on the restaurant’s payphone in acts of heartbroken desperation. Finding no solace in these failed attempts at reconciliation, he makes a disciplinary vow: for each day in the month of April, he purchases a can of pineapple—May’s favourite food—with a sell-by date of May 1^st. When May (the month) finally arrives, having had no contact from May (his ex-lover), the officer eats all thirty cans of pineapple in a marathon sitting, symbolically consuming his expired love in an effort to bring closure to his past relationship. Of course, the pineapples do not stay down for long. He purges himself of love—of May—slumped under fluorescent lights in the bathroom of his Hong Kong apartment. The stomach decides his fate, like the petals of a daisy.

Despite the officer’s systematic approach to the acceptance of lost love, the means are anything but rational. He gives himself to an experience predicated upon the removal of ownership, allowing the expired pineapples to concoct an intensity that impresses itself upon him. Although it is quite clear from early on that May has no desire to rekindle their romance, the officer suspends the inevitable, removing his agency from the equation as sugar and acid converge in a rigged coin toss of hope. I, too, have attempted to give myself to irrational processes in hopes of mitigating nerve-racking or uncomfortable situations. In my undergraduate days, I would stay up late on nights before final exams playing games of solitaire on my coffee table, convincing myself that winning three games in a row would lead to favourable results the next morning. You might be surprised to find that there was very little correlation between solitaire success and exam grades. For one reason or another, I always wore a pair of blue socks with images of sailboats on them anytime I was on an airplane. Eventually, they ran so ragged that I was forced to tempt fate with a new pair. Despite the mutual exclusivity of events, creating an absurd connection allowed me to remove a form of subjective agency from the proceedings. While I could have been studying, resting or packing, I instead chose to give in to an irrational process, opting for minor blips of unownable affective experience before rationality set in again.

Do these peculiar arrangements constitute acts of becoming-pineapple? Becoming-solitaire? Becoming-sock? Do they form alliances with other entities in hopes of derailing processes of subjectivization? Here, I clumsily lean on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal where, as a means of parting with the logic of humanism and its rational order, one neither imitates nor regresses nor identifies with a non-human animal, but creates a non-hierarchical alliance which allows for new affective measures on a plane of consistency between beings.⁴ In this exchange, there is no subject, only becoming: “a verb with a consistency all its own.”⁵ He Zhi Wu does not try to imitate canned pineapple any more than canned pineapple might imitate him. He creates a block of affective exchange, ceding forms of his subjecthood in the process. It is perhaps in those moments when we resist rationalizing our gut feelings that we experience a related form of becoming, described by Deleuze and Guattari as the Body without Organs (BwO). The BwO is always in a state of becoming as it attempts to destratify the rational organization imposed on its being. However, destratifying—or disorganizing —oneself is a dangerous pursuit that should be undertaken in small iterative steps by “[lodging ourselves] on a stratum, [and experimenting] with the opportunities it offers” before retreating to stable territory.⁶ Said otherwise, we cannot live indefinitely under the rule of food poisoning, but while we are there, we can experiment with new modes of being before returning to better health.

Moments of affective experience that precede organized thought are one form of this experimentation. To live there would be untenable, but to stretch their duration is revelatory. This is the troubling task: to find zones of experimentation before our brains kick in and ruin all the fun. Can we delay our habitual inclination to articulate and instead stay with the gut feeling as long as possible, all the while knowing it won’t last for long? We constantly organize responses to the scenes before us, but the trick is to stay with their intensities before making them legible, as if holding our breath underwater before coming up for air.⁷ We should dabble with the BwO and allow ourselves to be impressed upon and formulated through intensities without speaking back to them or categorizing their forms. When walking through the front door of the Licensed Family Restaurant, abandon everything you know about dining establishments. Let waves of light, sound and fragrance hit you, but never attempt to identify their sources. Let the image stay fuzzy. We should consult with stomachs full of pineapple before anything passes back up past the vocal cords and normalcy resumes.

Writing is always a conflicted arena for encountering these ideas since it is difficult to escape the structures of signification that always point back to some semblance of an author-subject. Affective moments might spring forth in the gaps between words and their meanings, and one must be willing to tread in this inherent inefficiency. All those things that can’t be clarified might add up to a poetic mode that allows us to dissolve subjecthood for flits here and there. I often return to poet and author Tan Lin’s prose poetry, which often nullifies the subject in favour of a dissolved form of authorship:

It would be nice to create works of literature that didn’t have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats. The most exasperating thing at a poetry reading is always the sound of a poet reading.⁸

Or I think of critic and poet Laura Riding Jackson’s earnest instructions on “How not to write literature:”

Cultivate inattention, do not learn how to express yourself, make no distinctions between thoughts and emotions, since precocity comes of making one vie with the other, mistrust whatever seems superior and be partial to whatever seems inferior — whatever is not literature.⁹

These desires for non-articulated forms of literature might take shape in the microseconds that precede the output of literary structure. Or, perhaps, in the unauthored poetics of kitchen appliance owner manuals, washing instructions on a shirt tag, or the descriptive packaging of office supplies. They happen in the split-second between touching the hot plate and crying out in pain. These forms resist our penchant for organization, and the ability to think otherwise might hinge on our efforts to prolong them, if only for a fraction of a moment. Just long enough that speech might go back on its word before it is spoken.

