Beats and Being

The first public presentation of a Rhythm-Oriented Ontology, at Guildford, Surrey University during the What is Performance Philosophy Conference. April, 11th, 2013. Camera by: Denise Agustinho

This gesture inaugurated rhythm-oriented at the performance-philosophy bienalle in Guilford, 2013. It thought of what exists as something in a crossroad, in a carrefour. In order for something to come to the carrefour, at least something else has to come to the carrefour. Something has to be repeated – to lie out the future – in order for something else to be expected, or not expected. To conceive of the future is to conceive of a tic – to conceive of something that will repeat. Blanchot writes, in the Écriture du Désastre: Nous sommes au bord du désastre sans que nous puissions le situer dans l’avenir. (We are at the brink of a disaster but we cannot place it in the future.) The unpredictable is not placed in the future. The next tic. When will it come? Something has to tic the tic. Something has to clock the clock. The carrefour is always populated. Out of nothing, nothing takes place. But I’ll be back to nothingness. And I’ll be back to silence. Something has to pave the way for whatever else will happen. There should be future for the future tic to tic. There is no ur-clock that would prepare a future for every tic and every tac. Because such an independent ur-clock would have no tense – no present, no now for anything, no A-series. Those ur-tics would have nothing to pass through. To exist, in a carrefour, is to co-exist.
Link to the book: Being Up For Grabs