Off Beat Thamyris/ Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race

Series Editor Ernst van Alphen

Editorial Team Murat Aydemir, Maaike Bleeker, Yasco Horsman, Isabel Hoving, Esther Peeren Off Beat: Pluralizing Rhythm

Editors Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Colophon

Original Design Mart. Warmerdam, Haarlem, The Netherlands www.warmerdamdesign.nl

Design Inge Baeten

Cover image Charlotte van Oostrum

Printing The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation – Paper for documents – Requirements for permanence”.

ISSN: 1570-7253 E-Book ISSN: 1879-5846

ISBN: 978-90-420-3616-1 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0887-1

In the warm, pleasant evening of the 4th of July, Nanny de Vries (1943–2012), my partner in life through the past fifty years, passed away quietly, released from the pancreatic cancer that had tormented her for some three months. She was the founder and first editor of the cross-cultural journal Thamyris: Mythmaking from Past to Present (Najade Press), and I merely her supportive co-editor. Nanny wanted our long-standing collaboration to be no longer restricted to archaeology and ancient history, but for its coverage to encompass women/gender, gay/ lesbian, and ethnic studies of relevance to our times. She was convinced that scholars would pay more attention to a journal with an international, cross-cultural dimension rather than to a European network such as that represented by the European Journal of Women's Studies, or, as she put it memorably in the September 1994 issue of Thamyris: “At a time during which nationalist and fascist ideas are regaining ground in Europe and constructed controversies of ethnicities throughout the world are causing catastrophic outbursts of violence, Thamyris has been founded to further an international dimension. In order to make Thamyris a truly cross-continental forum for discussion, an ever-widening network of participants all over the world is essential. In order to obtain a fully cross-cultural balance, we will make every effort to involve more non-Western scholars.” — Thamyris Vol. 1, No. 1 (1994), p. 2. Although Nanny – a member, up to and including 2000, of the now expanded editorial team – was very pleased with the takeover of Thamyris by Rodopi, and with the resulting beautiful and stylishly contemporary cover and altered subtitle (Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race), there were good reasons for our original decision in 1994 to choose the subtitle Mythmaking from Past to Present. In Nanny's words once more: “For the human need for myths seems inescapable, especially to legitimize dubi- ous ideologies and cultural conventions or to explain away the exclusion of groups apparently contrasting with a dominant culture. Besides, many utopian movements or dystopian visions create their own compensatory myths in search of an alternative future or in order to re-create an empowering past. Obviously, mythmaking fulfils a lot of functions, as it serves the needs of the moment by constructing a desired reality.” — Thamyris Vol. 1, No. 1 (1994), p. 1. In her “Personal Requiem,” our later co-editor Gert Hekma has written that Nanny, with her idea for Thamyris, was ahead of her time: “Nanny was the quiet, attentive, effective and, in particular, sweet pillar of strength who made the journal flourish.” She is with us no more. I consider it quite an honour to have lived and worked with her.

Jan Best co-editor Thamyris (up to and including Vol. 4, No. 2, 1997) Mission Statement

Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race

Intersecting is a series of edited volumes with a critical, interdisciplinary focus. Intersecting’s mission is to rigorously bring into encounter the crucial insights of black and ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies, and facilitate dialogue and confrontations between them. Intersecting shares this focus with Thamyris, the socially committed international journal that was established by Jan Best en Nanny de Vries, in 1994, out of which Intersecting has evolved. The sharpness and urgency of these issues is our point of departure, and our title reflects our decision to work on the cutting edge. We envision these confrontations and dialogues through three recurring categories: place, sex, and race. To us they are three of the most decisive categories that order society, locate power, and inflict pain and/or pleasure. Gender and class will necessarily figure prominently in our engagement with the above. Race, for we will keep analyzing this ugly, much-debated concept, instead of turning to more civil concepts (ethnicity, culture) that do not address the full disgrace of racism. Sex, for sexuality has to be addressed as an always-active social strategy of locating, controlling, and mobilizing people, and as an all-important, not necessarily obvious, cultural practice. And place, for we agree with other cultural analysts that this is a most productive framework for the analysis of situated identities and acts that allow us to move beyond narrow identitarian theories. The title of the book series points at what we, its editors, want to do: think together. Our series will not satisfy itself with merely demonstrating the complexity of our times, or with analyzing the shaping factors of that complexity. We know how to theorize the intertwining of, for example, sexuality and race, but pushing these inter- sections one step further is what we aim for: How can this complexity be understood in practice? That is, in concrete forms of political agency, and the efforts of self-reflexive, contextualized interpretation. How can different socially and theoreti- cally relevant issues be thought together? And: how can scholars (of different backgrounds) and activists think together, and realize productive alliances in a radical, transnational community? We invite proposals for edited volumes that take the issues that Intersecting addresses seriously. These contributions should combine an activist-oriented perspective with intellectual rigor and theoretical insights, interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives. The editors seek cultural criticism that is daring, invigorating and self-reflexive; that shares our commitment to thinking together. Contact us at [email protected]. Contents

11 Introduction Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen

27 ¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Timothy Yaczo Social Club and the Repeating Island

43 Turning the Machine into a Slovenly Machine: Donna Summer, Tilman Baumgärtel Giorgio Moroder, and “I Feel Love”

55 Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture: Birgitte Stougaard Rhythmic Conventions, Skills, and Everyday Life Pedersen

71 Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Dietmar Elflein Metal Music

89 Kairos, the Rhythm of Timing Marie Gelang

103 Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry Lena Hopsch and Eva Lilja

123 Subversive Rhythms: Postcolonial Prosody and Indo-Anglian Peter Groves Poetry

135 AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Shintaro Miyazaki Everyday Technologies

149 Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Jodi Brooks Blind Field

169 The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Jan Hein Hoogstad Interventions

197 Contributors

199 Index Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 11–26

Introduction

Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen

Rhythm has no owner. It does not belong to a particular time, place, art form, discipline, person, body, sense, or even itself. Rhythm constantly slips away. We do not conceive the concept as specific to music, literature, nature, or anything else. We rather focus on rhythm’s displacements, its trajectories and dispersions are a telling fact. Its ongoing itineraries reveal that the concept—despite being around for god knows how long—still manages to fend off any attempt to end or stabilize its movements. Rhythm does not simply lack a legitimate owner, it actively resists all forms of appropriation. Whereas we do not approach rhythm’s displacements as a problem, it does pose a practical challenge to this volume. How to approach a concept that constantly slips away? An obvious and common tactic to grasp the ungraspable is to throw a net over it. Many theoretical accounts of rhythm do exactly that: they try to fit its unpredictable movements into regular structures. Princeton’s New Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, for example, defines rhythm as follows: “A cadence, a contour, a figure of periodicity, any sequence of events or objects perceptible as a distinctive pattern capable of repetition and variation” (Preminger and Brogan 1066–67). In this account, rhythm is defined by the patterns it produces. The lure of such a formal definition is that it offers a universally applicable analytic framework. Patterns can be discovered everywhere: in music, poetry, nature, mathematics, astronomy, statistics, everyday life, etc. As such, they can serve as a common ground for the analysis of heterogeneous phenomena. A formalist account of rhythm is thus especially suited for interdisciplinary research. Shared structured allow specialists from different backgrounds to work together without the need to know the specifics of each others disciplines.

Introduction | 11 In spite of the appeal of a common interdisciplinary framework, this volume does not subscribe to a formalist account of rhythm. An understanding of rhythm as organized patterns is too broad, and thus cannot explain the concept’s specificity. From a structural perspective, rhythmic patterns do not intrinsically differ from other patterns. Any structure can be called a rhythm and vice versa. Moreover, these patterns may be helpful to interpret other phenomena, but fail to account for rhythm itself. Whereas seasons, lullabies, star constellations, and crime figures are all characterized by structured patterns, the fact that they are organized alone does not explain their rhythmicity. Rhythm keeps slipping through the holes of the net. The concept becomes operational by being transformed into a broadly applicable analytic schema, but loses its specificity in the process. Rhythm is nothing but a name: formalism leads to nominalism. Apart from being too broad, we argue, a formalist account is too narrow as well. By reducing rhythm to patterns, two of its defining characteristics disappear: movement and experience. Etymologically, rhythm derives from the Greek verb “rheo” which means “to flow.” Plato explains it as “order in movement,” and thereby defines the two necessary elements of the concept (Preminger and Brogan 1067). The problem with a formalist account of rhythm is that it only explains the order and not the movement. As a matter of fact, in order to grasp the rhythmic patterns at all, the flow needs to be coagulated. Structures emerge at the expense of movement. Processes only lend themselves to analysis, when they are interrupted. Such interventions, though, are an epistemological precondition for knowledge per se and not a problem as such. Our main objection to a formalist approach to rhythm lies in the fact that it cannot take its own operations into account. It is blind for its own practice. The fact that rhythm’s actual displacements cannot be grasped, does not necessarily mean that we have to settle for a reductionist, formal definition of the concept. Whereas it may be impossible to fully comprehend rhythm, it is equally impossible not to experience it at all. Our senses are constantly confronted with its effects. Through auditory, haptic, visual, gustatory, and olfactory stimulation, rhythm manifests itself to the body. Better yet, we subscribe to Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea that it is, in fact, this inter-sensory play of affects that constitutes a body. In On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873), the philosopher explains this idea as follows:

To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound; second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere right into the middle of an entirely new and different one. One can imagine a man who is completely deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music. Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni’s sound figures: perhaps he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now swear that he must know what men mean by “sound.” (110)

12 | Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 11–26

Nietzsche argues that all knowledge starts from experience, but is also irreducible to it. All that exceeds immediate bodily sensations is produced by precise and specific operations. In the above quote, the philosopher details the genesis of conceptual metaphors, such as body, subject, or structure, meticulously. For him, concepts are the effects of projections from one type of nerve stimuli upon another sense: synesthesia. Understood as the inter-sensory play of sensations, rhythm (temporally not logically) precedes the bodies that perceive it. Our theoretical account of the concept therefore departs from embodied experience. Nevertheless, this shift from formal structures to bodily sensations is not without risks. Whereas patterns are manifest to anyone, affects are only perceived by a particular body. Because of the dangers of subjectivism and relativism, academic research on rhythm has often been reluctant to fully explore the role and function of experience. The New Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics for instance, does acknowledge the importance of rhythmic perception, but at the same time points out the risk of subjectivism:

The mind is not some Lockean tabula rasa, a passive recipient of impressions; rhythmic perception is very much an active organization of sense-data, and when critics turn from the poem as object of perception to studying individual perceivers and their acts of perception, they enter a great wilderness of mostly uncharted terrain. (Preminger and Brogan 1068)

This volume chooses to ignore this well-intended warning. We find that the danger of unbridled relativism presumes an outdated conception of experience. Perceived rhythms are only subjective as long as the body is considered the possessor of sensations. Nietzsche’s reversal of this relation of ownership, however, obstructs the theoretical shortcut from empiricism to relativism. Again, affects precede the individual, human body and can therefore not be subjective by definition. In this introduction, we develop an interdisciplinary concept of rhythm that neither settles for formalism nor for relativism. We do not resort to cognitivism either, since it is our belief that this middle ground inherits the problems of both other approaches. It explains subjective sensations through (culturally or universally) shared patterns—so-called image schema—that are inscribed in the brain and/or other parts of the human body. In our view, however, cognitive theory thereby erases all the particularities that make an individual’s embodied experience a fascinating object of analysis. Whereas affects are our point of departure as well, we do not privilege the human subject. On the contrary, one of the aims of this introduction is to show how rhythm can actually help overcome traditional, subjectivist accounts of embodied experience. The first part of this introduction, “Hung Up on Bones,” uses Marshall McLuhan’s post-humanist concept of technologically extended bodies to transform rhythm from an inter-sensory into an inter-medial play of sensations. We argue that rhythmic

Introduction | 13 affects have the power to bring together the heterogenous, artificial parts that constitute McLuhan’s extended bodies. Still, we want to avoid the suggestion that rhythm only unites. Rhythmic affects can just as easily destroy these same bodies. An inter- medial, rhythmic interplay of affects can be either constitutive or damaging to them. The second part of the introduction, “Big Pills and Small Pills,” starts from the assumption that rhythm entails both meanings of pharmakon: medicine and toxin.1 We argue that it is neither possible nor desirable to reduce the concept to one of these two meanings. Rhythm neither cures nor poisons all bodies under all circumstances, but has the potential to do either. Its healing powers differ from body to body, and even more importantly, they are contingent on the manner in which rhythm is used. Rhythm can be poisonous or antidotal depending on the applied operation. The concept of rhythm that is developed in this introduction does not unite everyone and everything everywhere. In fact, not even all contributions in this volume subscribe to this concept. Although our account of rhythm is not as broadly applicable as a formal definition, it does open up possibilities for interdisciplinary research. Affects precede concepts, and are therefore shared across all disciplines. Embodied experience, however, is marked by cuts, shifts, and suspensions as much as the patterns and structures they produce. We argue that these rhythmic operations can and should not be universally applicable, but need to remain precise and specific. In fact, as announced in the title of this volume, we even prefer to speak of the concept in plural. “Arrhythmia” and “polyrhythmia” are central to our project, because these concepts—that I will discuss below—prevent rhythm to be mistaken for an omnipresent or omnipotent power. Only as spatially and temporally bounded—and thus plural— phenomenon, does it have the potential to structure and organize movement. As Plato claimed, movement and order are equally important to rhythm. However, he forgot to mention that it also takes interventions to distinguish these two aspects as such. Only through irreducible acts of displacement are ungraspable flows transformed into analyzable patterns, and the other way around. Still, these interventions come in many shapes and colors. Rhythmic operations are not universally applicable; they vary among different times, places, art forms, disciplines, persons, bodies, and senses. Displacements are not external but inherent to our concept of rhythm. We find that they should be acknowledged and repeated rather than ignored and avoided. This volume does not offer a consensual or harmonious account of rhythm. Its contributions, as described in the third part of this introduction “A Practice of Rhythm,” often over- lap, contradict, avoid, and even ignore one another. To us, however, such flaws and imperfections are indispensable to the approach to rhythm that we propose in this volume. We do not conceive them as accidental differences but as irreducible acts of displacement. Through such operations, this volume proposes a dynamic practice of rhythm rather than a fixed definition.

14 | Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 11–26

Hung Up on Bones Hip bone connected to my thigh bone My thigh bone connected to my leg bone My leg bone connected to my ankle bone I get so hung up on bones —Parliament, “Dr. Funkenstein”

In the chapter “The Gadget Lover” in Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan transforms Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of the body into a media-theoretical one. He argues that bodies are engaged in an ongoing process of mutual adaptation with technology. They are not only shaped by their physical capacities—if they have any— but also by their artificial extensions. For McLuhan, the primary function of such “gadgets” is to help the body with physical and mental tasks it needs to complete. Differently put, the invention of technological extensions is a defense mechanism of the body, which prevents overstimulation of its central nervous system:

In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offend- ing organ, sense, or function. Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load. (McLuhan 46)

McLuhan defines the body by its capacity to be stimulated by sensations. The central nervous system—rather than the heart or any other organ—is thus most vital to him. Whenever that “electric network” (47) gets overburdened, the body will get rid of the source of its stress. Prolonged exposure to bright lights leads to (temporary) blind- ness; sudden loud sounds cause (instant) deafness. This is what McLuhan defines as auto-amputation: to prevent a complete melt- down, the central nervous system cuts off the overburdened organ. Parallel to the amputation of its own functions, the body needs to find ways to compensate for these losses. Technological gadgets are its countermeasure. They are invented to relieve the body of the stress caused by overstimulation. In order to explain this, McLuhan mentions the obvious example of the wheel:

For example, in the case of the wheel as an example of an extension of the foot, the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and momentary media was the immediate occasion of the extension or “amputation” of this function from our bodies. The wheel as a counter-irritant to increased burdens, in turn, brings about a new intensity of action by its amplification of a separate or isolated function (the feet in rotation). Such amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through blocking of perception. (46–47)

Whereas technology starts out as a relieve for physical discomfort, it can easily become a cause of irritation or sickness itself. For McLuhan, the body can only handle

Introduction | 15 a limited amount of stimuli simultaneously. Its total perceptive capacity needs to be distributed over the individual senses. As a result, a person that stands in an extremely aromatic kitchen or an equally intense back alley will see, hear, smell, taste, and feel less than normal. Targeted amplification of one specific kind of sensory stimuli can thus be used as a method for narcosis. As an example, McLuhan mentions the Audiac: a device that confronts dental patients with very loud noises. Because of this amplification of auditory sensations, the patient no longer feels pain. This holistic concept of the body leads McLuhan to conclude that a hyperactive, and one-sided use of a certain technological extension can thus invoke the central nervous system to block out certain stimuli. In such cases, however, not only the sense that causes the stress gets numbed, but all the others as well. General narcosis is the body’s response to targeted irritation of a specific sense: “Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body” (49). McLuhan’s concept of sensory equilibriums allows us to reformulate the relation between rhythm and the body. The latter is no longer restricted to its physical capacities, it is now also constituted by its technological extensions. In effect, rhythm is now an inter-medial instead of an inter-sensory play: it redistributes technologically amplified affects between the different senses and thereby prevents the overstimulation of the central nervous system. McLuhan defines this process of redistribution as therapy:

Therapy, whether physical or social, is a counter-irritant that aids in that equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the central nervous system. Whereas pleasure is a counter-irritant (e.g., sports, entertainment, and alcohol), comfort is the removal of irritants. Both pleasure and comfort are strategies of equilibrium for the central nervous system. (47)

Therapy is the exact opposite of narcosis. In the latter case, the body is bombarded with amplified stimuli in order to numb central nervous systems. In the former, the same affects are used to reach a new equilibrium between the senses. Rhythm is the play between inter-medial sensations and thus seems to be closely related to therapy. Still, sensations can only be redistributed if the reached status quo is not eternal. In other words, the occasional disruption of a given equilibrium is just as important as its establishment. Rhythm can be used as an irritant as well as a counter-irritant. Rhythm is a strategy to either cause or cure the sensory self-amputations McLuhan describes. Whereas its therapeutic use may be more attractive, its narcotic applications should not be ignored either. More importantly, rhythm should not be mistaken for a panacea. Its power, for therapy as well as narcosis, is limited. Better yet, these treatments only work because of rhythm’s limitations. Apart from looking at this pill’s benefits, it may be even more important to determine its side effects. In order to

16 | Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 11–26 properly asses its medicinal potential for technologically-extended bodies, it is necessary to define the circumstances in which rhythm is a cause or a cure for sickness.

Big Pills and Small Pills They say the bigger the headache, the bigger the pill Baby, call me the big pill. —Parliament, “Dr. Funkenstein”

Rhythm is often treated as a panacea, an antidote to the alleged problems of so-called (post-)modernity, such as fragmentation, dispersion, and acceleration. The benefits of this big pill are substantial: it offers a form of identity that does not rest on shared values, ideals, or truths, but merely on a common division of space and time. Whether this structure is embraced or contested does not really matter. Even the battlefield is a place that unites differences.2 Rhythm’s healing powers do not depend on the patient’s approval of the cure. The pill does not have to taste nice in order to heal. Still, it would be a mistake to conceive the symptoms, the diagnosis, and the antidote as unique to the here and now. As we have mentioned above, even Plato already conceptualized rhythm as a structuring, organizing, and unifying movement. But whereas the Greek philosopher reserved this power for specific practices—in particular music and ethics—the subsequent trajectory of the concept has been one of emancipation from concrete human activity. Rhythm became increasingly autonomous, abstract, and metaphysical. This development reached its summit in German romanticism, when the philosopher Friedrich Schelling granted the antidotal concept of rhythm its ultimate formulation:” Within music itself, that particular informing of unity into multiplicity, and informing that is itself encompassed as a particular unity—in this case the real unity—is rhythm” (109). In this quote, rhythm is understood as a cosmic unifier. Conflicts and differences are either surface-effects or temporary obstacles toward the formation of a whole. Rhythm is the underlying force that already has or will unite everything. Romantic as this may sound, though, the idea of rhythm as a cure-all is still in fashion today. We would even argue that this antidotal concept dominates contemporary musical, philosophical, and commonsensical conceptions of rhythm. Take, for instance, this quote from French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, in which he prescribes rhythm to cure pathological cases:

Eurythmia (that of a living body, normal and healthy) presupposes the association of different rhythms. In arrhythmia, rhythms break apart, alter and bypass synchronization (the usual term for designating this phenomenon). A pathological situation agreed!—depending on the case; interventions are made, or should be make, through rhythms, without brutality. (67)

Introduction | 17 Rhythm: the big pill that regulates irregularities and cures all possible conditions, sorrows, and illnesses. Despite its immediate and persistent appeal, this panacea does not come without side effects. The first complication is what we call panrhythmia. By understanding rhythm as a cosmic unifier, the concept becomes hermetic and all- inclusive. There is no arrhythmia: even those events that do not fit, somehow have to fit. The antidotal concept of rhythm privileges the rule over the exception, repetition over difference, the whole over its parts, structure over event, and the existing order over change. In short, in this definition rhythm is a guard of being rather than a van- guard of becoming. A second related but slightly different side effect is monorhythmia. If rhythm unites everything, it cannot be multiple itself. There is no polyrhythmia: perceived differences between rhythms3 are only apparent. Closer inspection reveals that they are in fact manifestations of one and the same primordial beat. As long as rhythm is mistaken for a panacea, this concept not only transforms the plural into the single but also erases all differences within itself. Hyperrhythmia, which we here define as the condition whereby rhythm is entirely removed from practice, is a third complication of the antidotal concept. Autonomy transforms rhythm into a metaphysical perpetuum mobile that functions automati- cally without the need for interventions. People can choose to either follow or break with a rhythm, but neither of these acts will have an effect. Rhythm proceeds with or without them. Individuals are subjected to rhythm but can never become its subject. They are slaves to the rhythm. The fourth and final problem is that—despite, or maybe thanks to, the omnipres- ence and omnipotence that is attributed to it—rhythm is seen as a reactive tool rather than a creative force. Rhythm can merely mend together the pieces that were already broken. Its temporal mode is that of lag: rhythm is always (too) late: metarhythmia. It might be a cure-all, but it is not a vaccine. Rhythm cannot prevent the patient from getting sick. Since, in this antidotal concept, rhythm becomes everything and everything is rhythm, these side effects mostly harm the cure itself. In fact, we contend that rhythm’s transformation to panacea did not heal the universe, but made rhythm ill. Specificity and heterogeneity are not flaws but positive qualities of rhythm. Only as a concrete and local—thus plural—phenomenon does rhythm have the power to structure and organize. Without a link to at least one specific practice, the concept is reduced to a dead metaphor. This volume is an attempt to cure rhythm by debunking its nearly esoteric aura of a cosmic unifier. Fortunately, German romanticism does not only mark the culmination of the historical development outlined above, but also signals the beginning of a different concept of rhythm. In Philosophy of Art, Schelling argues that rhythm is not subordinate to temporality but the other way around. Rhythm structures time; the latter is