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As a genre, Licensed Family Restaurants (LFRs) are peculiarly underdeveloped, but to step through their doors is to know them immediately. Distinct from the all-ages fun boasted by the laminated menu barons that line the arteries of cities with boisterous facades made to be visible through vehicle windshields, LFRs ditch the scripted “hello, my name is [insert here] and I will be helping you today” with a welcoming “hi, just a sec” from the side of the mouth as one hand covers the telephone’s transmitter. The lights are dim with blinds half-drawn. There is a dining side and a lounge, but not so sealed off from one another that the clink of cutlery and the whirr of VLT machines don’t mix. The electric-pump water feature babbles in the entrance and the carpet flooring bears the compression of decades. A cool draft comes through each time a takeout order is picked up and there is always an open table for those who choose to stay. The soup of the day never changes and there is nutmeg in the meat sauce. The unevenly lit sign out front reads The [insert here] House. There is something for everyone.

When Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1960), wrote that “new ideas must use old buildings,”¹⁰ she pinpointed the need for mixed-age building stock within city blocks so that a wide range of outcomes — of both cultural and economic enterprise — would be possible, especially given the need for low-cost overhead for new or no-yield ventures. In thinking through LFRs, however, I have often willfully misappropriated Jacobs’s assertion as a tongue-in-cheek slogan for their continuation. On the one hand, these buildings now comprise some of the older building stock in our communities, and one might romantically understand them as incubators of the new, a step removed from the too-well-lit, too-much-glass, too-thought-out, commercial-friendly public infrastructure enshrined by municipalities today. On the other hand, LFRs were seemingly built to be old from the jump, invoking the architectural charms of Granada, or the historic bridges of Venice, or even the mineral-based stalactites and geologic formations of underground cave systems. Buildings built to be old that are now old buildings.

And, yet, the time is not out of joint.¹¹ In Ghosts of My Life (2015), Mark Fisher critiques the prevalence of anachronistic forms of cultural pastiche, identifying within them “a stasis [that] has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of ‘newness,’ of perpetual movement.”¹² Fisher rightfully locates this stasis within numerous creative modes: music, literature, and film, predominantly that, while touting themselves as contemporary, are remixes of past forms veiled by a façade of newness. This jumbling of time produces a feeling of inertia that has come to define our current age. The effect can easily be identified in hordes of contemporary old-style saloons, retro diners and — most ominously — prepackaged dive bars, as they blatantly recycle past forms while marketing themselves as a novel experience. However, my gut tells me that LFRs operate outside of this phenomenon. While they possess no shortage of reference to other times and places, they refuse to embody them with the same theme-crazed fervour of the newer models premised on simulating the experience of a different time while claiming the concept is novel. For LFRs, thematically-driven experience is mostly coincidental. There’s no post-irony. There’s no post-anything. The LFR doesn’t operate within the framework of a referent to push against. They are not contingent. They are perfectly in time.

Each of us has an archetypical LFR that serves as our benchmark for the term. For me, it is The Lumber House. Although it burned to the ground nearly two decades ago, I still remember the hazy low-lit wood interior, burnt-out bulbs in the street sign, and the blinding glow from the takeout window. Even if my memory is faint, I can still call back those scenes felt in the gut before their images come into focus. Cobwebs are live wires under incandescent glow, and another twenty evaporates in a VLT.

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Cole Thompson is an essayist from Treaty 4 territory in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, currently residing on Treaty 6 territory and the traditional homeland of the Métis in Saskatoon. His current work and research centres on the horizon as an aesthetic and political genre. He is the Coordinating Curator for the University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collections and holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

1. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique, 31 (1995): 88.
2. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 88.
3. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 90-91.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 237-239.
5. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 239.
6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 160-161.
7. I owe both the sentiment and phrasing of “being in a scene” to the work of Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant, most notably in their co-authored book The Hundreds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
8. Tan Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 16.
9. Laura Riding Jackson, “All Literature,” Anarchism is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), 20.
10. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, Inc., 1961), 188.
11. In Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), Jacques Derrida often returns to a quotation from Hamlet that “The time is out of joint” to describe forms of broken time that are hauntological. Mark Fisher also uses this phrasing in Ghost of My Life. In relation to LFRs, I argue that time is not broken at all. Since they are so distinctly unlike the places they elicit – Venice, for example – they do not take on the temporal strangeness that occurs when forms that are out of time persist in the present.
12. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), 12-13.

This article is published in issue 41.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue