Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Introductions
- Rhythm, Rhuthmos and Rhythmanalysis
- Could Rhythm Become a New Scientific Paradigm for the Humanities?
- A Genealogy of Rhythm
- I Modalities Of Rhythm
- 1 Drawing Rhythm: On the Work of Rudolf Laban
- 2 What is at Stake in a Theory of Rhythm
- 3 Rhythm and Textural Temporality
- II Sites And Practices
- 4 Attunement of Value and Capital in the Algorithms of Social Media
- 5 Idiorrhythmy: An (Unsustainable) Aesthetic of Ethics
- 6 Adventures of a Line of Thought: Rhythmic Evolutions of Intelligent Machines in Post-Digital Culture
- III Rhythmanalysis
- 7 The Configuring of ‘Context’ in Rhythmanalysis
- 8 City Rhythms: An Approach to Urban Rhythm Analysis
- 9 Rhythm, Rhythmanalysis and Algorithm-Analysis
- Indexs
5 - Idiorrhythmy: An (Unsustainable) Aesthetic of Ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Introductions
- Rhythm, Rhuthmos and Rhythmanalysis
- Could Rhythm Become a New Scientific Paradigm for the Humanities?
- A Genealogy of Rhythm
- I Modalities Of Rhythm
- 1 Drawing Rhythm: On the Work of Rudolf Laban
- 2 What is at Stake in a Theory of Rhythm
- 3 Rhythm and Textural Temporality
- II Sites And Practices
- 4 Attunement of Value and Capital in the Algorithms of Social Media
- 5 Idiorrhythmy: An (Unsustainable) Aesthetic of Ethics
- 6 Adventures of a Line of Thought: Rhythmic Evolutions of Intelligent Machines in Post-Digital Culture
- III Rhythmanalysis
- 7 The Configuring of ‘Context’ in Rhythmanalysis
- 8 City Rhythms: An Approach to Urban Rhythm Analysis
- 9 Rhythm, Rhythmanalysis and Algorithm-Analysis
- Indexs
Summary
The book in which this chapter appears was developed from a series of conferences and seminars on rhythm and rhythmanalysis, during which repeated references were made to the works of Deleuze and Guattari and Lefebvre. The latter is not surprising given his writings on ‘rhythmanalysis’ (Lefebvre 2013) and a theory of ‘moments’ (2014: 634–52; 800–7). Deleuze and Guattari (2013; Deleuze 1994), while less immediately accessible, have also offered signifi-cant and evocative takes on rhythm and the ‘refrain’. This chapter, however, takes a somewhat different tack by referencing the work of Roland Barthes, or more specifically a brief commentary on rhythm that appears in his lecture course How to Live Together (2013). Of course, Barthes was a reader of Deleuze (as can be seen in his lecture notes) with a shared interest in intensities (rather than codes and ‘systems’ of codification etc.). And there is a more direct connection with Lefebvre. Both were members of the Marxist circle that published the influential journal Arguments; as part of which both ‘strove to develop a critical and reflexive Marxism … [that] sought to understand the sociocultural transformations occurring within France and other Western industrial societies in the postwar era’ (Gardiner 2000: 74). In this respect both were offering new theories of the everyday, of which Lefebvre's account of rhythm can be understood as an important component, enabling a blend of political and aesthetic analysis. While Barthes’ own account of rhythm is more peripheral, it can nonetheless help us consider the writing of rhythm in important ways, not least in allowing for a more writerly account of rhythmanalysis, which opens out to an ethics of rhythm: to question less what rhythm is and what it does, and instead to consider what kinds of rhythms we want and desire; to shift from ontological questions of rhythm to ethical ones.
Inventions of Rhythm
This analysis of rhythms in all their magnitude ‘from particles to galaxies’ has a transdisciplinary character. It gives itself the objective, amongst others, of separating as little as possible the scientific from the poetic. (Lefebvre 2013: 94)
Rhythm might appear to be something we can intuitively relate to, as something that pervades, that we must fall in with.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rhythm and CritiqueTechnics, Modalities, Practices, pp. 150 - 172Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020