18 | Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 11–26 subjected to the former. This means that the specific temporality we diagnosed earlier as one of the side effects of the antidotal concept of rhythm is reversed: metarhythmia becomes prorhythmia. Rhythm does not mold a unity out of heterogenous elements, but heterogeneity is an effect of rhythm. Unwittingly and unwillingly, Schelling turns rhythm from a peacemaker into a war- monger. It is no longer only a structuring and organizing principle, but also a force of destruction. Rhythm only holds together what it first breaks. Rhythm is thus not just unifying; it is also pluralizing. Whereas Schelling still privileges the former over the latter, we propose to shift the emphasis. This is the first out of two ways in which we understand the title of this volume, Pluralizing Rhythm. The second way in which we understand our title refers to rhythm itself rather than its effects. Our title should be understood as a call for polyrhythmia. In this volume we want to pluralize rhythm in order to cure it of pan-, mono-, and hyperrhythmia. As outlined above, up until the nineteenth century rhythm’s history is marked by ever-increasing autonomy and hegemony. This process of emancipation is not only marked by gain but also by loss. Rhythm is not merely liberated from external restraints, but also removed from practice and everyday life. Before rhythm got metaphysical, it was a musical as well as an ethical principle. Praxis connected both initial meanings of the term. In fact, rhythm’s broader significance—and subsequently its emancipation—directly derives from the fact that it is not an abstract principle but a very concrete know-how. This is, for instance, apparent in one of the earliest and best-known reflections on rhythm: Book III of Plato’s Republic:

[M]usical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul; on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated grace- ful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar. (73)

In this quote, Plato distinguishes ethics from morality. The philosopher is concerned with the training of good citizens, but does not define any intrinsic characteristics or rules of conduct that should lead to the formation of such citizens. The value of rhythm and harmony consists in the fact that they teach a person to instinctively tell right from wrong without actually spelling it out. This does not mean that for Plato music is abstract and detached from life. The fact that harmony and rhythm are embedded in a specific practice, and correspond to a unique know-how, makes them

Introduction | 19 concrete by definition. Morality, on the other hand, always needs to abstract from the specificity of the here and now in order to define universalized and general norms, laws, and other rules. For Plato, ideally people would not need any imposed restric- tions to become decent citizens. Through proper musical training—hence the connection between ‘praxis,’ ‘to practice,’ and ‘practice’—they will eventually inter- nalize an infallible moral compass. Echoes of Plato’s ethical understanding of music can still be heard in German Romanticism. Unsurprisingly, however, the emphasis has now shifted from its didac- tic potential to its unifying power. In Ideas, for instance, Friedrich Schlegel claims: “Music is more closely related to morality, history to religion; for rhythm is the idea of music, but history deals with the primitive” (247). Just like Schelling, Schlegel privileges rhythm over time. For him, temporality—here in the form of history—is ultimately unfit as a structuring principle and is therefore linked to the primitive. Rhythm, on the other hand, has proven in music that it has the power to unite differences. Schlegel therefore suggests that the same force that manages to hold together notes or instruments may also be used to unite the individuals in a state. Contrary to Plato’s vision, music and ethics in Schlegel are not connected through a common praxis but synthesized into a transcendent unity. Despite these crucial shifts and differences, it is important to recognize what all these conceptualizations of rhythm have in common. From Plato to German Romanticism, rhythm has always been understood as an ethical as well as a musical principle. It has been invested with the potential to organize, discipline, and rule the self and others. Ethics is thus not secondary or external but an integral part of the concept of rhythm. It is thus no coincidence that Friedrich Nietzsche makes his intervention in rhythm’s conceptual history in an ethical rather than musical context. In “Of the Virtue that makes Small” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s proto-philosopher travels to a town he has visited before and notices that everything has shrunk. Wondering what has made everything smaller, Zarathustra observes that it is people’s rhythm, or, better yet, their lack of it: “Ask my foot if it likes their melodies of praise and enticement! Truly, to such a measure and tick-tock beat it likes neither to dance nor to stand still” (188–89). Rhythm is implied but not explicitly mentioned in this quote. Nietzsche only defines it negatively, in opposition to the notion of meter (or measure). Meter is a regular, cyclical pattern, best illustrated by the metronome or the clock. Both these mechanical devices, however, respect the flow of time, which is never interrupted, disrupted, or reversed. The divisions made by metronomes and clocks—later defined by McLuhan as machines that separate time from the rhythms of human experience4—are superimposed on temporal processes; they are quantitative rather than qualitative. Meter therefore does not have any structuring power of its own. It simply provides everything with a position according to predefined rules

20 | Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 11–26 or standards. Meter cannot recognize the new since its value is already predeter- mined. Moreover, it is important to realize that the German word for meter (“Takt”) is also part of the expression “den Takt angeben,” which literally means “to conduct” and figuratively “to rule.” In Zarathustra’s case, this connotation of the word is crucial. By imposing their measure on him, the inhabitants of the town try to rule over the philosopher. More precisely, they want Zarathustra to conform to the measure they have subjected themselves to: “They would like to lure and commend me to small virtue; they would like to persuade my foot to the tick-tock measure of a small happiness” (189). Meter equals moderation equals mediocrity. These are just a few of the names that Nietzsche’s “virtue that makes small” goes by. Zarathustra also mentions plenty of others: happiness, humbleness, generosity, and so on. This “bed- warfing” virtue appears in many different guises but its function is always the same: domestication. Even though the town’s inhabitants try to impose this virtue on Zarathustra, it would be a mistake to think they are in control over this measure. It is their morality that rules them. These people have a “small virtue” but no values, meter but no rhythm. Values and rhythms are creative, virtue and meter submissive. Nietzsche thereby brings in an aspect of relativity and temporality into the concept of rhythm. One person’s rhythm can become someone else’s meter. In the same fashion, someone’s value can become someone else’s virtue. These distinctions cannot be made independently of specific contexts: rhythm and meter are discursive notions. For Nietzsche, meter is not a structuring and organizing but a normalizing and domesticating power. This has to be understood literally. Meter is a force that produces rules, law, and standards. By juxtaposing rhythm to meter, Zarathustra transforms rhythm into a power that breaks with or stands outside these norms. Whereas meter is a conservative principle, rhythm is a critical or subversive political force. On the one hand, Nietzsche’s concept of rhythm marks a return to Plato. Both these philosophers conceive rhythm as a concrete and ethical rather than a metaphysical and moral force. As soon as it gets detached from praxis, rhythm loses its power to structure and organize. On the other hand, Nietzsche also clearly breaks with Plato’s philosophy. As opposed to Plato, Nietzsche’s rhythm does not lead to an undefinable but universal understanding of “good.” On the contrary, each rhythm separates good and evil in its own precise and specific manner. It does not teach a person to do the right thing, it simply urges one to act. In Plato, the concept of rhythm was inextricably linked to practice and harmony. Nietzsche shows that, in its subsequent development, the concept’s emancipation took the wrong direction. Instead of removing itself from practice, rhythm should have been separated from harmony. From Plato until Schelling, rhythm and harmony remained almost synonymous. Both principles are understood to mend a unity out of

Introduction | 21 plurality. Nietzsche, however, shows that they are distinct. The difference is simple: harmony is primarily unifying, rhythm pluralizing. Rhythm is not a principle of consensus but of dissensus. “Of the Virtue that makes Small” shows that agreement leads to meter and one (small) virtue whereas conflict brings rhythms and values. This places the distinction between meter and rhythm at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy. It is vital to his so-called transvaluation of all values. In order to truly understand pluralism, it is necessary to understand the excess of rhythmical practices. Rhythm should be clearly distinguished from meter. Nietzsche’s critique to his predecessors and contemporaries is both very simple and infinitely complex: all existing theories have failed to give an account of the difference between these two concepts. As long as events are conceived as part of a past, current, or future whole, rhythm does not exist. The romantic concept of rhythm, for instance, is exposed as meter in disguise. Schelling and Schlegel still prioritized the one over the many and— as a direct consequence—time over rhythm. Zarathustra, though, refuses to dance to the tick-tock of the clock. His feet demand more than the periodical repetition of the same. But, what exactly is this surplus value of rhythm? In just a few sentences, Zarathustra transforms rhythm from a metaphysical foundation to a philosophical enigma. Without even explicitly mentioning the term, Nietzsche’s proto-philosopher introduces a problem many twentieth-century philosophers failed to solve: what distinguishes rhythm from meter?5 We argue, however, that this long-standing enigma does not need to be solved. Better yet, solving the problem misses the point. Rhythm is not a problem for Nietzsche: it is the solution. In the prologue to Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: “I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you” (46). For Nietzsche, the difference between measure and rhythm lies in the unexpected, and can therefore not be defined once and for all. Arrhythmia: order needs an element of chaos, which is completely different from being chaotic. This element of chaos is an act rather than a quality. In order to perform such an unexpected act, an element of order is equally necessary. There is no omnipresent and omnipotent rhythm that structures everything in the same way. Instead, there are many rhythms that all organize in a unique manner. Arrythmia and polyrhythmia are both necessary to counter the aforementioned side effects of the antidotal concept of rhythm. Through Nietzsche, we can finally illuminate the second understanding of the title Pluralizing Rhythm. We believe that rhythm itself is and should be plural. In fields as diverse as music, culture, nature, and economy, rhythm can be seen as a phenomenon that simultaneously connects and divides. It suggests a certain measure with which people, practices, and cultures can comply. Yet, for this very reason rhythm can also function as a field of exclusion, contestation, and debate. In that sense, rhythm possesses an underestimated potential for knowledge production. Whereas its connecting force is often accentuated in the aesthetic, political,

22 | Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 11–26 and commercial usage of the term, the underexposed divisive aspect of rhythm is at least as important. Rhythm is not a panacea. It is neither omnipresent nor omnipotent. Still, this does not mean that it cannot cure some symptoms, just not all and—even more importantly—not all at the same time. Rhythm is an antidote that only works in small dosages. It does have the power to structure and organize, but only if it is treated as a local, specific, and singular phenomenon. In this volume, we focus on the particularities of different practices of rhythm, rather than come up with a general theory of the concept. Several small pills might be more effective than a big one.

A Practice of Rhythm This volume consists of contributions that combine the political, aesthetic, musical and theoretical dimension of rhythm. These essays consider the unifying as well as disruptive potentials of rhythm by performing a close analysis of texts and objects from contemporary arts, music and politics. In short, this volume complicates, disturbs and pluralizes the notion of rhythm. How recent “pre-revolutionary Cuban music” implicates our understanding of the contemporary is the focus of Timothy Yaczo’s essay “The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island,” which does so by exploring the complex relations between music, sound, rhythm, islandness, nostalgia, and globalization. He proposes two different settings for hearing the Buena Vista Social Club. As part of a musical world-making process, the first listening is connected to the rhetoric of world music; the second focuses on polyrhythmic features as a specific mark of “Caribbean” and “Cuban.” Yaczo argues that listening to the Buena Vista Social Club seems to affect senses of time and place, and that a listener is, in that process, dealing both with contemporary musical and political practices of rhythm. In his essay “Turning the Machine Into A Slovenly Machine: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and ‘I Feel Love,’” Tilman Baumgärtel discusses the rhythmic ambiguity and tension between the technological and the organic in the track “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer and her producer Giorgio Moroder. Through a close reading of the song and the conditions of its production, Baumgärtel comes to the conclusion that Moroder manages to transform artificially sounding synthesizer loops into an organic pulse. The producer thereby dissolves and suspends seemingly antithetical oppositions and turns them into displacements and decenterings. Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen analyzes the role of rhythm in hip hop music and culture. In her essay, “Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture: Rhythmic Conventions, Skills, and Everyday Life,” she points out the significance of aesthetics, and especially rhythm, as a meaning-creating feature. Stougaard Pedersen argues that this feature transgresses from rap itself to hip hop culture in a broader sociological sense. Her analysis focuses on a certain laid-back feeling—of

Introduction | 23 primarily old school groove-oriented songs—that influences the moves, gestures, and performance of hip hop attitude in an everyday sense. Dietmar Elflein’s essay “Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music” rethinks the role of rhythm in rock music in general and Heavy Metal in particular. The author tries to find an answer to the question: what attracts people worldwide to the culture and music of Heavy Metal? One of his answers is that Heavy Metal’s “glocal” attraction is connected to the rhythmic quality of the music. This essay introduces the concept of “rhythmic transgression” to designate the excess of power and control that structures both Heavy Metal culture and music. Marie Gelang’s “kairos, the Rhythm of Timing” is a study in the field of early rhetoric that investigates tempo and rhythm in a speaker’s nonverbal communication. Gelang explains and discusses kairos’s historical and contemporary uses. She thereby relates the concept to the sensing of the right moment, which is often described as timing in everyday experience. Apart from dealing with kairos on a conceptual level, Gelang’s essay also analyzes it in relation to an empirical study that discuss the teaching practices of university lecturers. In their collective essay “Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry,” Eva Lilja and Lena Hopsch transform rhythm into a tool for analyzing sculpture and poetry. Through an analysis of a poem by Sylvia Plath and one sculpture by Naum Gabo, they aim to broaden the understanding of rhythm in time, as well as the assimilation of rhythm in space. Lilja and Hopsch claim that the experience of being a moving body in a room is basic to any apprehension of rhythm. This definition is then carried out on the basis of cognitive theory and develops the concept of balance as a visual and a spatial phenomenon. In his essay “Postcolonial Prosody and Indo-Anglian Poetry,” Peter Groves explores the idea that poetic rhythm functions as a potent signifier of cultural difference and identity. He studies rhythm in the works of two Indo-Anglian poets, in which he discovers a clash between an Indian ‘rhythm of life’ and the metrics of English poetry. This essay analyzes the postcolonial problem of bringing together culture, language, and poetic forms through the concept of rhythm and the role of the pentameter. Groves thereby challenges and transforms English poetic rhythm. Shintaro Miyazaki, in his essay “AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies,” brings up the importance of rhythm in what he names the post-digital era. He discusses rhythm in the field of media-archaeology as an inter- modal tool with meaning-creating potential in both a techno-cultural and epistemological sense. Miyazaki does so by introducing and developing the concept of “algorhythm,” a portmanteau of “algorithm” and “rhythm.” This juxtaposition emphasizes how rhythm in a post-digital era can productively analyze cultural objects and their relation to media-based situations.

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Jodi Brooks explores the interplay between invisibility, temporal sensibility, and filmic caesuras in her essay “Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field.” Through readings of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) and King Vidor’s film Stella Dallas (1937), Brooks discusses the possibility of cinematic rhythm. To develop such a notion, she uses concepts like suspended beats, “missed” beats, and collaborative expectancies (Steven Feld) between film and spectator. “Invisibility’s Beat” thereby maps a field between rhythm, gaze, and filmic spectatorship. Rhythm, revolution, and “the One” are on Jan Hein Hoogstad’s mind in his essay “The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions.” In order to confront “the One” without collapsing it to a structured form, he departs from the idea that Brown’s musical intervention in “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” was revolutionary, and reads “revolution” as a complex, discursive operation marked by inherent ambiguity through intervention that emancipates rhythm by disrupting it. By cycling through input from diverse and divergent musicologists, Henri Lefebvre, and Deleuze and Guattari, Hoogstad carefully claims that revolutions must be rhythmic, that rhythms can only be constituted through interventions, and that the ongoing chain of displacements mark the revolutionary aspect of Brown’s practice of rhythm.

Introduction | 25 Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Cahoone. Malden (MA): Blackwell, 2003. Disseminations. Trans. Barbara Johnson. London: 109–16. Print. Continuum, 2004. 67–186. Print. ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R.J. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Print. Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Preminger, Alex, and T.V.F. Brogan, eds. The New Print. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP,1993. Print. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Trans. Stuart Elden and Plato. The Republic. Ed. Joslyn T. Pine. Trans. Gerald Moore. London: Continuum, 2004. Benjamin Jowett. Mineola: Dover, 2000. Print. Print. Schelling, Friedrich. The Philosophy of Art. Trans. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. 1989. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Schlegel, Friedrich. Lucinde and the Fragments. Nonmoral Sense.” From Modernism to Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: Lund, 1971. Postmodernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Print.

Endnotes

1. See Derrida’s essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” for Processed in this uniform way, time is separated further analysis. from the rhythms of human experience. The mechanical clock, in short, helps create the 2. See Heidegger’s essay “The Age of the World image of a numerically quantified and Picture” collected in The Question Concerning mechanically powered universe” (McLuhan 158). Technology. 5. Whereas this question may sound simple in 3. In Lefebvre, the notion of polyrhythmia theory, Zarathustra’s riddle—that comes in many paradoxically functions as this ultimate rhythm. different shapes and forms—proves to be impossible to solve. Theoreticians, such as 4. “As a piece of technology, the clock is a Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, George machine that produces uniform seconds, Bataille, Gaston Bachelard, and Henri Lefebvre, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern. have all failed to find an answer.

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¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island

Timothy Yaczo

If popular music really is a refrain, then there is strong case to be made that nostalgia, in practice, is an instrumentalisation of the refrain. Nostalgia, I want to suggest, is inbuilt in the refrain itself. The very structure of popular music, its inherent repetitiveness in other words, makes it an especially potent nostalgia-inducing agent. My implication is that nostalgia does not only concern the distant past, nor indeed is it only a matter of memory (sometimes memory does not come into it all). It is manifest in the present as repetition, and its function is not simply mnemic. (Buchanan)

It was the autumn of 2008 when I biked over to the music store Concerto on Utrechtsestraat in Amsterdam to purchase an album, Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall, which I had been anticipating for weeks.1 It was a live recording of a concert that had taken place on another continent nearly ten years earlier, featuring a group of aging Cuban men and women singing about a place and time existing through the rhythm of imagination. I first heard the Buena Vista Social Club while in Amsterdam years before that, when a friend played their eponymous debut album from 1997 during a round of poker. Since then I have been a fan of the group’s energetic music, characterized by fast and multi-textured acoustic instrumentation, upbeat lyrics, minor tones, boisterous percussion and bright brass, and where accents take precedence over meter. While Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall is eighty minutes of resurrected Cuban music in the United States, its allure is defi- nitely more widespread: the stacks of CDs and pervasive marketing in Concerto affirmed my hunch of a dedicated western-European audience.

¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island | 27 I quickly bought the CD and popped it in when I got home, cranking the volume to allow the precisely flavored buildup of each song to percolate throughout our living room’s space. Although I found it difficult to sit for the polyrhythmic fervor, I managed to open the liner notes to the first page and read the reprinted ten-year-old New York Times review of the concert. Portraying the event, the author wrote that:

The music was rich with tenderness and nostalgia, suggesting a world of tropical ease and pre-Revolutionary innocence. Part of Cuba’s new appeal to the outside world is the notion, partly illusory, that its isolation has made it a time capsule, maintaining styles that have been overrun by hectic commerciality elsewhere. But these Cuban musicians, an apparition made possible by shifts in politics, ambi- tion and taste, are not disappearing again. Mr. Gonzalez, Mr. Ferrer and other core members of the Buena Vista Social Club will be touring the United States in the fall, keeping Cuba’s past in the present. (Pareles 22)

In a way, the album to which I was listening was a sort of time capsule: since the 1998 concert at Carnegie Hall, guitarist Compay Segundo, percussionist Anga Díaz, singer Pío Leyva, pianist Rubén González, and singer Ibrahim Ferrer had all died (since the live album’s release, bassist Orlando López and guitarist Manuel Galbán have also passed). But I had to wonder: what could this “partly illusory” “new appeal to the outside world” mean? What was being situated in a statement like that? Or excluded? Cuban music has played an integral—formative—role in the evolution of jazz and “world music.” So what about the narrative of this particular band, or the music they play, could incite this nostalgic reaction, a pointed yearning for the “innocent” style of a perceived traditional and authentic Cuban sound? Why here, now, for these obscure musicians seemingly preserved only by cigar smoke and providence? Sure, it could simply be the ages of the musicians themselves that captures a feeling of nostalgia for listeners. It might be the songs, many of which were written well over five decades ago, and are now given fresh and tight interpretations by band members who had never played together as the Buena Vista Social Club. For those familiar with the PBS documentary of the group by director Wim Wenders, that romantic sentimentality of “keeping Cuba’s past in the present” might also be attributed to the tale of the group’s initial recording and production: the happenstance assemblage of musical masters long forgotten by both the politics of the American embargo on Cuba and by changes in the “traditional” Cuban musical forms of boleros, sons, and guajiras toward the nuevo canto sound. Or, at last, perhaps something more than simple exposure was being smuggled in the album’s distribution via the “world music” genre: that the Carnegie Hall performance somehow reflected an entire era for an audience to behold, installing the adjacent sentiment too, that “this is the way we expect Cuba’s music to have once and always sounded.”

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These retrospective moments, taking stock of our contemporary social and sonic totality by way of a siren from a perceived past, seem concomitant with other moments—dreams—of alternate futures. They amplify a dissonance from which the present is judged and found wanting. In 1998, the wanting took the political form of petitioning American, Dutch, and Cuban governments to secure visas for Buena Vista members in order to leave Cuba and perform at both Carnegie Hall in New York City and the Carré Theatre in Amsterdam. Here, if just for a moment, Buena Vista trig- gered a rethinking of the political arrangements policing social and sonic boundaries. For myself, this dialectic between past and future, and between politics and culture, resonates with the work Frederic Jameson offers for utopian impulses in culture. By shifting the discussion of utopias from content to representation (xiii), Jameson pro- pels a reading of contemporary politics allowing us to see our desires for the future as a means to promote a fissure with the present. Taking my cue from Jameson, I apprehend the Buena Vista Social Club as a contemporary Cuban musical jetsam washing up into Western earshot; like nuggets of utopia wedged downriver, they excite our desires for the possibility of that primal golden source relentlessly out of our reach upstream. A fugitive, resurrected sound, the pre-revolutionary rhythms of the Buena Vista Social Club flood our contemporary musical landscape and provide a glimpse of the entire terrain anew: our present understanding of our musical and political evolution is recalibrated, and in doing so, spurs imaginative and alternate possibilities for political futures. All of this, nonetheless, refers to a first reading of the Buena Vista Social Club as Cuban music. The group arrived on an album in 1997 through manifold rhythmic routes: African accents and cadences, the American Southwest and Southern-US blues, European and American salsas, and Caribbean turbulence to highlight a few proper-noun passageways. Another listening resounds a polyrhythmic play, not captured or managed by any one center or circumference, even if there are dynamics common among them, or motifs of “African,” “European,” or “Island” discretely recited through them. The theme of islands, and in particular, the Caribbean, is fas- cinatingly rethought through the work of Anonito Benítez-Rojo. For him, isolating Caribbean culture, including music, betrays the archipelagic temporal and spatial dynamics from which it emerges. In the case of the Buena Vista Social Club, Benítez- Rojo adds critical insight into how their blast-from-the-past cultural reception may be part of a Western seduction to capture and systematize the Caribbean region. For this contribution, I would like to propose a way of hearing the Buena Vista Social Club in two waves. A first, adjoining Frederic Jameson’s meditations on the utopian enclave with a sense of generative musical production offered through music scholar Simon Frith’s analysis on the rhetoric of “world music,” places Buena Vista Social Club in a process of musical world-making. Following this tributary invites a productive reading of the meaning of globalization through the “world music” genre.

¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island | 29 A second hearing, de-narrated by way of Antonio Benítez-Rojo, discerns a larger nest- ing process, which attunes the Buena Vista Social Club within a cultural and corpo- rate dynamic machine particular to the Caribbean. The first puts politically productive polyrhythms within earshot. The second makes audible a hyper-connected narrative within which we might recognize the Buena Vista Social Club as an object of cultural knowledge with particular echoes in a musical moment. While Jameson can help trace past rhythms to give us a new context for the present, Benítez-Rojo shows us how there are certain rhythms that came before context, and even displace the desire for it. Taken together, I hope to amplify how the rhythms delivered by way of Buena Vista affect the sense of time and place ascribed to contemporary musical knowledges and political practices.

The Utopian Enclave Recorded music is part of a dialectical evolution in human rhythms, and as such, finds motility in a process of cultural differentiation, which include technological innovations. Composition, improvisation, and geography are but a few of the vectors ener- gizing difference in music. They can create new styles, re-imagine faded sounds, or soft-step intriguing hybridities. Reading Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, Frederic Jameson advances this hermeneutic of cultural motility when positioning his analysis of utopianisms (Jameson 14). For Jameson, a metaphysic, like cultural differentiation in this context, would “posit something like an undifferentiated substance which begins internally to differentiate itself into so many related but distinct, semi- autonomous ‘systems’” (14). We can populate and characterize this hermeneutic through music as well: western classical and opera hives off be-bop and big band; the lagoon of Les Paul, blues and folk recirculates into rock and pop, like The Beatles and Beck; mixing currents magnify Ravi Shankar and Bob Dylan; Bob Marley and Gorillaz emerge from further juxtapositions. Some recordings lose audibility or are never made at all as the process gestates. Multiplication, harvesting, and diffusion of sounds are all coexistent in this system of differentiation. Departing from this foundation, Frederic Jameson considers utopianism, and writes about the historical formulations which give rise to utopian impulses and utopian projects. It is my sense that reading the Buena Vista Social Club as nostalgic, or “lost,” music approaches the same collection of impulses resonant with utopian imaginings, specifically with the notion of utopias as enclaves. With regard to the possibility of such enclaves within culture, Jameson posits how:

we can begin from the proposition that Utopian space is an imaginary enclave within real social space, in other words, that the very possibility of Utopian space is itself a result of spatial and social differentiation. But it is an aberrant by-product, and its possibility is dependent on the momentary formation of a kind of eddy

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or self-contained backwater within the general differentiation process and its seemingly irreversible forward momentum. (15)

Here, the space of utopian enclaves occupy something seemingly displaced, left out, forgotten. As with the time capsule metaphor in Pareles’s New York Times article, utopian space is real space in this world, but seemingly not of it. The temporal fulcrum of these different spaces is bolstered by the Buena Vista Social Club’s Carnegie Hall performance itself: in the refrain of the song “Veinte Años,” Omara Portuondo sings out “Hoy represento al pasado/No me puedo conformar” (“Today I represent the past/I cannot conform [to the change]”). From this, we could read that utopian imaginings gain traction when a vision of the past emerges through a certain vision of the present. Indeed, though Jameson theorizes about grand epistemological paradigms in this utopian process, its my argument that smaller enclaves like the Buena Vista Social Club (when heard as resistant enclaves) can produce active kernels of utopia, which radically re-imagine the relations of regions within the differentiation process. In any case, music engages the senses. Be it a song or a concert, music has temporal requirements that occupy cognitive attention for a certain duration. Unlike many material objects, playing and listening to music persistently energizes memory and emotions. A purchased CD will never have identical interpretations regardless of the number of times it is listened to by a single person or multiple people. “In Cuba the music flows like a river,” writes Ry Cooder, a musician on and producer of both Buena Vista Social Club albums, “it takes care of you and rebuilds you from the inside out” (Buena Vista Social Club 3). This reaction to Cuban music in particular exhibits how a person can “belong” to music, even if the music can never “belong” to any person. In other words, musical experiences are an integral aspect of how we come to know ourselves and our identities, as well as how we articulate that subjectivity at any one moment. Jameson states that:

the fundamental dynamic of any Utopian politics (or of any political Utopianism) will therefore always lie in the dialectic of Identity and Difference, to the degree to which such a politics aims at imagining, and sometimes even at realizing, a system radically different from this one. (xii)

If, in the flux of musical and social differentiation, we can be remade, or “rebuilt” like Cooder, then investigating recorded music alongside utopian projections proves a fruitful endeavor for productive politics. The quick assemblage, recording, and diffusion of Buena Vista Social Club’s sound therefore presents an intriguing enclave in recorded music history. At the PBS website for the band and its documentary, this rupture is characterized in the following passage:

If you’d been at the Buena Vista Social Club in Havana, circa 1949, history itself would have danced before your eyes. And it does so once again, through the music

¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island | 31 and the film. We return to the proscribed Island, a place that was rendered at once mythic and hopelessly superficial through the lens of the Cold War. We also return to a past that was virtually proscribed in Cuba itself . . . It is the story of one of the most unique musical narratives of our time. Its impact has been not only of bringing a crew of great musicians out of ignominy on the island, but also of providing, for audiences in the U.S. and Europe, a kind of Rosetta Stone, a way to interpret the Latin influence on world music over the last half century. (Martinez)

Here we are transported to an imaginative place without political, ethnic, or economic tensions. This is music the whole world can enjoy. The fantasy of the Rosetta Stone suggests the revelation of a “lost map” of sorts, whereby only now can we step back and understand our contemporary musical situation. Upon hearing the Buena Vista Social Club we can experience the social totality of our musical and political present and trace the routes by which we have arrived over the last half-century. The mythical island journey upon which we embark by simply registering the Buena Vista Social Club contains the possibility of radically revisioning our seemingly irrevocable current momentum rife with political, economic, and ethnic tensions. Seemingly exogenous discourses, like Buena Vista Social Club’s fermented Cuban sounds, reformulate how we hear the now. Jameson confirms that at the moment such externals—internal to the differentiation process—employ us to take stock of our totality, utopian impulses appear. He explains that:

Such enclaves are something like a foreign body within the social: in them, the differentiation process has been momentarily arrested, so that they remain as it were momentarily beyond the reach of the social and testify to its political powerlessness, at the same time that they offer a space in which new wish images of the social can be elaborated and experimented on. (16)

Havana music before the Cuban Revolution is beyond the reach of the social, but it can be imagined with the aid of cultural memory, thrusting the listener into thoughts of how both musical and social landscapes can be reconceived. Jameson characterizes the space of utopian investment as a monument that cannot be the whole yet simultaneously attempts to express it. Here we hear how the resistance of the enclave saddles nostalgia. The pre-revolutionary sonic shrapnel, refrained and reor- ganized in the present, delivers the nostalgia of “lost rhythms” and monumental- izes it in the process. Tellingly, as the PBS website encourages, our Buena Vista Social Club enclave lends itself to reimagine our pre-contemporary past through the modern resurrected sounds in our contemporary present. This musical Rosetta Stone does not decode a history we have already accepted; rather, it encodes a projection of a history we wish to inaugurate now, with the Buena Vista Social Club at the frontier.

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World Music as a musical genre can also be considered within the context of a utopian enclave. Buena Vista Social Club formed as part of a project by World Circuit Records, but, prior to that, World Circuit participated in the inception of its larger cultural project called “world music.” The “world music” genre was first outlined in a London pub in 1987 by a conglomerate of record labels seeking to expand enthusiasm for obscure musics (Frith 305). Inspiring increased and easier purchases of non-Western music in stores was itself a rethinking of the consumer landscape of recorded music, but that rethinking also encountered the obvious accusation that genre-labeling certain sounds “ghettoizes most of the world’s music” (Byrne). The concern is clear, in part, because of the vagueness of the term “world music,” which would on its face seem to indicate the music included would be “all the music of the world,” but in practice refers to certain music otherwise excluded from the general selection. For the group of utopi- anist record labels in 1987, however, the aim was to cease excluding non-Western music by reconceptualizing its description into something recognizable for the general population. The tension created by the campaign for “world music” is characterized by one of its co-creators, Ian Anderson from Rogue Records, when he writes that:

It was simply a great idea, followed up by a lot of unprecedented co-operation between enthusiasts . . . Long after all the dust has settled, who knows what was really going through Paul Simon’s mind when he set off to record Graceland? Yes, he was able to rejuvenate his career and enjoy the fruits of a multi-million seller with music that couldn’t have been made without the contribution of outside-unknown black South African musicians. But was he aware of the political minefield he was entering over the cultural boycott? Was he an ’80s Pat Boone figure, watering down black music just to gain success with his white audience? Or was he blindly pro- pelled into the project by an enthusiasm for music he’d personally discovered and wanted to share with others? Who are we to judge, without exposing our own prejudices, jealousies and pre-conceived ideas? . . . [The ‘world music’ genre] has greatly helped international understanding and provoked cultural exchanges — people who’ve found themselves neighbours in the same box have listened to each other and ended up making amazing music together. (Anderson)

New possibilities and awareness were integral to both the motivation for “world music” as well as its subsequent cultural differentiation. Bringing “foreign” artists like the Buena Vista Social Club, King Sunny Ade, Youssou N’Dour, Thomas Mapfumo, and Nadka Karadjova into the larger social (to which Jameson refers)2 attested to it’s political powerlessness to insulate, and exclude those sounds. Even if these artists found themselves in the same proverbial box, the idea of “world music” made for a new musical culture, organized around various new musical signifiers. The sonic space that opened as a result actively called for new imaginings of the sounds and politics of the social.

¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island | 33 The generative politics resulting from this continuous flux of the external-internal sound, the music from “out there” here, can be specifically sketched. Eliades Ochoa, the Buena Vista Social Club guitarist heard most prominently on the track “El Carretero,” now has the opportunity to “dream” about exploring worlds outside of this island of Cuba while knowing he can return at any time (Erlich). His situation is no longer extraordinary; music that challenges listeners to forge a dialogue between our political past and future are part of a world-making process. Further, that the Clinton administration quietly prosecuted and fined US-American Ry Cooder 25,000 dollars for violating the Trading With The Enemy Act for his travel to and recordings in Cuba in the 1990s (Smith), and that this was greatly overshadowed anyway by the nearly two million copies of both albums purchased and circulated, perhaps demonstrates yet another type of challenge through (and to) exchange made salient by the consumer tactics of the “world music” genre, here for example, to decline US-American border policy. Cuba, although always an island connected with the Caribbean, expands its archipelagic qualities at the micro/individual level as well as at the macro/world level. The Buena Vista Social Club finds itself in this very fissure. On evaluating how much music plays a role in shaping politics, Simon Frith writes how:

On the one hand, music plays a role in turning a class-in-itself into a class-for-itself. Vague feelings of ethnic affiliation become a self-conscious ethnic identity, as shared myths and memories are articulated musically, given instrumental, rhythmic and lyric form. On the other hand, people are mobilized by music materially, as crowds brought together to make events; concerts offer, in themselves, the experience of collective power. Under certain circumstances, then, music becomes a source of collective consciousness which promotes group cohesion and social activities that in turn have political consequences. (Frith 317)

Even though the Buena Vista Social Club has encountered political resistance (as with Cooder’s embargo troubles noted above, but most publicly notable in Miami, Florida),3 the group cohesion promoted by the band’s sound (as well as its method of delivery through World Circuit) is one of a “global” consciousness. The embargo has always been a political flashpoint, but the Buena Vista Social Club presents a unique occasion in that the cultural and political discourses orbiting the group communicate a deep sense of interconnectedness amongst Cuba and the world despite (as well as on behalf of) whatever political and musical machinations attempt to insulate that sound. This is not to suggest that the presence, or, rather, contemporary emergence, of the Buena Vista Social Club promises to solve the fundamental social and political problems between Cuba and the West, but it does produce a sonic intervention which exposes the cultural polyrhythmic operations that have been continuously at play around and within the embargo.

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Reimagining vectors of power relations was a key part of a Buena Vista Social Club side-project album, entitled Rhythms del Mundo: Cuba. The tracks on this album, released in 2006, are remixed “Latinized” versions of mainstream artists such as Jack Johnson, Radiohead, Coldplay, and the Arctic Monkeys.4 The tsunami that obliterated parts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand in December of 2004 motivated the album’s charitable gesture, for sales went toward raising awareness of global warming. Inter-related politics can come from unexpected sources. This album strongly demonstrates how “world music” can challenge how we think about the “we” as a self-enclosed unit in music and culture by accentuating its relational character between musicians, producers, and geographies. Art that transports listeners to alternative futures with radically different identities and tastes can offer useful political impulses. Coupling this aspect of “world music”—keeping Buena Vista Social Club in mind particularly—with innovative consumptive practices returns us to a sea of utopian projects. Jameson notes that:

This is a figure which then usefully allows us to combine two hitherto contradictory features of the relation of Utopia to social reality: on the one hand, its very existence or emergence certainly registers the agitation of the various ‘transitional periods’ within which most Utopias were composed (the term ‘traditional’ itself conveying this sense of momentum); while, on the other, it suggests the distance of the Utopias from practical politics, on the basis of a zone of the social totality which seems eternal and unchangeable, even within this social ferment we have attributed to the age itself. (15)

In this case, the “practical politics” distanced by utopias are exhibited by the political administration of Cuba’s music before Buena Vista Social Club’s emergence. Music discovered a way past a polarized world, and through its own insularity. What is at stake here for the Rhythms del Mundo: Cuba album is “less a sense of subjective instability than the negotiation of new cultural alliances,” ones that seek to “imagine new, utopian worlds” (Frith 318). We can now re-hear that New York Times article from the introduction: when it expresses how the Buena Vista sound “suggests a world of tropical ease and Pre- Revolutionary innocence” (22), the music does just that. While listening to music can have an effect of displacing emotions or location, this music mentally and emotionally transports a listener to that imagined place and space of romantic Cuba by cap- turing certain memories and projecting others. It also demonstrates how sounds of sublime nostalgia and tropical ease, once buried in an island’s past, can energize and compel us to action as they emerge from their enclave—reimagining our social and musical reality. This should not be mistaken as the power of mere romanticism, since this “tropical ease” emerges through politics by way of political displacements and not despite them. The dialectic of politics and music emergent now with Buena

¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island | 35 Vista unmoors us from the arrangement of politics which gave it occasion; in that way it opens space to imagine further interventions for productive politics. With this listening, we can hear the meaning of globalization through “world music” by recognizing the complexity of Buena Vista’s sound as the global in the local and the enclave within the global.

The Repeating Island Recently, a few friends and I went to Café Alto near Leidseplein in Amsterdam. That evening, in the long and narrow pub space, the Latin jazz and fusion band Conjuto Amsterdam were playing. Their sound brought together Cuban, Dominican, Venezuelan, Dutch, American, and African components in energetic dialogue. At one point, they played a rendition of “Pueblo Nuevo,” a song composed by Buena Vista Social Club pianist Rubén González. With Roset van Oss on piano punctuating the danzón section, it became clear to me what we were experiencing was in fact another spiral of the Caribbean reaching all the way to The Netherlands and beckoning us back imaginatively. The theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo, in his work The Repeating Island, motivates us to think of this cultural exchange in terms of “flows and interruptions” (6). For him, the relationship between the Peoples of the Sea (later discursively ordered as the Caribbean) and the world which was brought there continuously reappropriates its own influences. “Rhythm, in the codes of the Caribbean, precedes music, including percussion itself,” writes Benítez-Rojo, reminding how it is “something that was already there, amid the noise” (18). The enclave/world negotiation begins to break down, because in this way, we can listen to the Buena Vista Social Club as nothing new to the world; we hear it as just another spiraling vector of the Peoples of the Sea’s cultural gestation in polyrhythm and metarhythm. Relating a “narrative of rhythm” of the Peoples of the Sea through its African preludes, in one way, Benítez- Rojo emphasizes:

[T]he African practice of immediate (transhistorical) legitimation does not confine itself merely to the polyrhythmic narration of the griot, or storyteller . . . but rather extends throughout the entire sociocultural superstructure with the result that each act, each utterance refers in one way or another to a rhythm-langue that underlies everything, that precedes everything, that places itself in the very root of all processes and things. (170)

If we were to take the Buena Vista Social Club synchronically—as its popular reception has in the last fifteen years—we would come upon an approximate date and place: Carnegie Hall in 1998. But as Benítez-Rojo suggests, while this would demonstrate a rhythm that appears within the margins of the social, it would be disingenu- ous overall to the infinite differentiations and diffusions of Caribbean sounds which find themselves in myriad cultural tidal pools globally. The seduction otherwise is

36 | Timothy Yaczo Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 27–42 why, it would seem, Benítez-Rojo asserts that in specific performances by Peoples of the Sea, narrators (or musicians, as it were) do not simply recount rhythms: they put them into play by listening and recounting themselves through them (168–69). Buena Vista is not original, but originating from this process of flow and interruption throughout history. Benítez-Rojo characterizes this system as the “Caribbean Machine,” and, as such, is:

[A] machine very different from those we’ve been discussing up to now. In any event, the notion of polyrhythm (rhythms cut through by other rhythms, which are cut by still other rhythms)—if it takes us to the point at which the central rhythm is displaced by other rhythms in such a way as to make it fix a center no longer, then to transcend into a state of flux—may fairly define the type of performance that characterizes the Caribbean cultural machine. (18)

The world was “ready” for Buena Vista as a sublime pre-Revolutionary sound in 1998 precisely because we had already culturally appropriated that sound to be interpreted in that way. Figuratively, then, Buena Vista Social Club’s story is simultaneously the story of Bizet’s Carmen, I Love Lucy, Gábor Szabó, Ravel’s Bolero, Gloria Estefan, salsa fusions in Tin Pan Alley, and communism. We can hear Dizzy Gillespie’s 1985 concert in Havana with Arturo Sandoval and Gonzalo Rubalcaba both forming and being formed—trumpeted, that is—by the Buena Vista Social Club. Conceptually, the rhythms of Buena Vista inciting a nostalgic reception from Western audiences can be heard as a percussive echo-effect: they are “different” but not exceptional because Western music is fluidly part of what constitutes the rhythms as Cuban or Caribbean. Those “traditional” sounds to which our collective nostalgia guides us become washed away through the waters of the Cuban archipelago. To the extent that Buena Vista can be heard as an isolated sonic “time capsule,” it simultaneously represents how that concept is a reaction—a creation and dream—when we know full well there are prior claims, prior paths to its rhythms. The rhythms were always there in the Caribbean, though hearing them now may reconstitute our contemporary soundscape. Here, new beginnings erase previous beginnings. Therefore, in order to re-hear the Buena Vista Social Club through the Caribbean Machine, it is necessary to listen to it as its complex chain of signifiers, part of a historically-driven “urge to systematize the region’s political, economic, social, and anthropological” as well as sonic dynamics (Benítez-Rojo 1). Accomplishing this through Benítez-Rojo’s framework, the concept of “world music” travels to bring in imperial and post-colonial sonic hybridities. The etymological beats of “world music” become “Western” in their articulation, by territorializing the music both spatially (in consumption) and sonically (via the multitude of cognitive canals). The play of rhythms in Rhythms del Mundo: Cuba illuminates how “world music” expands from islands with skin drums and spirals to include tourist simulacrums, philanthropic

¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island | 37 politics, the Voyager missions’ Golden Records, xenophobic violence, acoustic fetishes, and boy-band pop acts. Returning to our first wave hearing of Buena Vista as a utopian enclave, we can thus diffuse its placement through the multiplicity of correspondences manifesting throughout time and space. For Adam Krims, imagining a group like Buena Vista as a resistant enclave to global capital forces “could, at least temporarily, help listeners (and perhaps performers) feel better about their environment; but then to celebrate that symbolic ‘resistance’ fetishizes the artistic gesture and thus obscures its ultimate compliance with the same political/economic forces that structure the gesture in the first place” (Krims 49). Krims displaces the “we” in “world music” in another way, a way which Benítez-Rojo might argue “decodes” a proverbial “we” by “reducing” it to compliance within recognizable institutions, and, thus, reinscribing how differences are prearranged (170). Embracing the rhythms of Buena Vista Social Club as discrete is simultaneously the appreciation of what “we” have already (dis)covered from the Peoples of the Sea; it promotes a myth that separates and distinguishes the band’s particular sound from its global incubation through time and space. It is possible still to read globalization through the cultural meanings of Buena Vista Social Club and “world music,” but only by problematizing how the differentiation processes circumscribing globalization attaches significance to the rhythms involved. For those who are not Peoples of the Sea, the sound of Buena Vista over there is welcomed/consumed according to local cultural codes in existence here. So what happens when we encounter those “foreign bodies” within the larger social totality? For Benítez-Rojo, “the mambo, the cha-cha-cha, the bossa nova, the bolero, salsa, and reggae happen; that is to say, Caribbean music did not become Anglo- Saxon but rather the latter became Caribbean within a play of differences” (21). Here, the music of Buena Vista is not intrinsically nostalgic, “world,” or “traditional”; instead, it became heard as such through the play of politics, classifications, and the sum of sonic orderings to which we are each uniquely attuned. All is not lost for Benítez-Rojo, however; so long as the desire involved in this process refers to non- violent routes, the “foreign” interacting with the “traditional” are diffracted by each other in ways that speak toward a “critical coexistence of rhythms” (Benítez-Rojo 28). Buena Vista Social Club is inextricably bound by this “critical coexistence of rhythms.” The pools of symbols, language, or emotions from which we might draw upon to enter “world music” are themselves constitutive of regulatory discourses. To assume “we”—or, indeed, the band—have “ownership” of this music or experiences of it installs Buena Vista as the detached narrator of their relations, and con- ceals the interdependency at play. Does this expunge the possibilities of personal self-creation music can have on subjectivities, as evidenced in the previous section? Depending on its peaceful inauguration, the “critical coexistence” can be a productive process, and therefore can broadcast those self-reflexive moments (while

38 | Timothy Yaczo Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 27–42 understanding that those changes are themselves evidence of other broadcasts). Benítez-Rojo outlines a permutation between consumerism, identity, and the Caribbean Machine when he writes that:

Contrary to the opinions of many, I see no solid reasons to think that the culture of the Peoples of the Sea is negatively affected by the cultural ‘consumerism’ of the industrial societies. When a people’s culture conserves ancient dynamics that play ‘in a certain kind of way,’ these resist being displaced by external territorializing forms and they propose to coexist with them through syncretic processes. But aren’t such processes perhaps a denaturing phenomenon? False. They are enriching, since they contribute to the widening of the play of differences . . . Culture is a discourse, a language, and as such it has no beginning or end and is always in transformation . . . Thus we may speak of cultural forms that are more or less regional, national, subcontinental, and even continental. But this in no way denies the heterogeneity of such forms. (20)

Therefore, the process of cultural differentiation to which Jameson speaks and Frith lauds, is archipelagic in the sense that the creative dynamism involved does not eradicate cultural originations or rhythmic recitations; that is, the “critical coexistence of rhythms” particular to the Caribbean constantly dialogue, refer back to one another, germinate relationally, and emerge communally.

Pluralizing Rhythms Neither of the waves of hearing the Buena Vista Social Club outlined above speaks to a universal truth about their sound. On one hand, Frederic Jameson permits a hearing of Buena Vista as a forgotten artifact, which reimagines our larger political and social musicality. Frith bolsters this departure, exhibiting how such enclaved sounds can help decipher the cultural meaning of globalization and interconnectedness in which we find ourselves contemporarily. On the other hand, Antonio Benítez- Rojo might hear Buena Vista Social Club as just one stream emanating from within and without a larger Caribbean Machine that urges an appropriation of island culture. Through Jameson we can find the uniqueness of Buena Vista and put it forth in a generative process of utopianism. Through Benítez-Rojo, we scatter that nostalgic sentiment and (re)(dis)cover the dialectic spirals which give it occasion in unannounced, but interconnected, ways. Perhaps in doing so, Benítez-Rojo attempts to grasp the social totality of the Peoples of the Sea, and finds the “critical coexistence of rhythms” within an ordering of enclaves. Or, perhaps, when Frith theorizes a widening play of differences on account of increased “world music” circulation he comes per- ilously close to proselytizing the Caribbean Machine. When I listen to the Buena Vista Social Club as a recording, or Conjuto Amsterdam as an audience of the melody, I allow myself to be put into play: attaching meaning while listening to the many

¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island | 39 meanings inciting its presence. Cuba, the Peoples of the Sea, a café stage, and my living room are mutually echoed, and inseparably audible. Benítez-Rojo brings us back to the island, and its seeming insularity. He writes that “[a]n island can, at a given moment, bring closer together or move farther apart cultural components of diverse origins with the worst of possible results—which, luckily, is not the rule—while on a contiguous island the seething and constant interplay of transcontinental spume generates a fortunate product. (29) This is the optimistic view of Buena Vista Social Club: that its “insularity” is closer to an interplay of “islandness,” and that while something is taken, something is also given. The cultural moment the Buena Vista Social Club presents is a scene of hyper-connected musical evolutions, political power, and imaginative capitalism. It is intimately coexistent with the sound of the chaotic beat of the Peoples of the Sea, part of someone’s utopia, as well as with our continuing polyrhythms.

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Works Cited

Anderson, Ian. “World Music History.” fRoots Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1998. magazine. Southern Rag Ltd., 201 (March 2000): 175–85. Print. n.p. Web. 29 Dec. 2008. Frith, Simon. “The Discourse of World Music.” Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Western Music and its Others: Difference, Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. 2nd Representation, and Appropriation in Music. ed. Trans. James E. Maraniss. Durham: Duke UP, Ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh. 1996. Print. Berkeley: U of California P,2000. 305–22. Print.

Buchanan, Ian. “Deleuze and Pop Music.” Jameson, Frederic. Archaeologies of the Future: Australian Humanities Review 7 (Aug. 1997): The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science n.p. Web. 15 April 2009. Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Print.

Buena Vista Social Club. Buena Vista Social Club. Krims, Adam. Music and Urban Geography. New World Circuit Records, 1997. CD. York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

———. Buena Vista Social Club At Carnegie Hall. Levine, Art. “Viva ‘Buena Vista Social Club’.” World Circuit Records, 2008. CD. Salon.com. Salon Media Group, 3 March 1999. Web. 5 Jan. 2009. Byrne, David. “I Hate World Music.” The New York Times 3 Oct. 1999. Web. 19 Dec. 2008. Martinez, Rubén. “Introduction.” PBS presents Buena Vista Social Club. Public Broadcasting Erlich, Reese. “Cuban Musicians Choose To Service, n.d. Web. 4 Jan. 2009. Stay and Play.” NPR Weekend Edition Saturday. Nat’l Public Radio, 18 Oct. 2008. Web. Pareles, Jon. “POP REVIEW; Ceiling Fans, Courtly 4 Dec. 2008. Men And a Whiff Of Old Cuba.” The New York Times 3 July 1998. Web. 5 Jan. 2009. Foucault, Michel. “Different Spaces.” Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: The Essential Works Smith, Caspar Llewellyn. “From the Dust.” The of Foucault 1954–1984. Volume Two. 1984. Observer. Guardian News and Media, 4 March Trans. Robert Hurley. Ed. James Faubian. 2007. Web. 13 Aug. 2011.

Endnotes

1. In addition to the gracious and insightful be heard as a modern musical heterotopia where assistance from the editors, this article would cultural differentiation is refracted through a not have been possible without the reviews certain contemporary pedagogy of the seemingly and support of Murat Aydemir and Michaela archaic. See Foucault at 179 for his explanation Frischherz. of the mirror as heterotopia, but more so at 182–83 where I find the Polynesian vacation 2. Jameson’s spatial explanation of the utopian villages example akin to the spatial and temporal enclave as a “foreign body within the social” is translocation of Buena Vista Social Club’s precisely the type of relation I sense Foucault reception. had in mind when discerning the appearance and function of heterotopias. To the extent that 3. A year before the premiere of Wenders’s Buena Vista is a rhythmic dislocation of our documentary in Miami, a music conference where contemporary musical knowledge, the band can some Buena Vista members were present (also

¿Y Tú, Qué Has Hecho De Mis Ritmos? The Buena Vista Social Club and the Repeating Island | 41 in the same city) had to be briefly cleared nevertheless exhibits how the Buena Vista Social because of a bomb threat (see Levine). While it Club provides forums for discursive complexity is not entirely clear to me why a group of anti- over the contemporary politics of the embargo. Castro Cuban Americans would protest a band associated with pre-Castro music, its publicity 4. See rhythmsdelmundo.com/cuba.

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Turning the Machine into a Slovenly Machine: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and “I Feel Love”

Tilman Baumgärtel

The track “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer still seems to come out of another world. Even though the song was produced three decades ago, it still sounds alien and futurist. And the world, out of which “I Feel Love” came, has been built out of loops, nothing but loops. The song rattles on and on like a machine gun. The loops appear deceptively simple at first. “I Feel Love” is based on the electronic throb of a pattern out of a few synthesizer notes the sequencer repeats over and over and occasionally transposes. But in the framework of these minimalist preconditions the track develops a field of rhythmic differences, deviations, and shifts. The blunt, mechanical thumping of a machine turns into complex polyrhythms, strict rule turns into confusing diversity, and eventually becomes an organism out of repetitions. Even Donna Summer herself eventually got lost in the confusing labyrinth of rhythms in “I Feel Love.” In this essay I want to show how producer Giorgio Moroder succeeded in transforming the clatter of the synthesizer loops of “I Feel Love” into an organic pulse with the help of a relatively simple production trick. Then, I want to discuss how “I Feel Love” systematically dissolves and collapses antithetical oppositions. This production trick not only lends an organic quality to the mechanical loops, but, in the process, amalgamates nature and technology on a musical level. At the same time, the oppositions between discipline and liberty, obligation and self-determination, repetition and difference, and Eros and Thanatos are suspended in “I Feel Love.”

The Munich Machine “I Feel Love”—lyrics and vocals by Donna Summer, composition and production by Giorgio Moroder—is generally considered to be the first disco track, which was

Turning the Machine into a Slovenly Machine: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and “I Feel Love” | 43 produced—with the exception of the singing—completely electronically.1 That makes the track the “Urpflanze” of techno, house, and other forms of electronic dance music. “I Feel Love” was a number-one hit around the globe, and has not lost its appeal today. With its meandering loops, it still does not fail to make people dance at birthday and wedding parties as well as at techno raves. Singer Donna Summer was an African-American woman who had come to Munich from the United States in 1968 to play a bit part in the German version of the hippie musical Hair. Giorgio Moroder is an Italian musician and composer, who had risen in Munich at the end of the 1960s as a producer of successful pop songs. In 1974 the singer-producer duo had its first international hit with “Love To Love You Baby.” “Love To Love You Baby” was recorded with predominantly traditional instruments, but its musical structure, which combines a few musical patterns over and over in different permutations, already anticipated “I Feel Love” through its relentless loops. “Love To Love You Baby” is a disco version of the notorious 1969 hit “Je t’aime . . . moi non plus” by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, a quite straightforward—and very successful—musical simulation of coitus. Just like “Je t’aime . . . moi non plus,” “Love To Love You Baby” was banned by many radio stations when it came out in 1974 because of its lascivious moaning. Despite this (or maybe because of this), the piece made it into the top ten song lists in several European countries and in the US. The original version of the song was only three minutes. Producer Moroder sent the record to Neil Bogart, the boss of the disco specialist US-American record label Casablanca. Bogart supposedly played the song at a party and was so impressed by the sensuous effect of the song that he acquired the rights for the US-American market and asked for an extended mix. In this period, rock music turned its back on the 3-minute pop song that fit on a single and started to fill whole LPs. A similar trend emerged in “black pop” music, where songs were extended; in order to play such long songs in the discotheques, the Maxi single was subsequently developed. Songs not long enough were extended, often by using tape loops. Therefore, it was in line with an emerging new trend in pop music when Moroder created the 17-minute version of “Love To Love You Baby.” The song took up the entire A-side of the album of the same name; when Casablanca released the album in the US, it became Donna Summer’s first worldwide hit—a considerable success for a European producer who was poaching in the predomi- nately Afro-American genre of disco. “Love To Love You Baby” is a disco piece in the style of its time: sumptuous string arrangements, hissing hi-hats, elegant little dashes of piano, and a wah wah guitar. The song’s elements are reminiscent of Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” (1975), Barry White’s “Love’s Theme” (1974), and other disco operas of that period. At the same time, “Love To Love You Baby” is also a piece of pure minimalism. The US-American musicologist Robert Finch compares the structure of the piece with Steve Reich’s

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“Music for 18 Musicians” (1974–1976) written at the same time, and states numerous similarities in the structure of the two compositions:

[T]he overall structure of “Love To Love You Baby” in its 17-minute version is precisely analogous to that of Music for Eighteen Musicians: the original three-minute version of the song takes the place of the opening and closing pulse section, while the intermediate 10 minutes are filled with a sectional set of ‘variations’ on the song’s basic groove, melodic material, and harmonic progressions. (31)

Summer and Moroder approached “I Feel Love” as a minimalist piece of electronic disco that departed from “Love To love You Baby” while engaging with other pop songs of the time. When written down, the lyrics of “I Feel Love” almost seem like a piece of concrete poetry. The piece was created for the concept album I Remember Yesterday (1977), which was produced by Moroder and Pete Bellotte for Donna Summer. It was the third album Moroder, Bellotte, and Summer worked on together. Every song on I Remember Yesterday was supposed to represent one decade of the twentieth century. Following other songs that referenced the swing of the 30s and the Motown soul of the 60s, “I Feel Love” was supposed to represent the music of the 1990s: thus, the music of the future. In retrospect, this turned out to be a surprisingly accurate musical prophecy, since the 90s were the epoch of techno for which “I Feel Love” supplied its first musical score. The basic principle of “I Feel Love” is an absolute reductionism, even surpassing “Love To Love You Baby.” The basis of the piece is a single synthesizer riff consisting of only four tones, which are simply transposed up and down the scale several times. In addition, the harmonious structure of the song is of the utmost simplicity: it consists of only four chords. Very much in line with its minimal melodic means, the lyrics of the song consists of only a few repeated words and phrases. In the short version of the song Donna Summer repeats the line “I feel love” in verse and chorus 25 times; in the original version, which is eight minutes long, this phrase is repeated more then twice as often. The six other phrases, which form the remaining text of the piece, are all repeated five times, respectively. Without its driving sequencer beat, “I Feel Love” is a minimal poem, which perfectly corresponds in its regularity and symmetry with the minimalism of the music. All that producer Giorgio Moroder initially had done in his quest for a futuristic sound was little more than use the sequencer of his Moog synthesizer according to the manual. He had input a short sequence of four notes, which the sequencer ceaselessly repeated at the push of a button. He was able to transpose the sequence of notes up and down the scale. Moroder moved the four notes of the riff lurch from A to C to D to E and thereby created the melodic foundation for “I Feel Love,” which makes most nursery rhymes seem sophisticated in comparison.

Turning the Machine into a Slovenly Machine: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and “I Feel Love” | 45 Figure 1 Lyrics, “I Feel Love”

46 | Tilman Baumgärtel Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 43–54

The sequencer loop is so dominant that cursory listeners might not even notice the piece has a number of other elements: a rhythm machine and a kick drum accompany the sequencer, and extended, single synthesizer notes support the harmonious structure of the piece. While the hammering sequencer is reminiscent of the pulsating minimal music à la Steve Reich, the long tones on the synthesizer take the listener back to the minimalism of elongation of a La Monte Young. Together with the drawn-out singing passages they form a resolute counterpoint to the thumping beat of the sequencer. Another subtle counterbalance to the banging synthesizer rhythm are echo effects, which duplicate some of the synthesizer notes into short, distant thunder. Similar effects are reminiscent in Jamaican dub reggae, where reverberations—that become faster or slower while fading out—frequently syncopate the linear “riddim” of a track. Terry Riley’s tape loop compositions often operate with similar decelerating effects. Yet, it is another production artifice with which Giorgio Moroder transforms the four- to-the-floor beat of the sequencer into a confusing polyrhythm. Moroder remembered later that the dazzling effect that sets this track apart from other electronic disco pro- ductions of the following years emerged from a blunder in the studio: “By coincidence I put a delay [an echo effect] on the bass, and, wow!—it sounded great, when the delay doubled the bass line” (Chin 44). In the final mix, Moroder put the original synthesizer bass on the left stereo-channel and its echo on the right, so one may separate the original bass and its doppelgänger from each other with every regular stereo set. When playing the record in discotheques and clubs, this mix across the entire stereo spectrum could lead to problems, depending on where the speakers were placed. Moroder:

If you were on the left side, you’d hear the downbeat and on the right you’d hear the up. Even Donna was dancing one evening and said: “What’s wrong with the rhythm?” (Chin 44)

Many listeners assume that the echo effect was created with a tape-loop effect similar to the the tape delays Sam Phillips used during his Sun Sessions and that Terry Riley had produced with his time-lag accumulator. In fact, it was a digital effect,

Figure 2 Diagram by Giorgio Moroder on the echo effect in “I Feel Love” © Giorgio Moroder

Turning the Machine into a Slovenly Machine: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and “I Feel Love” | 47 which produced this swindle-inducing new effect. It doubled the meter of the rhythm and let the beats jump from one stereo loudspeaker to the other loudspeaker. And it made “I Feel Love” one of the most influential records in the history of popular music. Giorgio Moroder himself has drawn a little diagram to explain the effect. “I Feel Love” makes little secret of the fact that it is about sexual desire. The few aspirated lines of Donna Summer have—as with “Love To Love You Baby”—an inescapable audibly erotic undertone. Donna Summer, who demonstrated a veritable alto voice in songs such as “Bad Girls” or “On The Radio,” sung here in a wallowing falsetto, and she succeeded in letting each part sound very ethereal and very physical at the same time. Her lines seem to flow directly out of a half-unconscious daydream into the here-and-now.2 The contrast between her dreamy, sensuous singing and the thrashing synthetic beat is one the song’s paradoxes, which keep it alive today. The constant repetitions of a few sentences like “It’s so good,” which are all about love and desire in connection with the driving sequencer beat, let the song appear like a hymn to sex and erotic desire. Peter Shapiro writes the song is “[t]he epitome of the cocaine chill and metal gloss (your teeth hurt after listening to it) of the 70’s. ‘I Feel Love’ could have better encapsulated the decade’s obsession with the detach- ment of anonymous sex only if the record was sheathed in latex” (109). Yet, as may often be the case with this complex and paradoxical piece of music, the opposite of observations like Shapiro’s are also true. If one imagines Summer’s drawn-out lines without the throbbing sequencer, her part reminds one of Gregorian chants or Arvo Pärt choral works. Her singing might then sound heartfelt, full of devo- tion, and describe a perfect coming-undone in love that borders on total self- abandonment. Summer would seem lost in the daydreams and the glories she describes. And one can ask oneself whether she really sings for a lover or for the repeating technology, which accompanies her triggers such oceanic states. If “I Feel Love” does not sufficiently stress its synthetic “constructedness” through its technological and merciless sequencer rhythm, Donna Summer’s over- produced voice recording also contributes to the song’s sterile-room impression. Summer’s voice was sequenced and multiplied until the recording ultimately sings the chorus in three voices with itself. It is difficult to imagine a more apt way to underscore the “non-natural origin” of this music than through its manipulation of the human voice. “I Feel Love” indulges in this “unnaturalness” in its denial of the human sound. “I Feel Love” is the ultimate mating of organism and machine. Donna Summer presents herself in “I Feel Love” only through the barrage of loops as half-human and half-machine: as a cyborg, who is connected to the endless pumping stimulation of the machine and enjoys this audibly. Simon Reynolds calls the song “pornotopia and curiously unembodied at the same time” (16). The choreography, with which Donna Summer performed “I Feel Love” during live appearances, underlined the fusion of

48 | Tilman Baumgärtel Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 43–54 human and machine the song evokes. Summer’s performances oscillated between seductive siren and robot. After flowing dance movements and some lascivious gyrat- ing and pelvis trusts, she got into jerky, mechanical movements, which were remind- ful of the electro boogie of hip hop break dance. In such moments Donna Summer became the artificial Maria from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (a robot that only looks like a woman). In “I Feel Love,” technology and body and human and media apparatus enter into a symbiosis that did not exist in popular music before. James Brown kept referring to himself as a “Sex Machine”; however, he did not want to become part of a machine. Disco, on the other hand, is chock-full with such organic-technical permutations, many from the periphery of Giorgio Moroder’s realm (who himself recorded under the nom de plume Munich Machine). Among the hybrids are the “Dancing Machine” of The Jackson 5, the “Love Machine” of Moroder’s Munich disco competitors Supermax, the “Automatic Lover” of Moroder’s former pro- tégé D.D. Jackson, and the “Menschmaschinen” (“Man-Machine”) of Kraftwerk. With the means of popular music, these disco cyborgs ask the question what humans will look like after “the end of humanity” and “the death of the subject” in a world dominated by technology. The fusion of human and machine is then no longer the horror vision incited by films such as Metropolis or Terminator, but rather a redefinition of what human are. Disco as a discourse gives such “post-human” concepts a face long before they were discussed in cultural theory in the 1980s and 1990s. Another Donna, Donna Haraway, describes in her “Cyborg-Manifesto” the cyborg as a model that frees women from the essentialist attributions of their “natural” role (149–81). The figure of the cyborg is for her a creature of a “post-gendered world.” As an “unnatural” and technically fabricated creature, the cyborg has left behind the “natural” dualisms of sex and race in favor of a hybrid existence. The artificial character, to whom Donna Summer in “I Feel Love” gives a siren-like voice, is a cyborg in precisely this sense. Summer systematically refuses to bow to the attributions avail- able at the time for a black and female entertainer. In “I Feel Love,” Haraway writes that Summer does not mime the Blues Mama or the Soul Diva, but instead, with her angelic singing, enters a terrain usually reserved for white singers:

The anti-essentialist attitude, which is expressed in this performance, is matched with the fact that the all-electronic “I Feel Love” has cut all its connection to the African-American roots of disco. Peter Shapiro writes: “‘I Feel Love’ once and for all banished the naturalism ascribed to dance music.” Moroder and Belootte had the African-American Summer playing the Teutonic ice queen with a machine heart singing about biology’s most fundamental act while surrounded by the most synthetic textures ever heard on a record. (110–11.)

With “I Feel Love” Donna Summer celebrated the “unnaturalness” of her new role with so much verve the public became distrustful. If a black artist could turn away so

Turning the Machine into a Slovenly Machine: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and “I Feel Love” | 49 completely from racial attributes the same could be possible with her gender, hence the rumors Summer was actually a transvestite or a post-operative ‘male.’3

Metric Dissonances One of the many paradoxes of this track is its machine-like order that works to open a field of disorder and difference. Despite its pounding “four-to-the-floor” beat, “I Feel Love” is not marching music, but is instead rhythmically complex. The track contra- dicts clichéd conceptions about disco and techno music as continuous boom boom boom in four-four time. With the echo effect, which disarranges the bass line, Moroder succeeded in making his repeating machines run out of sync to turn the strict regular meter into a confusing polyrhythm. He turned the machine into a slovenly machine. Afterward, rhythms do not repeat like machines anymore but like living beings: with slight imprecisions and minimal shifts. If one of the themes of “I Feel Love” is dis- solving the antagonism between technology and organic nature, then the polyrhythmic synthesizer riff of “I Feel Love” is the musical implementation of this idea. Moroder’s production ruse with the echo delay is very similar to Steve Reich’s minimalist “phase shifting.” As in Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain,” with its two tape loops that keep falling out of and back into sync with each other, the echo delay does not produce a precise and synchronous duplicate of the synthesizer riff. If one listens carefully, one will notice how the echo plays tag with the riff. Sometimes it runs almost synchronously with the riff, but then it presses ahead or slows down. Thus, tremendously complex polyrhythms emerge that would be more or less impossible to copy with traditional instruments (and by no means could be conventionally notated). The complicated electronic beat, which fills dance floors to this very day, is a resulting pattern à la Steve Reich. It occurs because two loops overlay and because new rhythmic patterns emerge out of these overlays. The American musicologist Mark J. Butler argues in his book Unlocking The Groove that such experiments with apparently straightforward meters are among the most important characteristics of contemporary electronic dance music. Butler calls rhythmic shifts, such as the disorienting bass riff of “I Feel Love,” “metric dissonances.” Butler states that “[t]he repetitive nature of electronic dance music, in combination with the almost constant presence of a loud, insistent bass drum within its texture, may lead to perceptions of its use of rhythm as homogeneous and simplistic” (137). Yet, Butler shows with a number of detailed analyses of techno tracks how loops are used to turn apparently simple rhythmic structures into highly complex and ambivalent rhythmic structures. For Butler, a central characteristic of techno is precisely the opposition between the simple meters, which seem to dominate most techno tracks, and such metric dissonances, which form a contrast to the strict beat. It almost seems as if the producers of such tracks anticipated Gilles Deleuze’s dictum that “the difference lives in the repetition” through music. When Deleuze

50 | Tilman Baumgärtel Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 43–54 writes about the meaning of the repetition in art, it sounds as if he is describing the echo delay from “I Feel Love,” which turns a simple beat into a confusing variety of metric differences:

Perhaps the highest object of art is to bring into play simultaneously all these repetitions, with their differences in kind and rhythm, their respective displacements and disguises, their divergences and decenterings, to embed them in one another and to envelop one or the other in illusions the ‘effect’ of which varies in each case. . . . Even the most mechanical, the most banal, the most habitual and the most stereotyped repetition finds a place in works of art, it is always displaced in relation to other repetitions, and it is subject to the condition that a difference may be extracted from it for these other repetitions. (Deleuze 293)

“I Feel Love” does exactly that. The piece transforms a hammering machine beat into an organic rhythm (paradoxically, with further technical aid!) and opens it to shifts, displacements, and decenterings. Few listeners might notice the metric refinement of the track, but it is unques- tionable that the tension between rigid beat and natural rhythm constitutes the attraction of this track as well as of electronic dance music in general. The fact that a strict, disciplinary beat can paradoxically lead to an infinite feeling of liberation was apparently strongly noticed in gay culture, from which disco emerged. Walter Hughes argues that disco is:

Less a decadent indulgence than a disciplinary, regulatory discourse that paradoxically permits, even creates a kind of freedom. If disco is a form of discipline, it resembles more of the other salient aspects of urban gay culture, such as bodybuilding, fashion, sadomasochism and safe sex. . . . [G]ay male identity derives to a great extent from a series of practises that combine pleasure with the discipline of the self. One significant moment of gay identification might therefore be the realization that the policing and regulation to which homosexuality is subject in our society are themselves erotic practices. . . . This moment, when one . . . usurps the power attendant on this exercise of power, is a moment staged in the disco nightly. By submitting to its insistent, disciplinary beat, one learns to be one kind of gay man; one accepts, with pleasure rather than with suffering, the imposition of a version of gay identity. (148)

Musical genres such as Hi-NRG and techno, which would develop out of the pounding sequencer loops of “I Feel Love,” invite its audience to turn dominance and disciplining repetition into a source of pleasure.

Everybody Hears Something Different Due to his rhythmic ambiguity, “I Feel Love” allows its listener great freedom in the perception of its meter and thereby of the whole interpretation of the track. Because

Turning the Machine into a Slovenly Machine: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and “I Feel Love” | 51 of its specific metric characteristics, electronic dance music opens new possibilities for the interpretation and experience of music. It cannot be overemphasized how amazingly similar the experience of a track like “I Feel Love,” that is monotonous and complex at the same time, is to the experience that the minimal artists and composers wanted to accomplish. What Rosalind Krauss writes about the “minimal subject” (the viewer of minimal art) also applies to the “disco subject.” The disco dancer on the dance floor is “[a] subject radically dependent on the conditions of the spatial field, a subject, that constitutes itself in the act of perception, but always only preliminary, from one instant to another” (136). Krauss obviously refers to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty here, which does not know a “pure” perception or experience, but only a physical one that arises out of the dynamic relationship between he or she who perceives and the object perceived. Discos and clubs as “total environments” (Thornton 57) that appeal to all the senses aim at this very physical element of perception with the unreal spaces they create out of flickering lights and colors. At the same time the loud hammering of the sequencers and the loops with their eternal repetitions confront the listener with him- or herself; this monotony makes one face one’s own perceptions. Because of metric dissonances and the resulting patterns, “I Feel Love” makes the “phenomenological” potential of electronic dance music particularly clear. The perception of the polyrhythmic beat depends on whether one stands closer to the right or the left loudspeaker. With “I Feel Love,” every person dances to a rhythm only they can hear until they—quietly blissful and ecstatic at the same time—can only repeat as ceaselessly as Donna Summer: “Ooh, it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good . . .”

52 | Tilman Baumgärtel Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 43–54

Works Cited

Brewster, Bill, and Frank Broughton. Last Night a Hughes, Walter. “In the Empire of the Beat, DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey. Discipline and Disco.” Microphone Fiends: Youth London: Headline, 2000. Print. Music and Youth Culture. Ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose. London: Routledge, 1994. 147–57. Butler, Mark J. Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Print. Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music. Bloomington: Indiana UP,2006. Print. Krauss, Rosalind. “Die Logik des Spätkapitalistischen Museums.” Texte zur Kunst Chin, Brian. Liner notes. “The Disco 6 (1992): 131–45. Print. Beatmasters: From the Studio to the Dance Floor.” The Disco Box. Rhino Records, 1999. CD. Reynolds, Simon. Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture. London: Picador, Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New 1998. Print. York: Columbia UP,1995. Print. Shapiro, Peter. Turn the Beat Around: The Secret Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American History of Disco. New York: Faber, 2005. Print. Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: U of California P,2005. Print. Summer, Donna, and Marc Eliot. Ordinary Girl: The Journey. New York: Villard, 2003. Print. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and 1991. Print. Subcultural Capital. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1996. Print. Howard, Josiah. Donna Summer: Her Life and Music. Cranberry Township (PA): Tiny Ripple, 2002. Print.

Endnotes

1. According to producer Moroder, the bass of the finished piece, which was inspired by the drum that provides the pulse of the track is the hypnotic hammering of the sequencer loops, was only non-electronic instrument on the whole originally intended only as filler to be replaced later recording. by the “right” lyrics (Howard; Summer and Eliot).

2. In fact, Summer improvised the melody and 3. Similar speculations bubbled about the other words when she heard the song, which had already great disco diva, Amanda Lear, who also often been recorded by her producers Moroder and had her lascivious lyrics accompanied by Bellotte, and hummed along in the studio. The text sequencer loops.

Turning the Machine into a Slovenly Machine: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and “I Feel Love” | 53 Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 55–70

Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture: Rhythmic Conventions, Skills, and Everyday Life

Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen

Hip hop culture was originally primarily a “black” cultural phenomenon during the 1970s and early 1980s, with close ties to the “black” ghettos of New York.1 As a broad concept, hip hop covers dance, graffiti, deejaying, and rap, and in its original form it was known as a live expression, a game in which the hip hop players took part in battles and fought against one another through rhythmically based rhymes and acrobatic movements. Dancing and rapping were done to achieve a certain status: winning the favor of the audience and consequently earning its respect was the main purpose of their creative activity. Hip hop culture belongs to the street; so does its language and music. The role of rhythm in this particular youth culture concerns style, movements, and “feeling.” Rhythm appears crucial to hip hop, and the aim of this article is to discuss the phenomena both as an aesthetic and as a cultural practice. Thus, this article wishes to point out the significance of aesthetics, and more precisely rhythm, in this particular culture. The rhythm of hip hop is treated as an aesthetic movement and experience that plays an active part in generating the concept of hip hop in a broad cultural sense. I try to illustrate the sense of delay in the beat, the “laid-back” feeling the micro-rhythmic feeling in groove-oriented hip hop music can be said to produce, and to demonstrate that this rhythmic feeling influences both the movements and the lifestyle of hip hop culture. To support my analysis, I discuss rhythm from different theoretical positions: from a musicological position concerning the fabric of the groove and the microrhythmic characteristics of rap music (Hasty; Danielsen, Presence), from a phenomenological, literary angle concerning rhythm as an experienced phenomenon (Ringgaard; Lilja), and as a philosophical and sociological phenomenon concerning the transgressive potential

Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture | 55 of the concept of rhythm from aesthetics to everyday life (Lefevbre; Wittgenstein, Blue and the Brown). Thus, I investigate aspects of the concept of rhythm that show its ability to expand the field of aesthetics and enter the sphere of everyday culture. The article is divided into two parts. The first part concerns the concept of rhythm as a methodological premise, and the second part discusses this concept more specifically in relation to hip hop music and culture. The article is meant as a survey of potential, and especially transgressive, possibilities of the concept of rhythm, but will not itself use rhythm analytically. It could be said that the article investigates preliminary conditions for an interdisciplinary method for analyzing rhythm in hip hop culture.

The Concept of Rhythm The following quotation from Virginia Woolf’s last novel, The Waves, sets the tone for my reading of the field of rhythm:

People go on passing; they go on passing against the spires of the church and the plates of ham sandwiches. The streamers of my consciousness waver out and are perpetually torn and distressed by their disorder. I cannot concentrate on my dinner . . . They dive and and plunge like guillemots whose feathers are slippy with oil . . . Meanwhile the hats bob up and down; the door perpetually shuts and opens. I am conscious of flux, of disorder . . . yet I feel, too, the rhythm of the eat- ing house. It is like a waltz tune, eddying in and out, round and round . . . Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included. (69–70)

These words by Virginia Woolf demonstrate the significance and power of rhythm as an experience that involves our everyday life—both our sense of being and our sense of belonging or exclusion. Rhythm thus appears to be a complex phenomenon involving several modalities concerning the perception of our surroundings. Among the challenges for an analysis of rhythmic modalities is, first of all, the concept of rhythm. As the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre puts it in his book Rhythmanalysis:

Is there a general concept of rhythm?—Answers: yes, and everyone possesses it; but nearly all of those who use this word believe themselves to master and possess its content, its meaning. Yet the meanings of the term remain obscure. We easily confuse rhythm with movement, speed, a sequence, a sequence of movements (gestes) or objects. (5)

Lefebvre’s work on rhythm was one of his last publications and should be seen as a continuation of his work on urban space. Rhythm in Lefebvre’s thinking thus emerges as a broad concept able to transgress time and space, though it is still closely connected to time and, in particular, repetition. But repetition is also

56 | Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 55–70 understood in terms of everyday life, what we do every day in a modern, urbanized society:

In the collision of natural, biological and social timescales the rhythms of our bodies and society, the analysis of rhythms provides a privileged insight into the question of everyday life. (Elden vii)

This article seeks to identify the role of rhythm in the specific context of hip hop both as a genre of music and a lifestyle, thereby investigating the transgressive potential of the rhythm of hip hop. According to Princeton’s Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, rhythm is first of all an organizing principle of temporal acts (Preminger and Brogan 1067). As an analytic parameter, is rhythm then a form or a way of sensing? What is the ontological status of rhythm? The argument in this article is that rhythm is characterized by ambiguity. It is a directly sensuous phenomenon that has an effect on its recipient; it is a formalized aesthetic convention and at the same time a culture-bearing practice.

Rhytmos Etymologically, rhythm involves a great number of paradoxes and much confusion. The word is said to stem from the Greek word rhytmos, which, in turn, is considered to be related to rheo, meaning stream (Preminger and Brogan 1068). Before Aristotle, rhythm was often understood as connected with a natural flood, the movement of nature. The French linguist Emil Benveniste criticizes this opinion and uncovers the history of the concept through rewritings of the Ionic philosophers Aristotle and Plato. The original meaning of the word rhytmos is thus a technical term and refers to form. In Benveniste’s reading, Aristotle considers rhythm to be a structure opposed to the natural understanding of the concept (cf. Pedersen, Lyd). This first definition of the word is therefore a technical one: rhythm is structured form, and, as such, in a way, is also an aesthetic convention connected to but not identical with meter. Meter provides structure; rhythm provides movement within that structure (Preminger and Brogan 772). This discussion, however ancient it might seem, is an important link to understanding the etymological arrival of the concept of rhythm. The confusion as to whether one should deal with rhythm as something fluent, or as something mechanical or formal, still seems visible, for instance, in the musicological discussions on meter versus rhythm in the science of music. In Christopher Hasty’s Meter as Rhythm (1995), this is provided as a tension in the scientific discussions on the concept:

Among the attributes of rhythm we might include continuity of flow, articulation, regularity, proportion, repetition, pattern, alluring form or shape, expressive gesture, animation and motion . . . Indeed, so intimate is the connection of the rhythmical and the musical, we could perhaps most concisely . . . define music as the rhythmization of sound (thus, the ‘musicality’ of speech or verse). Nevertheless,

Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture | 57 rhythm is often regarded as one of the most problematic and least understood aspects of music. . . . Music theory presents us with a reasonably clear understanding of rhythm. Thus restricted, rhythm is identified with meter, durational pattern, or durational proportion . . . But music as experienced is never . . . an expression of numerical quantity. (3)

Hasty presents an interesting difference in the way rhythm might be analyzed. He asks whether it is possible solely to analyze rhythm as a formal or technical matter (meter) concerning the object, or if one has to take into account the rhythm as it is performed and from here perceived. The latter possibility presents some difficulties concerning the ability to render an aesthetic experience analytically salient in such a way that it can be analyzed according to the methods traditionally used in the science of music.2 As stated before, the word rhytmos refers to form, and when something is a technical term it is also a convention, based upon cultural and learned abilities. We can hardly imagine a culture without rhythmic proficiency, but this skill seems very deeply rooted in every culture, so it often seems to be a naturally given ability. In Africa, in what might be called “black” vernacular culture, for instance, certain daily work routines or kinds of children’s play consist of complex polyrhythmic structures closely related to a material, physical necessity. As Samuel L. Floyd writes in his book The Power of Black Music: “Play, sport, relaxation, the everyday events and vicissitudes of life, and other periodic interactions of living were accompanied by and expressed in musical forms ranging from the simple to the complex” (29). Norwegian scholar Jon Roar Bjørkvold demonstrates in a television documentary the peculiar importance of rhythmic competence in his studies of daily work routines in Africa. Pounding of fufu (a corn product) is an everyday routine that involves an extremely polyrhytmic complexity. The pounding is done with sticks on the on-beats while hands move the fufu strictly on the off-beats, and in this steady maintenance of the rhythmic accuracy, fingers do not get smashed by the sticks. Another example of culturally based rhythmic proficiency is the way in which folk- dance visualizes the specific rhythmic foundation of a culture: in the folkdances of Eastern Europe it is possible to move about completely effortlessly to odd meters — for instance, 7/8 time — while 3/4 time or 4/4 time is rooted in the musical perception and experience of Western Europe. According to this example, a tension appears in the concept of rhythm between its culturally founded basis and the body as the point of departure for the rhythm. The body is the starting point for the rhythm as well as the point where it is perceived as a rhythm. In perception, rhythm becomes rhythm, so to speak, and not just unconscious repetition. Rhythmic perception thus appears to actively organize sensory data. In this sense, it becomes possible to talk about a double perspective: on the one hand, a technical or formal repetition must exist before we can sense a rhythm, but,

58 | Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 55–70 on the other hand, it is this sensory experience that structures the sound into a meaningful string of sounds — a rhythm. This particular sensory experience takes place through the ear and the body and in this way an inner tension exists in the concept of rhythm between corporeal and conventional understanding.

Rhythm As Experience With this argument I have identified rhythm in between a conventional, formal understanding and a phenomenologically based approach to the concept. Rhythm is, in addition to a form, also a way of living, an experience fundamental to our perception, as we read in the quotation from Woolf. Rhythm is a basic condition in our field of perception; this field is culturally variable, but we cannot imagine any culture without a rhythmic competence. Rhythm becomes a meaningful entity the moment it moves into the ear or the body. Hasty, continuing his analysis of the concept of rhythm as a double bind, explains:

Central to our understanding of rhythm is the notion of regular repetition. Any phenomenon that exhibits periodicity can be called rhythmic, regardless of whether evidence of this periodicity is accessible to our sense perception . . . To many, rhythm in music is above all else the repetition of pulse or beat. . . . At the same time, we can use the word rhythm to characterize phenomena in which periodicity is not apparent: a fluid gesture of the hand, . . . the ‘shape’ of a musical phrase. Such applications necessarily rely on human sensory perception . . . This second meaning relies on aesthetic judgment and admits of degrees. (4)

In continuation of this line of thought, Danish literary historian Dan Ringgaard deals with the concept of the rhythm of language on two levels:

Rhythm is not just a matter concerning the eye or the ear. Rhythm is also felt, it is perceived as such. On the one hand, the rhythm of language is a kind of recognition, a way of understanding the world . . . On the other hand, rhythm is an experience, a way to take part in the world as a sensing creature. (12)

If we take Ringgaard’s claim seriously, rhythm is both a skill and an existential experience of being. At the same time, rhythm is also an experience of being and an ability or a potentiality that can be developed and refined. I therefore argue that the concept of rhythm has to be developed precisely in the field of tension between a cultural convention and the perceiving body. However, the difficulties or vagueness of the concept appear to be a methodological problem. As Lefebvre argues:

Rhythm is easily grasped whenever the body makes a sign; but it is conceived with difficulty . . . It is neither a substance, nor a matter, nor a thing . . . the concept implies something more. But what? Perhaps energy . . . An energy is employed, unfolds in a time and a space. (64f.)

Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture | 59 Central to the methodological discussion on the possibilities of analyzing rhythm stands the question of where a rhythm takes place. A position that views rhythm as a formal construction or a metrical pattern obviously finds rhythm in the object. A cognitive understanding of rhythm, on the other hand, would understand rhythm as a mental construction that seems loosened from its object, whereas a phenomenological position must understand rhythm as something experienced. This position creates some difficulties concerning the validity of the phenomenological method. If we understand rhythm as related to experience, a determination of a given rhythm will not take place until the concrete act of perception. In her studies of funk grooves, Norwegian scholar Anne Danielsen operates with a distinction between sounding and non-sounding aspects of rhythm:

The different levels of pulsation are commonly referred to by their musical note values as quarters, eights, sixteenths, and so on. However, it is important to distinguish between levels of pulses within such a theoretical framework and what is actually heard, between quarters as a reference structure and quarters as a sounding rhythmic gesture . . . Hence the need for explicating a paradigmatic premise for the analytical work that follows, namely that rhythm is conceived as an interaction of something sounding and something not sounding . . . The latter is always at work in the music, and to me it is impossible to understand rhythm without taking it into consideration. (46f.)

Rhythm in the metrical sense is thus a formal construction, but when it comes to the meaning-creating part of this formal construction, it involves an interpretation of the process of perception. The aesthetic experience of rhythm involves impreciseness, but it is nevertheless necessary to understand and grasp rhythm as it is unfolded and perceived in music, literature and everyday life.

Rhythm in Time and Space A very crucial and complicated question concerning the concept of rhythm is whether one should understand rhythm in time alone (serial rhythm) or also in space (spatial, visual rhythm); if the latter possibility is adequate, then how? Swedish professor of literature and metrics Eva Lilja deals with rhythm as something that has both temporal and spatial functions insofar as rhythm in music, poetry, and pictures refers to movement as a basic category. In this view, rhythm must be considered to possess time- and space-related features in the span between universal cognitive experiences and culturally based aesthetic conventions (Lilja 2). Lefebvre also succeeds in bringing together the dimensions of time and space in his even broader concept of rhythm:

Time and space, the cyclical and the linear, exert a reciprocal action: they measure themselves against one another; each one makes itself and is

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measuring-measure; everything is repetition through linear repetitions . . . A further paradox: rhythm seems natural, spontaneous, with no law other than its unfurling. Yet rhythm, always particular, (music, poetry, dance, gymnastics, work etc.) always implies a measure . . . Rhythm reunites quantitative aspects and elements, which mark time and distinguish moments in it—as qualitative aspects and elements, which link them together. (8–9)

In Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm, time links up with both the quantitative, measurable elements and the qualitative aspects of a rhythm. These qualitative aspects could, for instance, be the sound of the rhythm referring to the space where it is performed, or they could be the laid-back feeling of the beat, which I previously introduced as an often used micro-rhythmic feeling, especially in old-school hip hop. The word groove is used to designate the rhythmic shape of a piece of music and is often used in connection with jazz, funk, and hip hop. The groove is related to the way the rhythmic shaping is bodily sensed both by the musicians and by the listeners. The funk groove, according to Danielsen, is a basic unit, often one or two bars, closely related to African rhythm as a master groove. The rhythmic pattern, which often consists of several microrhythmically complex layers, has a fixed length in time and is repeated (Danielsen 44). The feeling of grooves often refers to microrhythmic features, such as a sensed delay of the beat connected to the rhythmic phrasing of the musician in relation to the metrical beat. The beat can be sensed as laid-back or pushed according to the style of the performer, and this feeling takes place in the performed beat, in the sounding aspects of rhythms. This can also be called the gesture of the rhythm, which is related to phrasing. In Robert S. Hatten’s words, gesture is a significant energetic shaping through time that, among other things, concerns progression in music and is connected to body movement. A delayed or laid-back feeling thus technically stems from microrhythmic differences in the performed groove, but as a performed gesture produces a certain quality of the rhythmic phrasing. The quality of the beat is produced in the performed space and is crucial to the groovy feeling of hip hop. The limits of what is perceivable as a rhythmic pattern are variable within different research fields and traditions. The psychology of perception has, for instance, developed experiments that show that there are very strong limitations to what can be perceived and understood as rhythmic patterns (cf. Olsen and Stjernfelt). According to these experiments, measures between one-fifth of a second and ten seconds are heard as rhythms, and sequences that go beyond these limits, such as the cyclic movement of daylight or seasonal changes, are not perceived as rhythmic patterns. Frequencies of repetitive parts faster than one-fifth of a second are perceived as vibrations. These experiments seem to solely focus on the quantitative, measurable element of rhythm (cf. Olsen and Stjernfelt).

Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture | 61 Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm is, as we have seen, much broader: Everywhere there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm. Therefore rhythm can be:

● Repetition (of movements, gestures, action, situations, differences) ● Interferences in linear processes and cyclical processes (time and space) ● Birth, growth, peak, decline and end (the course of the sun, the changing seasons, narrative structure). (15)

Lefebvre’s concept might be considered weak by seeming too broad or imprecise. Inasmuch as his book carries the title Rhythm Analysis, his avoidance of any attempt to make the concept of rhythm a concrete tool for analysis seems ambivalent. In an attempt to address this need, in my research I have worked with four positions that have to be taken into consideration in an analysis of rhythm. Rhythm may be seen as:

● Experience or perception, a way of being. ● A skill or ability that we do not know we possess but that is conventionally based. ● An aesthetic convention that concerns technical matters or form. ● A cultural function creating a sense of identity, aestheticization.

These four positions have been presented so far in this article as follows: the first one concerns the phenomenological position, the second the culturally based and conventional position, the third the formal or the metrical position, and the fourth extends the radius of the concept of rhythm, as Lefebvre argues: that rhythm in our urban everyday reality plays a part in our way of creating meaning. All of these elements make up the concept of rhythm as a methodological category, and obviously movements and interactions will occur between the positions. But if we maintain, as stated before, that the determination of a given rhythm is taking place during perception, we must emphasize that rhythm is determined as a phenomenogically perceived phenomena. As Lefebvre quite romantically puts it:

The rhythm analyst listens . . . and first to his body. . . . His body serves him as a metronome. A difficult task and situation: to perceive distinct rhythms distinctly, without disrupting them, without dislocating time. (19)

[A]t no moment have the analysis of rhythms and the rhythm analytical project lost sight of the body. (67)

Life Forms, Language Games, and Rhythm Lefebvre aims to provide a privileged insight into everyday life with his rhythm analysis. It would seem that rhythm and life forms are connected, and therefore this

62 | Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 55–70 argument could be related to the maintenance of a link between rhythm and the language game, as argued by Wittgenstein. In the thinking of the later Wittgenstein, we find a functional understanding of language. Meaning emerges from the things we do. One way in which this functional understanding of the connection between the act of living and language emerges is through the concept of the language game. Language games are ways in which we can use language, where language becomes connected to a life form:

The term ‘language game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that speaking a language is part of an activity or a form of life. Review the multiplicity of language-games in the following examples, and in others: Giving orders, and obeying them— Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements— Reporting an event—Making up a story; and reading it— Guessing riddles— Making a joke; telling it— Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. (Wittgenstein 10)

As a concept, the language game points to a very broad concept of language connected to an activity someone is doing with language, and in this way it becomes alive. Language games contain energy and produce differences, ideas supported by Lefebvre’s definition of the role of repetition: “[N]ot only does repetition not exclude differences, it also gives birth to them, it produces them” (7). These quite abstract conceptual matters are, in Lefebvre’s thinking as well as in Wittgenstein’s, always closely linked to the way in which rhythm, language, and language games are connected to a life form: the place executing the actions of rhythm and language. “Lefebvre’s work on rhythms and repetition in this aspect is useful for gaining insight into the double sense of the notion of everyday . . . meaning the mun- dane, the everyday, but also the repetitive, what happens every day” (Elden ix). Through repetition and routines, rhythm is connected to a concrete and physical way of life. To ask for something, to pray or to swear are all rhetorical acts or forms. These kinds of performatives in language can be compared to the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates’s studies of African storytelling traditions in his book The Signifyin(g) Monkey (1988), where he investigates similar language games as rhetorical figures that must be understood in close relation to African cultural forms, literary as well as religious. According to Gates, signifyin(g) refers to a discourse for two voices within a postcolonial context. Gates’s concept is a metaphor for continuous paradigmatic revision or variation of well-known elements of storytelling and literature. If signification in standard English refers to horizontal references between signifier and signi- fied, signifyin(g) represents vertical revision and rhetorical play with established meanings by transforming them into new signifiers: repetition with revision.

Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture | 63 Examples of rhetorical figures in “black” culture could be “marking, loud-talking, testifying, calling out, sounding, rapping, playing the dozens and so on” (Gates 51f.). In The Power of Black Music (1995), Samuel A. Floyd interprets Gates’s concept in relation to “black” music: “Musical signifyin(g) is the rhetorical use of pre existing materiel as a means to demonstrate respect for or poking fun of a musical style, process or practice through parody, pastiche, implication, indirection, humour, tone play or word player” (8). Like the language games of Wittgenstein, figures like these are performative acts in language and by means of language, acts that at the same time play with different types of meaning: rhythmic, gestural, and bodily expressions. These types of utterances are all connected to and express themselves through a social practice. Considering hip hop as a specific context, it appears that hip hop as a lifestyle or life form uses rhythm as an active element in the production of meaning; that is, it takes part in the work of establishing a sense of identity within its participants. In contrast to vernacular “black” culture’s use of rhythm as a basic material necessity, rhythm in today’s youth cultures plays an aestheticizing role in building and maintaining a personal identity in connection with the community of hip hop. In hip hop, the beat must be understood as completely fundamental to both the culture and the music. As a framework, hip hop consists of four parts: break dancing, graffiti, rapping, and deejaying. In my research, rap music plays a central role, but both break dancing and deejaying are also based and dependent on the beat. Rap consists of a groove, a repetitive beat and a flow: the loud, babbling voice on top of the groove. In short, as said by the old-school legend in American east-coast rapper KRS-One, “rap is something you do, hip hop is something you live” (“9 Elements”). Rap is an aesthetic practice; hip hop is a life form in Wittgenstenian terms, a way of living that is connected to the functions of language, an interpretation of existence.

Hip Hop Research Much research on hip hop music and culture is contextually based. This research field often relates hip hop to sociological or anthropological issues concerning the culture of hip hop and its staging of racial, political, or social “marginalization.” The question of “authenticity” is also quite often brought up as central to understanding the culture of hip hop. Authenticity in this context concerns being part of the hip hop community and being faithful to the specific codes of this community. Hip hop culture was born out of an experience of social and cultural marginalization in urban “black” US America in the 70s, and in this sense it is closely connected to an oppositional self-understanding. According to Swedish sociologist Ove Sernhede, this construction of a community through the sense of alienation still seems to play an active part in what could be called contemporary “authentic” hip hop culture, which is connected to the formation of ghettos in suburban spaces throughout the world (39).

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The relationship between the local and global aspects of the culture is another interesting field in the study of hip hop. Hip hop is clearly a globalized cultural practice: Sernhede speaks of the worldwide hip hop nation, but rap is also connected to national languages outside Afro America. Hip hop always understands itself in close connection with the place where it is performed, meaning the neighborhood, or simply “the hood.” So, hip hop represents an interesting clash between a globalized concept stemming from “black” culture and an important local influence, both through the national language and the relation to the native soil. In Scandinavia, most rap artists do their texts in a Scandinavian language. In this way, Scandinavian languages are put under pressure by the US-American concepts of hip hop and its use of language. In this mutual exchange, language develops by virtue of being challenged—precisely in the act of a language game grounded in a life form. The transition from the cultural, sociological aspects of hip hop to the aesthetic dimension has not been a main theme of hip hop research so far. Therefore, in my research I try to rewrite these well-documented areas—marginalization, authenticity, the global versus the local—from an aesthetic perspective. In my approach to the hip hop scene I seek to turn the question around and sort out what characterizes the rhythm of hip hop and identify how it affects hip hop culture and deposits meaning in the culture of hip hop in a broader sense. This methodological discussion concerning the fruitfulness of starting out an analytical approach from an inductive or deductive angle is by no means unilateral. Rather, it is a matter of different strategies that complement one another. As Lefebvre puts it:

One can study and compare cases: the rhythm of the body, . . . durations and phases of durations etc. . . . this remains close to practice the other procedure consists in starting with concepts, definite categories . . . The second method does not exclude the first; they complete one another. (5)

In contemporary society, popular musical concepts and lifestyles define themselves through rhythms; for instance, the techno/dance culture and lifestyle are closely connected to a fast beat that is rhythmically “on top,” while groove-orientated hip hop music and culture are characterized by a microrhythmically laid-back feeling. This feeling is rooted in the rhythmic phrasing of the groove as described before, but is active in the concept of hip hop in a much broader sense insofar as it is related to the hip hop attitude to life in general. Over time, the concept of hip hop has gone through radical changes. In the 70s and early 80s, hip hop primarily existed as a subculture. It still does partly, but especially during the 90s, the music became mainstream and commercialized, as did the hip hop lifestyle, clothing, dance, movements, and so on. Today, the concept of hip hop refers to both an authentic, sub-cultural self-conception and a commercialized,

Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture | 65 mainstream culture. This concept is at once a cultural lifestyle and a very sophisticated art form. In this sense, hip hop can be regarded as rewriting the boundaries between aesthetics and culture. The role of rhythm is essential to this process of rewriting: rhythm in this sense is perceived as a kind of gesture that can perform movements and create meaning; it is able to transgress aesthetics and enter the sphere of everyday life. Continuing this line of thought, I therefore find it necessary to investigate the rhythm of hip hop as an aesthetic factor decisive for the way in which the culture of hip hop views itself as being on the border between aesthetic experience and aestheticization as a cultural phenomenon. Thus, it is crucial to analyze hip hop as an art form as well as a cultural and political statement. As Imani Perry puts it from a US-American point of view: “While the music bursts with socio political themes, it is quite dangerous for the critic or listeners to interpret it purely as a reflection of social and political conditions, without thought to the presence of artistic choice in every narrative and composition” (39).

Hip Hop Groove Hip hop music, both groove and flow are very inspired by African vernacular music traditions. Rap has a family resemblance to earlier Afro-American musical forms and can be viewed as a period in Afro-American music history when the familiarity with the African side is considered particularly strong (Danielsen, “Iscenesat” 204–05). First of all, rap has several features in common with what might be called groove-oriented music in general, including African rhythmic music. It is the rhythmic foundation that acts as the basis of both the content and style of the flow in rap. The polyrhythmic features essential to rap are also often emphasized as typical for Western African rhythmic traditions. The texture is tight and includes a large number of musical events within a short time span. However, the most significant and conspicuous indication of the connection between African culture and rap music is the repetitive beat. Different from Western music, primitive African music has used the repetition of very simple, short, repetitive rhythms as the basis of its musical forms. This has partly to do with the close connection between the music and the body through dance:

The integration of dance with music is crucial to understanding African and African-inspired musics, such as blues and jazz. Unlike composed classical European forms (arts which are presented by some sort of written score), such musics are brought to life through live production and concurrent improvisation. (Dimitriadis 423)

In short, due to the repetitive beat, it is possible to practice an improvisational form. The fascination with the break and the use of pauses are also typical of the

66 | Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 55–70 aesthetics, especially of old-school hip hop from the 70s or early 80s such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five:

The record is full of breaks and silences but it is held together by the stuttering rhythm. Flash keeps holding the needle back, tearing great empty holes in the web of sound. But however long he waits, he always comes back to hit the mix with the right sound at the right time. He never misses the beat. (Hebdige 227)

This aesthetic movement involving the use of breaks, keeping the tempo down, and stretching the beat to its limits can be related to the idea of the laid-back feeling as a significant groovy quality in hip hop’s use of rhythm. Anne Danielsen indicates that counter rhythms are a funky sign from which the beat is pushed. In my opinion this feeling is also achieved by a delay in the beat, an intentionally inexact beat that can be traced to the production, which creates an imprecise or laid-back sensed beat. The slight delay then creates the easygoing quality through a low center of gravity in the music, a groovy or funky feeling. The laid-back feeling concerns the time-related aspects of the beat whereas the sense of low gravity relates to the sound or the acoustic qualities of the beat. In this description I operate both with a delay in the beat and a beat with a low center of gravity, which are two different characteristics that have a related effect. The latter along with the laid-back feeling create a funky feeling, which is also crucial to hip hop:

Hip hop has to be funky to be good . . . funkiness might refer to an inciting beat . . . it causes hips to sway and backs to curve . . . It is sensual, stimulating senses . . . The core of funkiness is found in the bass: repetitive beats filled with bass can be felt underneath the feet and inside the chest. (Perry 51)

The funky and laid-back feeling is related to how we perceive and mediate rhythms phenomenologically. A specific musical feeling is then related to the quality of the beat as much as to its quantitative measurable elements. Through the rhythms of the flow and the groove, it is possible to rethink hip hop as a cultural practice with the rhythm as a factor that generates movement. The special feeling of the rhythm is viewed as a kind of gesture that creates meaning from the sounding, performed, and perceived rhythm. This specific feeling is connected to the delay of the beat in groove-orientated hip hop music, which we experience through our senses and bodies as relaxed and laid-back.

Hip Hop Flow The hip hop flow contains, first of all, rhythmic movements, word puzzles, humor, and ironic and metaphorical language. The use of call-and-response is of great importance in the connection between African music and hip hop. In his book The Power of Black Music, Samuel L. Floyd calls this figure a master rhetorical trope of African musical

Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture | 67 culture, a trope that is especially distinct in the genre of freestyle rap, where the improvisational element is prevalent. In freestyle, the rappers improvise rhymes and flows on the spot, and often the act takes place in a battle-like situation. Freestyle rap is often very equilibristic and delicately crafted. While the beat represents the steadiness of the groove—the formal pattern—the flow can tease and move around the beat. Freestyle rap is an example of how the culture of hip hop developed in the first place: as a battlefield, where street gangs battled using acrobatic moves, graffiti, and rhymes instead of their hands and weapons (to use the slightly romanticized version that is rooted in the self-image of hip hop culture). Imani Perry thus describes freestyle as a kind of stream of consciousness, where the flow is more concerned with the quality and cleverness of individual ideas than with the coherence of the text. The flow can be said to stage the rapper’s position through a creative act. Freestyle can also be a kind of narrative strategy, where the action of freestyle seeks authenticity through storytelling. By means of the flow it is possible to create one’s life by inventing one’s own narrative discourse. In this sense, aesthetic ideas and strategies also play an important role in hip hop culture. The rapper often tells an idiomatic and coherent story that includes an effect of reality. The flow indicates a play on authenticity that has to be seen in relation to the self-conception of the hip hop community in a broader perspective, namely, the feeling of exclusion from the rest of society. Swedish sociologist Ove Sernhede appropriately named his book Alienation Is My Nation, referring to a hip hop nation acting across races, nationalities, and national borders. The rapper’s flow is compelling when it comes to the creative use of linguistic possibilities. In this sense, the language game as well as the concept of style seems crucial to the hip hop life form expressed through the rapper’s flow. Very often the flows play on homophones, pointing at the use of language as a space for creative developments. Language games serve as a movable life form, where meaning is constantly being challenged. As in Gates’s concept of signifyin(g), the meaning of rap flows might be viewed as a play on repetition with revision—poking, dissing, boasting in language—as a vertical play on signification processes. The use of rhythm in the flow is obviously central. Hence, using special accents or stress in language is also a typical gesture in hip hop. In addition, the flow is the signature of the rapper. It takes place between the beat, the metrics and the rhymes. The flow is a combination of the rhythmically moving voice and the tone of the voice, or its “grain” as Roland Barthes puts it. The diction of the voice is also of great importance: it can be either very laid-back or very aggressive and compelling. Danish critic Lars Bukdahl defines flow like this: “There are two formal engines in rap — the flow and the rhyme. The flow is the fluctuation, the manner in which the rapper recites” (100). According to Bukdahl, the flow acts at the junction of rhythm, metrics, rhetoric, dialect, voice qualities, speed, and tempo, and so far no terminology has been developed yet to describe the moves at this junction.

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From my perspective, Bukdahl overlooks one specific point concerning the role of rhythm in hip hop, namely, the relation between the flow and the groove. According to my methodological interest, it is precisely here the tension is to be found, the place where the beat is pushed and challenged by the movements of the rapper’s flow. In the tension and at junction between groove and flow, it might be possible to find the rhythm of hip hop as a specific groovy kind of gesture. A musical gesture can be said very broadly to concern progression, or the way in which music progresses through time. So the rapper’s flow could be called a gesture that rewrites time, plays with it, scrambles and pushes the beat of the groove, and, in this sense, connects time and space. Here, the metrical time-related understanding of rhythm is distinctly combined with the spatial quality of the performed rhythm. The quality of the beat creates a certain feeling that generates meaning for the general use of the musical expression. The quality of the beat is therefore crucial here; for instance, the microrhythmic, laid-back production of the beat mentioned earlier illustrates this. More generally, gesture in hip hop refers to the body language used: the way they move their hands, talk and dance, all of which occurs in a “laid-back” manner. The groove in the rhythm, the delay in the beat, and the tension between the groove and the flow are all part of what could be called the gesture of hip hop; in other words, they are the tension or play on meanings we experience phenomenologically. The rhythm of hip hop and rap music rewrites the boundary between aesthetics and everyday life as different modalities on various levels. The rhythm of hip hop and its aesthetics are crucial for understanding and analyzing the lifestyle of hip hop. I have presented various ways of analyzing the rhythm of hip hop as a specific term and I have also addressed the role that rhythm plays when it supports hip hop culture and contributes to this culture as a lifestyle. My intention has been to point out how the rhythm of a life form becomes a carrier or creator of identity. Hip hop as a lifestyle reinstalls rhythm as an active element in the production of meaning by supporting and establishing a sense of identity. In contrast to vernacular “black” culture’s use of rhythm as a basic material necessity, rhythm in contemporary Western youth cultures plays an aestheticizing role in building and maintaining a personal identity linked to the hip hop community. When analyzing rhythm one has to consider the phenomenon both as a technical term, as a cultural, conventionalized practice, and a phenomenologically perceived phenomenon. In this article I have pinpointed the role of rhythm on various levels concerning everyday life. In hip hop culture rhythm plays differentiated roles: it concerns rapping and dancing, but acting, walking, and positioning oneself possibly also deals with rhythmic feeling as does the perceiving of one’s surroundings. Thus, in possible future investigations, the concept of rhythm as a methodological approach can be useful in aesthetic analysis of hip hop music, dance, and everyday experiences, and would probably deliver new insights to counter- cultural readings of hip hop culture.

Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip Hop Music and Culture | 69 Works Cited

“9 Elements.” Writ. by KRS-One. Lyricsdepot.com. Kjørup, Frank. Sprog versus sprog—mod en ver- Lyrics Depot, n.d. Web. 2 May 2012. sets poetik. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2002. Print. Bukdahl, Lars. Poesi dèr. Danske raptekster 1988–2004. Aarhus: Systime, 2004. Print. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum, 2004. Print. Danielsen, Anne. “Iscenesat marginalitet?” Hiphop i Skandinavien. Ed. Mads Krogh and Lilja, Eva. Svensk Metrik. Stockholm: Swedish Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, Academy, 2006. Print. 2008. 201–17. Print. Olsen, Kasper Nefer, and Frederik Stjernfelt. ———. Presence and Pleasure—The Funk “Den dansende krop—teoretiske og analytiske Grooves of James Brown and Parliament. overvejelser omkring Igor Stravinskijs ‘Tre stykker Middletown: Wesleyan UP,2006. Print. for soloklarinet.’” Musikaestetik. Aalborg, Nordic Summer University, 1985. Print. Dimitriadis, Greg. “Hip-Hop: From Live Performance to mediated Narrative.” That’s the Pedersen, Birgitte Stougaard. “Anticipation and Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. Ed. Murray Delay as Micro-Rhythm and Gesture in Hip Hop Forman and Mark Anthony Neal. New York: Aesthetics.” Journal of Music and Meaning 8 Routledge, 2004. 421–36. Print. (Winter 2009): Sec. 3. Print.

Elden, Stuart. “Rhythmanalysis: An Introduction.” ———. Lyd, litteratur og musik—gestus i kunsto- Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. plevelsen. Aarhus: Aarhus UP,2008. Print. By Henri Lefebvre. London: Continuum, 2004. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood. Durham: Duke vii–xv. Print. UP, 2004. Print. Floyd, Samuel L. The Power of Black Music. Preminger, Alex, and T.V.F. Brogan, eds. The New Oxford: Oxford UP,1995. Print. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP,1993. Print. Forman, Murray. The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Ringgaard, Dan. Digt og rytme. Copenhagen: Middletown: Wesleyan UP,2002. Print. Gads Forlag, 2001. Print.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey—A Sernhede, Ove. “Los Angered og forstadens Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. krigere.” Social Kritik 74 (2001). 39–50. Print. Oxford: Oxford UP,1988. Print. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and the Brown Hasty, Christopher F. Meter as Rhythm. Oxford: Books—Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Oxford UP,1995. Print. Investigation.” New York: Basil Blackwell, 1958. Print. Hatten, Robert S. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. ———. Filosofiske Undersøgelser. Copenhagen: Bloomington: Indiana UP,2004. Print. Munksgaard, 1971. Print.

Hebdige, Dick. Subkultur og Stil. Aarhus: Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. 1931. London: Sjakalens Ørkenserie, 1983. Print. Hogarth, 1990. Print.

Endnotes

1. This article uses the term “black” to 2. For further discussions on the ontology of demonstrate the non-essentialist and rhythm see: Hasty; Kjørup; Ringgaard; Pedersen. conventional status of the concept.

