Ramble:
As you know, I’m currently interested in ‘the event’, which is less a
reference to Deleuze and Badiou than a nod to Parkrun and all kinds of
local sporting festivals that are focused less on competition than on
framing scenarios of communal individual endeavour. Although, it must be
confessed, I am unconcerned with the communal and even less interested in
individual triumph or despair. Nonethless I imagine a thoroughly private
and invisible event, perhaps beginning at 3am in a carpark in Pt Kembla
and then zigzagging north via roads, tracks and scarcely legible forest
paths towards some blank ending in the Royal National Park. This event is
dark, unheralded and offers nothing especially redeeming.
To be honest, however, I am thinking of something even more unformed.
While he notion of ‘the event’ suggests an objectified, inherently
structured amalgam of time, direction and effort – something rule-governed
and determinable – the event that actually concerns me is the one that
begins without warning, that lacks all definite shape, that opens up
unpredictably. This other event (at the limit of the formal event) is
less wrought than determinedly and waywardly followed. I find myself
within it without any means of defining its contours or any scope for
lucid conclusion. In this sense the event only takes shape when it
discovers its dissolution.
At one level the event is an artifice, a resource, a necessity. At
another level it is indescribable. It is nothing like an event at all.
It within the sense of the event’s evident impossibility that the
commitment to the event begins.
There is an intimate relation between the event and the non-event. They
are drawn to one another. They lend one another meaning and can never be
simply opposed.
So, more practically, what am, I suggesting? A set of minor experimental
actions in which form and the risk of formlessness coincide.