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Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music

Dietmar Elflein

The poverty of Western thinking about rhythm, coupled with common prejudices and stereotypes about popular culture, obscures the diversity and role of rhythm in rock music. We must resist crude judgments about the beat of rock music, even when those crudities are surrounded by references to Plato, Rousseau, and other intellectuals of the Western canon. (Gracyk 147)

This plea concludes chapter five of Theodore Gracyk’s aesthetic of rock music, entitled Rhythm and Noise. In that particular chapter, the philosopher and aesthetician discusses different approaches that associate rock music rhythm with offensive sexuality, rebellion, violence, etc., in order to imply that the rhythm of rock music under- mines the values of the Christian West. Although in the twenty-first century it may seem dull to argue against such a square point of view, Gracyk uses the discussion to question frequently used clichés about the rhythm of rock music and asks what exactly makes people want to move to rock music. In his opinion, not only the beat, but specific forms of rhythmic interplay within a certain piece of music are responsible for its rhythmic quality and attraction. While Gracyk mostly treats the specific rhythms of individual artists and musicians, I would like to focus on the diversity of the use of rhythm in one of the most successful genres of rock music neglected by Gracyk: heavy metal. To give just one striking example of heavy metal attraction, in 2008 and 2009 Iron Maiden played arena concerts in 38 countries around the world during their Somewhere Back In Time tour. In the roughly 40 years of its existence, heavy metal has evolved into a “glocal” phenomenon with fans and musicians on every continent—something no one thought possible at the beginning of the genre. Apparently, there must be something that

Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music | 71 attracts people to heavy metal on a more or less global level. Jason Toynbee describes particular popular music genres like hip hop or reggae as “glocalised” genres, meaning popular music genres that are marketed globally and followed by the development of local scenes which happen to incorporate regional features in certain parts of the world (158–59). This also applies to heavy metal. My argument is that key concepts of heavy metal culture and the rhythmic quality of the music mix to generate its glocal attraction. Concomitantly, that means that there should be specific ways of constructing culture and music that separate heavy metal from other popular music- related cultures and music genres that lack a glocal attractiveness. To this purpose, I would like to describe how rhythms structure both heavy metal culture and music. Social rhythms centered on the production of music structure heavy metal culture and its historical existence in a circular way in order to minimize the dangers of uncontrolled change. The resulting mythical unity of heavy metal culture regards itself as excluded and independent from every possible society, and therefore potentially glocally attractive. Analogous to these social rhythms, musical rhythms are focused on (virtuosic) control of the musical means employed in order to gain unity. But in order to showcase the power of virtuosic control, rhythmic interplay confronts differing and, at least in part, antagonistic meters that create a musical tension that is never resolved. This reluctance to resolve tension can be read as sign of power (“I can take that”) or powerlessness (“I would if I could”). I would like to discover this virtuosic control of power(lessness) in a close reading of one particular heavy metal track, “Taking The World By Storm” by the Canadian extreme metal band Kataklysm. Its chorus contains the line “Overcome the pain,” which I borrowed to use as the title of this article.

Social Rhythms of Heavy Metal Culture In her cultural sociology of heavy metal culture, sociologist Deena Weinstein argues that heavy metal fans are mostly “blue collar, white, male youths” (100). But these three common assumptions have not stood the test of time. Certainly male dominance exists in heavy metal, but participatory observation at concerts and festivals shows that there is a growing minority of female fans,1 and the “whiteness” of heavy metal culture has to be questioned as well, since heavy metal has become a glocal phenomenon with fans all around the world (see Dunn and Mac Fayden). As early as 1996, ethnographer and folklorist Bettina Roccor noticed that, at least in Germany, there has been an increase in the number of fans with higher educational levels (148–52). Sociologist Rainer Diaz-Bone also questions the blue collar assumption in arguing that three main themes of heavy metal culture—the cycle of production, the work and success ethic, and the appreciation of being able to do it alone—reveal an affinity to professions like craftsperson, technician, and skilled worker (411). In his discourse analysis of a German heavy metal magazine, Diaz-Bone describes the cycle of production of heavy metal culture, which according to him is focused on

72 | Dietmar Elflein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 71–88 inspired units, that is bands (408–11). Every unit like this is caught in a cycle of production centered on the production of albums. First, songs have to be composed, rehearsed, and recorded. Then the album gets released and has to be promoted by interviews, concerts, and tours. When the tours end the cycle starts again. This rhythm of life has left its mark on heavy metal culture. But within that rhythm, the concert represents more than just promotion: it is the peak of the production cycle. Weinstein regards the concert as important since different parts of heavy metal culture meet and mix there (199), while Diaz-Bone opts for a slightly different view (409). While not neglecting the importance of the concert as a meeting point, in his opinion the main function of the concert, besides promotion, is to authenticate the record in the sense of: ‘are they able to play that stuff live?’ Since heavy metal culture is centered on the band and the record in his view, Diaz-Bone’s approach also accords with Gracyk’s and Charles Fairchild’s theses that albums, and not performances, are the primary work of rock music. But there is another cultural dimension of a heavy metal concert, and it is the opportunity for reminiscing a band’s past albums and remembrance of the band’s status within heavy metal culture. Since the lineup of many working bands on the tour circuit constantly varies, a concert may not be able to authenticate the promoted album in the terms Diaz-Bone means, because the on-stage lineup differs from the recorded lineup:

The current singer wasn’t able to tour so the old singer, Brett Hoffman, was recruited. Rob Barret joined Cannibal Corpse again and instead the old guitar player, John Rubin, returned. Bass player Jason Blachowitz (who recently replaced Gordon Simms) was not allowed to leave the USA due to miscellaneous criminal acts, and drum legend Dave Culross had to complete construction on his house. (“Bolt Thrower”)

This accidental touring lineup of the US-American death metal band Malevolent Creation is certainly not able to authenticate any album, but it is able to reminisce about the band’s status within heavy metal culture. If heavy metal culture is centered on the production of albums, a stream of tradition consisting of a constantly changing selection of all the heavy metal albums ever released could be proposed as a sub- structure of heavy metal culture. The stream of tradition is a concept developed in the scientific discussion of cultural memory (Assmann 55). It defines a precursor of the canon that is not part of the time-transcending cultural memory, but is nonetheless made up of cultural artifacts, like albums. Since the stream of tradition describes a project of historiography, it is inscribed in historiography as a discourse of differing and contradictory interests of the music industry, musicians, fans, journalists, and others. Therefore, not the concert itself but the festival (the venue and the accompanying program) should be regarded as the focal point of heavy metal culture, since this is

Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music | 73 the place where concerts and record stores—often called “Metal Market” or something equivalent—mix. Festivals normally last two or three days, and one can more or less permanently attend concerts, buy new, old, and rare records, party at the campground, etc. The history of heavy metal culture is not only present in the record stores, but also on stage. Disbanded bands stage special reunions, band anniversaries are celebrated with special sets and guest lists, etc. Therefore, parallel to the cycle of production that provides texture to the social rhythm of the band as the central unit of the culture, festivals structure the rhythm of life of fans, musicians, organizers, and neighbors in a circular way in order to promote the unity of the culture by means of history lessons in heavy metal culture. But the unity of heavy metal culture is a tradition invented by groups of people who earn their living from heavy metal culture.2 They build a myth around their own history to create unity. Since most of the current generation started their heavy metal career—as a journalist, manager, musician, (booking) agent, roadie, record company owner, or employee, etc.—in the early 1980s, the so-called “New Wave of British Heavy Metal”3 has become the founding myth of heavy metal culture, and the 1980s represents the mythical decade of unity. For the most part, the stream of tradition praises records released in the 1980s as important artifacts of the culture. From an ethnological viewpoint, societies with such a circular notion of time re-enact their founding myth at festivals (Müller 34, 72). But since such circular conceptions of time only work with a limited number of participants, when the mem- bership of heavy metal culture increases, this becomes a threat to its mythical unity. Ultimately, growth leads to separation—a process that started in the 1990s according to the myth—and the new entities strive to create their own founding myth to return from a marginalized position to the center of history. To keep from undermining unity, these effects of separation have to be reintegrated into the founding myth of heavy metal culture—for example in an annual rhythm at festivals. In terms of musical history according to Weinstein and Ian Christie, heavy metal emerged at the beginning of the 1970s and crystallized around the decade’s transition to the 1980s. Differentiation, which has remained an ongoing process, started from that point. Thus, separation had already started in the mythical 1980s, a fact that lets the desired unity of heavy metal culture appear even more unstable. Weinstein proposed a three-part continuum as a methodological means of reducing the complexity of stylistic differentiation within heavy metal culture that distinguishes crystallized heavy metal (classic metal) (6–8) from hard rock and “metal, fundamen- talist revision” (extreme metal) (52). In terms of the individuals who do not make a living from heavy metal culture, meaning ordinary fans, the mythical unity leads to a circularly renewed experience of heavy metal culture as more or less unconnected to real life outside heavy metal culture. This possibility is part of metal’s glocal attraction. Heavy metal culture offers

74 | Dietmar Elflein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 71–88 an imagined unity that rejects change and regards itself as excluded and independent of every society, no matter how many records and concert tickets Metallica and Iron Maiden sell in that particular society, for example. This exclusion is put into practice in everyday life outside of heavy metal culture and is—at least in part—a cause of suffering. When the number of heavy metal fans in any neighborhood grows, this fights individual loneliness on the one hand; but at the same time, a larger group is a potential threat to the unity of heavy metal culture. Therefore, every new fan has to prove his or her ability to be part of heavy metal culture by being able to provide detailed knowledge of the stream of tradition.

Transgression in Heavy Metal Sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris adds another dimension to this view by applying the concept of transgression to heavy metal culture to explain the specific attractiveness of heavy metal’s mythical self-exclusion from mainstream culture (27–49). Although Kahn-Harris analyzes only a certain part of heavy metal culture (extreme metal), at least diluted forms of his findings should match heavy metal culture as a whole. His work is also of interest since the example of a close reading below is a track by an extreme metal band. For him, the attractiveness of heavy metal culture is rooted in its ability to create spaces in which the specific needs of the people involved are fulfilled:

The scene allows members to experience the pleasures of transgression and mun- danity in a relative safe, secure and autonomous environment. Indeed, reflexive anti-reflexivity allows members to maintain the illusion that this safe environment is immune from the complexities and problems of the world. (Kahn-Harris 157)

“Reflexive anti-reflexivity” paraphrases an attitude of “knowing better, but deciding not to know” (145). According to Kahn-Harris, the desired transgression “implies a sense of crossing and testing boundaries and limits” (29). Kahn-Harris relates this concept to Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about the medieval carnival, as it “sets limits even as it challenges others” (29). Consequently, transgressive behavior for Kahn- Harris is also deeply attracted to Julia Kristeva’s abject, which is “formless, disgusting, terrifying and threatening” (157). He identifies three forms of transgression in extreme metal, which he labels sonic, bodily, and discursive transgression. Sonic transgression centers on the distortion of sound, bodily transgression is devoted to heavy metal’s attraction to excessive drinking and potentially violent forms of dancing, while discursive transgression describes heavy metal’s preoccupation with violence, the occult, aggression, and other “dark” themes. I would like to add a fourth dimension: rhythmic transgression, which centers on the unresolved tensions of rhythmic interplay I will show below. All four forms can be found in heavy metal culture as a whole in diluted manifestations.

Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music | 75 In comparison, extreme metal’s need for transgression is more serious and repetitive. Kahn-Harris writes,

Extreme metal discourse represents a departure from heavy metal discourse in that the fantasies it explores are less obviously ‘fantastic.’ Heavy metal discourses are generally lurid, theatrical, baroque, and often satirical. Extreme metal discourses are detailed, repetitive, and apparently serious. (43)

Kahn-Harris also describes extreme metal’s general obsession with control that can be linked with the skilled virtuosity of the musicians (artisans) and the repetitive element, since repetition resembles the urge to control something (36). In sum, heavy metal culture can be described as an all-age, male-dominated glocal phenomenon centered on albums (the production cycle of the band), and reveals closeness to the values of artisans, technicians, and skilled workers while imagining itself as excluded from mainstream society to experience the pleasures of transgression.

Discursive Transgression In general, one should be careful not to overemphasize the relevance of any heavy metal lyrics, since lyrics are generally regarded as being less important than the music and the visuals or the image. For example Jon Tardy, the singer in the well- known death metal band Obituary, is known for the way he uses his voice to fit sonically to the music instead of focusing on lyrical content. But this lack of content does not affect Obituary’s status within heavy metal culture.4 Nevertheless, the lyrics of Kataklysm’s track “Taking The World By Storm” can be read as a typical fight against selling out, as a fight for unity, particularly because of its opening line “Corruption, the poisoned apple, that feeds your lust.” But the lyrics do not get more precise about any possible subject of the text. Instead, the powerful image of “Taking the World by Storm” is supplemented in the pre-chorus by images of a never-ending struggle that go hand in hand with a lot of suffering:

Hold on to this, endurance of will I’ll travel hard through the impossible Clenching my fist, this fight will never end I shall rise, taking the world by storm. (Kataklysm)

While the protagonist is showing his will to move, at the same time he is not sure if he will really make it. There are uncontrollable and powerfully dangerous forces to fight—the impossible—and every victory is only temporary because this fight will never end. Consequently, to take the world by storm is projected into the future: “I shall rise, taking the world by storm.” The chorus following specifies the impossible

76 | Dietmar Elflein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 71–88 dangers as—at least partly—the protagonist’s inner demons, which are not easy to conquer. “Overcome the pain, take away the fear, kill the voice inside, kill the lie.” The gram- matical form of the imperative that commands this chorus re-emphasizes the protagonist’s will to do something, but will he succeed? We will never know, because after walking through hostile, depressing surroundings (“Walked through fields of war, faced a spineless world, blinded by light”) the last verse ends with a repetition of the grammatically ambiguous line “I will conquer this lie.” In terms of discursive transgression, the lyrics imply a fascination with “dark themes” and treat them extremely seriously. There is absolutely no trace of humor in the lyrics. But the underscored sincerity is also passive. The protagonist is, metaphorically speaking, chained by the way things are and therefore unable to move. The corresponding album cover shows a winged demon chained to a throne- like seat made of metal, skulls, and bones. The throne is positioned above a wasted urban landscape. The sky is stormy and filled with birds of prey. Therefore, the album title Prevail is illustrated in a dark, fatalistic, and also ambiguous way. The reign of the chained demon can be read individually or socially, but in any case there is not much hope left for a better future, where the world could be taken by storm. After all, we are at the mercy of circumstances. This reading of the lyrics is supported by the track’s video, in which nothing is taken by storm either. The video was shot in a large, empty industrial hall with a flight of stairs and showcases the four members of the band performing the song together on the floor with an additional second guitar player on the flight of stairs. The musicians are moving to the rhythm of the song (mostly head banging or swinging their guitars around), but nobody is walking or running around. Nobody even tries to move in this video. Instead, they stand side by side; in fact, they are nailed in their spatial positions and they don’t even interact with one another. Occasionally, an individual interacts with the camera and the singer takes two or three steps in the direction of the camera while performing and promising, “I shall rise.” This is the one of the movements made in the space. Another spatially different setting shows the singer standing alone in another part of the hall, effectively separated from his fellow musicians. There is nothing left except a shallow promise to take the world by storm. But obviously the main connection between the musicians is the rhythm of the music or their synchronized movements to the rhythm of the music. Kataklysm’s fatalistic worldview is typical for the more serious portion of heavy metal lyrics that has evolved since heavy metal culture emerged out of the ashes of the 1960s counterculture. To sum up the historical situation, positive dreams of change died in Altamont5 or Memphis,6 while the Vietnam War was still going on. Black Sabbath’s anti-war anthem “War Pigs” describes the cruelty of the (Vietnam) war and accuses politicians of leaving the fight to the poor. According to Black

Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music | 77 Sabbath, that is a fact that cannot be changed. If one is poor one has to suffer from the decisions of politicians (or the wealthy or whoever). The same occurs in the lyrics of the eponymous song “Black Sabbath.” The protagonist tries to escape Satan, but he has no chance: “Oh no God please help me!” To cite some more examples of fatalistic views in heavy metal lyrics, Judas Priest describes a Big Brother-like vision of society in “Electric Eye,” but adds “there’s nothing you can do about it.” In the title track of the album (Screaming for Vengeance) the protagonist is screaming for vengeance, but becoming active is projected into the future: “If it takes forever babe I tell ya I can wait.” Iron Maiden’s lyrics are often inspired by historical facts that can’t be changed anymore, for example the suffering of American Indians in “Run to The Hills,” or the senselessness of the Crimean War in “The Trooper.” When moving from classic metal like the examples cited above to thrash and the beginning of extreme metal, Metallica’s lyrics add a more depressive twist to this passive worldview that also manifests itself in song titles, like “Fade To Black” or “Trapped Under Ice.” Slayer change perspectives in parts of their lyrics by letting the listener suffer as a result of the deeds of the band’s protagonist (“Death will come easy just close your eyes”), while Megadeth add a cynical taste demonstrated by album titles like Peace Sells But Who’s Buying? (1986) or Rust In Peace (1990). Within this lyrical world, hope is only found in texts devoted to bodily transgression, like Metallica’s “Hit The Lights” or “Whiplash.” Positive elements of the type: hope for a change in situation X are lacking in heavy metal’s view of the outside world. Hope is limited to the parallel world of heavy metal culture carefully cultivated by reflexive anti-reflexivity.

Sonic Transgression Sonically, the sound of heavily distorted electric guitars dominates Kataklysm’s song, accompanied by vocals that can also be described as distorted—an almost unvoiced sound between screaming, growling, and barking. On the contrary, the drum sound is anything but distorted; every cymbal and every drum can be heard with absolute clar- ity. Drums, guitars and vocals, that is all we hear; we assume there is a bass guitar, since the video shows a bass player as part of the band, but actually we do not really hear it. This soundscape matches all of the sonic stylistic conventions necessary for identifying an extreme metal track, except that the drawn-out screams are missing. Nevertheless, Harris Berger described the drawn-out screams as part of a concept of virtuosic control of the voice that is important to heavy metal singers and differs considerable from a more emotionally driven blues-derived vocal style common in rock music (49–60). This approach corresponds also to Diaz-Bone’s analysis of heavy metal’s affinity to the values of skilled workers. Robert Walser analyzes this type of skilled virtuosity as an important feature of heavy metal’s guitar solos, but “Taking The World By Storm” also lacks a virtuosic guitar solo (50).

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It is obvious that the track is consciously working with a reduction of its sonic means of expression. A similar reduction can be found in the formal structure of the song, which strongly resembles the “intro-two verses-break-verse-playout” structure analyzed by Allan F. Moore as a common formal structure of rock music in general (150). In fact, the formal structure is reduced even further to “two verses-break-playout.” But after all, the formal structure is composed of a succession of guitar riffs, the main formal unit of any heavy metal track. The verse consists of a succession of four riffs of identical length, the break part adds a fifth riff, and the playout repeats the fourth riff of the verse. But the stylistic conventions of heavy metal normally opt for much more complex structures composed of sequencing riffs. When using a verse-chorus structure, a heavy metal song should at least feature a complex and drawn-out break, which is also missing.7 Because of this reduction of expressive means, the necessary virtuosic control can only be found in the rhythmic patterns provided by the individual musicians and in rhythmic interplay as a sign of ensemble virtuosity, something Walser only denotes (48–49). Since there is a general lack of melody with the vocals declaiming the lyrics more than actually singing them on defin- able pitches—in general, melodic fragments occur only as parts of guitar riffs—the perception of this particular song is dominated by rhythmic features.

Rhythmic Transgression Up to now, rhythm has been featured as a structuring, connecting element within heavy metal culture and its concretion in Kataklysm’s form of discursive transgression. But unresolved tensions are created within rhythmic interplay. These dividing forces are required to create the connective aspects of rhythm in heavy metal culture. Rhythmic interplay within heavy metal8 is a mixture of riff and pulse-based playing styles layered horizontally by the different instruments and sequenced vertically to create the track. Formally, these sequences of riffs can merge with verse-chorus structures. But riffs are not the smallest invariant units in heavy metal’s musical language. They can be divided into groups of (multiples of) two or three pulses, the main rhythmic modules of riff creation. Music psychologist Herbert Bruhn refers to pulse as a regular repetition of an acoustic event. Meter restructures pulses into heavy (stressed) and light (unstressed) acoustic events, while rhythm is regarded as a specific organization of the pulse within a given metric framework (235–41). Within heavy metal, the arrangement of pulses in metric groups sequenced to form a rhythm results from rhythmic and/or harmonic-melodic variations. One pulse of the group is doubled or halved, or, at least one pulse is transposed to another pitch. Purely rhythmic variation culminates in one-pitch riffs, while harmonic-melodic variation culminates in the repetition of melodic fragments. The opening riff of “Taking the World By Storm” is a typical heavy metal riff that combines pulse- and riff-based playing styles and sequencing groups of pulses

Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music | 79 Figure 1 Kataklysm, “Taking The World By Storm,” excerpt from the first riff (intro, interlude). created by harmonic-melodic variation. The pitch of the pulse is B2,9 which means the guitars are tuned down a fourth, an extreme implementation of the common sonic feature of down tuning in extreme metal. Figure 1 shows the first half of the riff; the second half is rhythmically identical with, in part, differing harmonic-melodic variations. Rhythmically, the riff is composed of a succession of groups of 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 4 ϩ 2 ϩ 4 pulses, or (multiples of) two and three pulses. This mode of riff composition causes an unresolved tension between even (2, 4) and uneven (3) groups of pulses. The guitar rhythm is contrasted with a reduced backbeat common to almost all rock-related styles, but also within the stream of tradition of heavy metal associated with Judas Priest of the British Steel period at the beginning of the 1980s.10 Rhythmically, the backbeat contrasts the succession of (multiples of) two and three pulses in the rhythm guitar with even- numbered sequences, which results in a rhythmic interplay that contrasts different divisions of a basic pulse.11 The second guitar riff of “Taking The World By Storm” is also composed of (multiples of) two and three pulses, but the metrical chain is rotated to a sequence of 2 ϩ 4 ϩ 2 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 ϩ 3 pulses as indicated in Figure 2:

Figure 2 Kataklysm, “Taking The World By Storm,” excerpt from the second riff (verse).

Again, the first half of the riff is shown, because as far as the guitars are concerned, the second half is rhythmically identical. In regard to the voice, the opening grouping of 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 pulses is not repeated in the second half of the riff. The above- mentioned method of contrasting even and uneven groups of pulses vertically as well as horizontally defines this second riff of the track in a slightly more complicated way.

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The sequence of 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 pulses in the voice is also featured in the third riff of the track (Fig. 2). The voice and rhythm guitar play this particular metrical chain while the bass and drums contrast even groups of pulses that are constant semiquavers in the bass and a blastbeat in the drums.

Figure 3 Kataklysm, “Taking The World By Storm,” excerpt from the third riff (pre chorus).

The term “blastbeat” describes a way of playing the drums in a very fast way by alternating snare and bass drum hits and starting with a snare impulse. The succession of 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 in the guitar is created through a transposition of the pulse to different pitches while playing as fast as possible. Guitar players speak of the speed picking technique indicated in Figure 2 by the appearance of the stems. Due to the playing styles of rhythm guitar and drums, the third riff represents the part of the track with the highest density, a sort of a climax of speed that, within the structure of the riff, is confronted with the comparatively slow succession of 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 pulses in the voice and the pitch change of the rhythm guitar. It also represents a contrast of contradictory divisions of the pulse. To emphasize this, the fast pulse and the 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 sequence are played parallel by either the drums and guitar or the voice and guitar. Playing parallel is a typical way of concentrating energy or power within heavy metal. It also highlights the uniqueness of the featured riff. The ongoing tension of sequencing and layering even and uneven groups of pulses in the first three riffs of the track is contrasted with sequences of even groups of pulses played by the guitars in the fourth riff that accompanies the chorus (Fig. 4).

Figure 4 Kataklysm, “Taking The World By Storm,” excerpt from the fourth riff (chorus).

Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music | 81 At same time, the drums return to the reduced backbeat that also accompanied the first riff. Therefore, the first half of the chorus is the only part of the track where the rhythmic interplay of guitar and drums sequences and layers is based on even- numbered groups of pulses and does not result in tension between even and uneven. This contrast supports the high density of the previous part of the track and acts as a fake closure of the different energy levels and densities inherent in the track as well. As shown in Figure 5, the first half of the chorus represents a fake closure, since the drums change to a ternary playing style and reinstate the tension between uneven and even in the second half.

Figure 5 Kataklysm, “Taking The World By Storm,” excerpt from the fourth riff (chorus).

As a consequence, the rhythmic tension not only remains unresolved but is also heightened with the binary pulse in the guitar and ternary pulse in the drums before the previously analyzed sequence of four riffs starts all over again. Metaphorically speaking, the end of the chorus is like an exclamation mark: That’s what we’re here for! The break part that follows the repetition of the analyzed sequence of four riffs also works with the familiar tension between even and uneven. While one guitar repeats constant quavers, the bass guitar doubles the pulse by playing semiquavers and the drums repeat a version of the familiar backbeat with doubled pulse density as well. But the second guitar contrasts this sequencing of even-numbered groups with the already familiar metrical chain of 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 pulses in an arpeggio-like playing style on changing harmonies as indicated in Figure 6.

Figure 6 Kataklysm, “Taking The World By Storm,” excerpt from the fifth riff (break).

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The track ends with a lengthy repetition of the chorus accompanied by the backbeat of the drums, which again changes to the ternary pulse transcribed above in the second half (Fig. 5). Throughout the whole track, the ongoing rhythmic tension between even and uneven is never resolved. It goes on forever, with changing intensity. That is what I call “rhythmic transgression in heavy metal.” Different levels of intensity, density and energy are layered vertically and sequenced horizontally to create a rhythmic power that is permanently under control by the skills of the musicians and is never unleashed.

Kataklysm and the Stream of Tradition of Heavy Metal Culture In regard to the stream of tradition, the featured sequence of 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 pulses contains an echo of blues-related playing styles. It is derived either from the son clave of Afro Cuban music or the Latin habanera rhythm (see Pfleiderer 234–37). Bo Diddley’s famous rhythm figure is closely related to these patterns and may serve in this context as a verification of the blues echo inherent in the 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 sequence.

Figure 7 An Abstraction of Bo Diddley’s famous rhythm figure.

In Bo Diddley’s tracks “Bo Diddley” and “Pretty Thing,” the transcribed rhythm is played on a drum; in “Mona,” it is doubled by a guitar. Classic metal, like Judas Priest and others, favors this succession of 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 pulses over other possibilities of sequencing groups of pulses, but at the same time produces numerous variants of the sequence, like doubling it, halving it, or adding an extra group of pulses to the sequence. Thus, with its numerous usages of the 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 sequence, “Taking The World By Storm” is deeply rooted in classic metal despite having been produced by an extreme metal band that normally tries to minimize any blues echoes. The possible reading of the lyrics as an endless fight for the unity of heavy metal culture is supported by this musical analysis because the main mode of riff creation is rooted in classic heavy metal’s rhythmic treatment of its blues heritage. Since extreme metal is an offspring of heavy metal culture that potentially threatens its unity, Kataklysm’s classic-metal-inspired type of rhythmic interplay opts to uphold the unity of heavy metal and extreme metal. But since the track (and its main formal unit) ends with a sequence of even-numbered groups in the guitar riff, the unity proposed by Kataklysm is unstable: it is permanently under threat. It is no surprise that the protagonist of the lyrics is fighting his inner demons during this fourth riff (Fig. 5). He is trying to “overcome the pain” and “kill the voice inside, kill the lie.” But which voice and which lie need to be killed? It could be the voice demanding unity as well as the voice threatening the lie of unity. Within extreme metal, sequences of even-numbered groups of pulses that contain absolutely no blues echo are often favored over the 3 ϩ 3 ϩ 2 succession and its

Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music | 83 variants.12 But as Kataklysm show, the transgressive practice of creating an unresolved tension between even and uneven is not minimized in extreme metal. In fact, it is created in a more serious way by confronting layers of exact binary and ternary pulse—like in the second part of the chorus transcribed in Figure 5—instead of sequencing groups of two and three in binary pulse. Classic metal distinguishes itself from blues-based playing by refraining from merging groups of two and three pulses into something between (like shuffling), but is always aware of that possibility. Extreme metal abandons this option. That means that groups of three pulses are no longer reminiscent of the blues, but act as an integral part of heavy or extreme metal’s means of rhythmic expression. Maybe Kataklysm just “kill the lie” of a ternary pulse being blues-influenced within the musical code of heavy metal. But reading the track that way means that the rhythmic reminiscing of heavy metal’s stream of tradition leads to the creation of a new founding myth—the founding myth of extreme metal culture—that threatens the unity of heavy metal culture by its mere existence. To take the next step: the last traces of ambiguity exit heavy metal culture when the blues influence is minimized or denied. Everything left is either one way or the other, binary or ternary, metal or not metal. In Kahn-Harris’s terminology, things are becoming more serious and repetitive. The testing of the boundaries of rhythmic power enforced by parts of the extreme metal scene and the relocation of the (physical) limits of confronting material of opposed (rhythmic) qualities are acts that also incorporate the will to suffer. Within rhythmic transgression there is a fine line where power mutates into powerlessness and control also means to be under control. In a similar way, the fatalist view of the world found in the lyrics and the no-interaction video confronts opposing topics with each other and provides no opportunity for resolving the inherent tensions. Instead, they are shifted into the inner self where they can be acted out as bodily transgression, for example. The virtuosic control of power needed to withstand the created tensions is a source of suffering at the same time. It is always in danger of becoming an end in itself.

Conclusion The glocal attractiveness of heavy metal culture is, at least in part, affected by its treatment of musical and social rhythms. Rhythmic transgression describes a way of layering and sequencing different levels of intensity, density, and energy vertically and horizontally. It creates an ongoing rhythmic tension that is never unleashed but permanently under control by the skills of the musicians. Therefore, rhythmic transgression creates the rhythmic power that makes people want to move to heavy metal as described by Gracyk. Socially, the transgressive practice of extreme metal, and heavy metal culture as a whole in a diluted way, allows people to act out unresolved tensions within a culture that positions itself as excluded from mainstream society and

84 | Dietmar Elflein Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 71–88 is therefore not responsible for creating these tensions. By defining itself as excluded from mainstream society, heavy metal culture also constructs a myth of unity that is effectively supported by people making a living out of heavy metal culture. Because of its mythical construction, heavy metal is constantly subject to acts that threaten its unity and is therefore something that needs to be taken care of by its participants. Despite the argument that key concepts of heavy metal culture and the rhythmic quality of the music mix to generate its glocal attraction, the described analogy between the musical and social rhythms of heavy metal culture, the unresolved social and rhythmic tensions, should not be overemphasized. Gracyk rightly insists on the purely aesthetic value of any music that is never completely absorbed in something he calls “the social relevance thesis” (46). In order to respond to Gracyk’s critique that the social relevance thesis treats “popular songs fundamen- tally as symbols and their aesthetic dimension is irrelevant” (48), the extended concept of transgression is used as a means to keep social and aesthetic values methodologically separated. Heavy metal is both a globally attractive fatalistic lifestyle centered on the virtuosic control of conflicting rhythms and a popular music genre loved by its fans because of differing aesthetic reasons.

Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music | 85 Works Cited

Assmann, Jan. Religion und kulturelles ———. “Somewhere in Time: Zum Verhältnis Gedächtnis: Zehn Studien. München: C.H. Beck, von Lebensalter, Mythos und Geschichte am 2000. Print. Beispiel von Heavy Metal Festivals.” Samples Jahrgang 8 (2009): n.p. Web. 21 Dec. 2010. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. http://aspm.ni.lo-net2.de/samples/. Bloomington: Indiana UP,1984. Print. Fairchild, Charles. “The Medium and Materials of Berger, Harris M. “Horizons of Melody and the Popular Music: Hound Dog, Turntablism and Problem of Self.” Identity and Everyday Life. Ed. Muzak as Situated Musical Practices.” Popular Harris M. Berger and Giovanna P. Del Negro. Music 27.1 (2008): 99–116. Print. Middletown: Wesleyan UP,2004. Print. Global Metal. Dir. Sam Dunn and Scott Black Sabbath. “Black Sabbath.” Black Sabbath. McFayden. Universal, 2008. DVD. Vertigo, 1970. CD. Gracyk, Theodore. Rhythm and Noise: An ———. “War Pigs.” Paranoid. Vertigo, 1970. CD. Aesthetics of Rock. Durham: Duke UP,1996. Print. “Bolt Thrower ϩ Malevolent Creation ϩ Nightrage ϩ Necrophagist.” Rev. of perf. of Iron Maiden. “Run To The Hills.” The Number Of Bolt Thrower, Malevolent Creation, Nightrage, The Beast. EMI, 1982. CD. and Necrophagist at Markthalle, Hamburg, Germany. Metal Hammer 1 March 2006: 116. ———. “The Trooper.” Piece Of Mind. EMI, Web. 21 Dec. 2010. 1983. CD.

Bruhn, Herbert. “Kognitive Aspekte der Judas Priest. British Steel. CBS, 1980. CD. Entwicklung von Rhythmus.” Rhythmus: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Ed. Katharina Müller ———. “Electric Eye.” Screaming For Vengeance. and Gisa Aschersleben. Bern: Huber, 2000. CBS, 1982. CD. 227–44. Print. ———. “Screaming For Vengeance.” Screaming Christie, Ian. Sound of the Beast: The Complete For Vengeance. CBS, 1982. CD. Headbanging History of Heavy Metal. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Print. Kahn-Harris, Keith. Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Print. Diaz-Bone, Rainer. Kulturwelt, Diskurs und Lebensstil: Eine diskurstheoretische Erweiterung Kataklysm. “Taking The World By Storm.” Prevail. der bourdieuschen Distinktionstheorie. Opladen: Nuclear Blast Records, 2008. CD. Leske and Budrich, 2002. Print. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Diddley, Bo. “Bo Diddley.” I’m a Man. 1958. CD. Abjection. New York: Columbia UP,1982. Print.

———. “Mona.” I’m a Man. 1958. CD. Megadeth. Peace Sells, But Who’s Buying. Capitol Records, 1986. CD. ———. “Pretty Thing.” I’m a Man. 1958. CD. ———. Rust In Peace. Capitol Records, 1990. CD. Elflein, Dietmar. Schwermetallanalysen: Die musikalische Sprache des Heavy Metal. Bielefeld: Metallica. “Fade To Black.” Ride The Lightning. Transcript, Verlag, 2010. Print. Music For Nations, 1984. CD.

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———. “Hit The Lights.” Kill’em All. Music For Pfleiderer, Martin. Rhythmus: Psychologische, Nations, 1983. CD. theoretische und stil-analytische Aspekte populärer Musik. 2006. Bielefeld U Lib., ———. “Trapped Under Ice.” Ride The Lightning. Bielefeld. TS. Music For Nations, 1984. CD. Roccor, Bettina. Heavy Metal: Kunst, Kommerz, ———. “Whiplash.” Kill’em All. Music For Ketzerei. Berlin: Iron Pages, 1996. Print. Nations, 1983. CD. Slayer. “Altar Of Sacrifice.” Reign In Blood. Moore, Allan F. Rock: The Primary Text: Developing DefJam Recordings, 1986. CD. a Musicology of Rock. 2nd ed. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Print. Ashgate Pop. and Folk Toynbee, Jason. “Mainstreaming: From Hegemonic Music Ser. Culture Centre to Global Networks.” Popular Music Studies. Ed. David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Müller, Klaus E. “Der Ursprung der Geschichte.” Negus. London: Arnold, 2002. 149–164. Print. Der Ursprung der Geschichte: Archaische Kulturen, das Alte Ägypten und das Frühe Weinstein, Deena. Heavy Metal: A Cultural Griechenland. Ed. Jan Assmann and Klaus E. Sociology. 2nd ed. New York: Lexington, 2001. Müller. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005. 17–86. Print.

Endnotes

1. Unfortunately there is a lack of up-to-date incompatible with Megadeth’s image — these empirical data on this topic. lyrics are not referred to in any reviews of the albums. Instead, Megadeth’s musical return to 2. See Elflein “Somewhere” for a more detailed heavy metal is appreciated as an artistic move discussion of this topic. that is visually accompanied by the return of their mascot ‘Vic Rattlehead’ — a zombie-like 3. The term “New Wave Of British Heavy Metal” skeletal figure who embodies the phrase “See sums up different British bands active around no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” — as part of the turn of the decade as well as the beginning the album covers. of self-organization of heavy metal fans and musicians by starting small independent record 5. This refers to the murder of Meredith Hunter companies, fanzines, etc. In a way it combined at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival organized the do-it-yourself ethics of punk with a greater by the Rolling Stones on December 6, 1969. emphasis on musical skills and a refusal to get a haircut: that is, a refusal to deny the stream of 6. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King tradition. While punk opted for a new way of Jr. on April 4, 1968. reinforcing the counterculture, heavy metal stayed with the old way while being aware of its 7. For a detailed discussion of heavy metal’s failure. formal structures, see Elflein Schwermetallanalysen. 4. To cite another example: Dave Mustaine, the leader of the well-known thrash metal band 8. For a detailed discussion of heavy Megadeth, converted to Christianity in the new metal’s rhythmic language, see Elflein millennium. Although, as a consequence, some Schwermetallanalysen. tracks on Megadeth’s last two albums contain deeply Christian lyrics—something any heavy 9. B2 in scientific pitch notation is equivalent to metal fan in the 1990s would have regarded as B in Helmholtz pitch notation.

Overcome the Pain: Rhythmic Transgression in Heavy Metal Music | 87 10. Interestingly, British Steel (1980) represents the bass only emphasizes an already existing a formally reduced approach to heavy metal in way of treating the pulse and adds nothing new the history of Judas Priest and also lacks to the modes of rhythmic interplay. Since it is virtuosic guitar solos and drawn out screams, also almost inaudible, the bass is ignored in the something for which Judas Priest’s singer Rob transcriptions of rhythmic interplay. Halford is normally celebrated. 12. Slayer’s way of playing exemplifies the 11. The bass guitar plays either parallel to the preference for even-numbered groups of pulses. rhythm guitar or parallel to the drums. Therefore,

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Kairos, the Rhythm of Timing

Marie Gelang

This is a rhetorical study of tempo and rhythm in a speaker’s nonverbal communication. Nonverbal tempo and rhythm are sources of understanding as well as misun- derstanding in different rhetorical situations. The primary focus of this contribution is to explain how the concept of kairos, meaning a subjective moment in time, can help us to understand tempo and rhythm in our nonverbal communication and how this can relate to a sense of timing. In my research I have found that one of the aspects of our nonverbal communication important for kairos is a sense of rhythm. A speaker with a good sense of rhythm can come across as very persuasive. Within rhetoric, a wide and complex variety of concepts are used to explore and discuss our society’s different discursive phenomena. When analyzing different bodies of empirical material, like the nonverbal communication of politicians and university teachers, some rhetorical concepts stand out as more important than others, namely ethos, pathos, decorum, and kairos. The concepts aim to clarify and explain nonverbal communicative processes that can seem incomprehensible. One of the concepts I would like to explore here is kairos. The concept of kairos captures a process that can be difficult to comprehend: whereby everything crystallizes into exactly the right moment for someone to act or speak, or both. Sensing this moment is what we in everyday speech often call timing. Exploring the concept of kairos, one finds that its connection to the sense of timing also involves a sense of tempo and rhythm. Following a presentation of kairos, I present of a body of empirical material consisting of lectures by university teachers against which the concept of kairos will be tested.

Kairos, the Rhythm of Timing | 89 The Right Action at the Right Time Kairos is a Greek word that designates the “right moment” in relation to time, place, and action (Sutton 413). The concept of kairos has been employed and further developed within the discipline of rhetoric, as well as within theology and philosophy. Within theology, the concept usually refers to an occasion when God intervenes in history; philosophically, kairos can, for instance, refer to the moment when “truth” is revealed (Karuse 4; Sipiora 114–27).1 Kairos is most often used in rhetoric in the following three ways: first through rhetoric, like kairos, requiring decisive and determined action; second, kairos referring to the right moment to speak; and third, its referral to what is appropriate. Kairos is the moment that the speaker awaits, in order to act in harmony with what the situation requires. One such moment can be when consensus is reached in deliberative negotiations. If the ideas are not expressed at the “right moment” the speaker misses kairos, that is to say, fails to live up to the demands imposed by the specific audience and situation. Kairos, in addition to being that which incites the speaker to speak, also constitutes the value of speaking (Sutton 413–17). Decorum is a concept closely related to kairos. Both contain the idea of doing the “right thing with the right forcefulness/proportions”; that is to say, doing an action considered fitting in a rhetorical situation (Hariman). In rhetoric, a “rhetorical situation” refers to the context within which nonverbal communication takes place (Bitzer). Lloyd F. Bitzer presented a definition of the “rhetorical situation” in the late 1960s. According to Bitzer, the three factors that comprise the foundation of a rhetorical situation are exigence, audience, and constraints. “Exigence” stands for that which can be considered an urgent, pressing need in the situation: something that must be dealt with. Which specific response necessary to satisfy the need, and how it is communicated, is different in each particular situation. “Audience” refers to the listeners or receivers of the rhetorical response. A rhetorical situation requires listeners/receivers open to influence. The rhetorical response should be convincing and it should ideally lead to some form of change, decision, or action among the audience. “Constraints” designates the limiting circumstances within the situation, such as, for example, beliefs, attitudes, facts, instructions, etc. Both concepts—decorum and kairos—are closely connected to the rhetorical situation. However, kairos adds an additional factor, the “right moment,” which is the aspect of the concept that I wish to emphasize in this chapter. In ancient literature, the concept of kairos describes those instances where someone carries out a suitable action at the “right moment.” In these texts, kairos is related to practical actions, for example throwing an axe. Terms such as aperture, hole, opening, target, point of impact, and the like, are used to describe the exact goal/purpose of the actions performed at the instant of kairos. Onians cites The Suppliants, a drama by Euripides (ca. 480–406 BCE), in which the character Adrastus speaks of men “aiming their bow beyond the kairos.” Kairos refers here to the temple (at the side of the

90 | Marie Gelang Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 89–102 forehead) as the target of the shot—a point where the arrow easily can penetrate, and metaphorically speaking, enter a person’s body and soul. The purpose of the action was to influence a person’s inner thoughts (Onians 343–48). A further example is when Odysseus, in a contest for Penelope’s hand, shoots his weapon through an aperture made of twelve iron axes placed crosswise in a straight line; here, the action is described as kairos.2 Pindar (518–438 BCE) also uses kairos. His metaphor describes the activity of an archer. It was important for the archer to aim his or her arrow at the right opening and strike it with force so that the arrow would penetrate the aperture and reach its goal. A shot that missed an opening failed, and was not seen as kairos. Kairos refers to the perfect hit, one that was made with suitable force, reached its target, and thereby enacted the intended effect (Onians 343–48).3 Another metaphor in the ancient texts of Homer and Pindar (among others) describes kairos as an important moment in the craft of weaving. The metaphor refers to the moment in weaving when the odd and even threads are separated so that the weft threads can be passed through the warp. The instant when the warp opens exemplifies kairos as an opportune moment, the right instant, the right opportunity, because the opening in the weave only lasts a short time, and the weft-insertion must take place exactly then (Onians 343–48). The recurring openings of the weave when the shuttle can be passed between the threads represent the “moments” when it is possible for a speaker to act (Sutton 414). The metaphors in ancient literature make it clear that a practitioner, for example of archery or weaving, must wait and sense the special moment. The moment must appear with perfection to enable the practitioner, by means of accomplished preci- sion, to strike the target. The archer must suddenly and with measured force shoot the arrow toward the mark, while the weaver must force the weave with the shuttle. The metaphors also show that kairos is tied to a specific situation in which a coincidence of circumstances allows it to arise (Sutton 414–15). For the Pythagoreans,4 kairos represented an overall sense of the right vital point in time and space when, for example, a conflict reaches its resolution, which then gives form and content to the universe. It was such a philosophical interpretation of kairos, concerning balance and harmony in the universe, from which Gorgias (483–374 BCE) and other Sophists further developed their interpretation of kairos (Helsley 371). Gorgias claimed there was no absolute truth, but that everything could be reflected through two opposing conditions, dissoi logoi.5 Kairos represented the moment when the opposing conditions were decisively resolved. Gorgias viewed kairos as a creative action. It was in kairos that new standpoints, new knowledge took form. Tradition and experience could hinder the spontaneous creativity and sen- sitivity to what is new, and hence to kairos. Instead of seeking security in tradition, Gorgias emphasized an openness and spontaneity toward the surrounding world so that an opening would be created for something new to happen (Benedikt 228f.).

Kairos, the Rhythm of Timing | 91 Gorgias met opposition from Protagoras (481–429 BCE), who claimed that kairos was dependent on tradition and anchored in history. Protagoras argued that evaluating whether kairos is occurring “now” depends on a series of reflections and objective, situation-bound qualities. Kairos demands conscious human participation. If one over relies on kairos arising spontaneously of its own accord, then the actual moment can pass unnoticed. Therefore, the individual is dependent on knowledge about customs and traditions. Based on them one can reflect on ongoing processes in the situation and act accordingly (Benedikt 228f.). Like Protagoras, Aristotle claimed that it is the circumstances of the rhetorical situation that are decisive for what is the “right thing at the right time,” especially if the action has to do with questions of ethics, morality, and justice (Kinneavy and Eskin 433–39, 442).6 The apprehension of the “right moment” is further influenced by the experience of the relationship between kairos and chronos, the two Greek terms used to refer to time. Chronos has a clearly quantitative meaning, and consists of measurable time, while kairos has a more qualitative, culturally based sense. Kairos is a subjective moment in time, unlike chronos, which is objective, absolute, and universal (Benedikt 226–29). Chronos is formal time and exists for abstract and objective reflection. Kairos, on the other hand, is the “right time,” which is a moment in time that is filled with meaning and significance. Tillich writes that kairos arises “in the moment of the fullness of time” (Tillich 33). Nevertheless, chronos and kairos depend on each other. Chronos is an underlying circumstance necessary for kairos to arise. Special historical events, natural processes and/or human actions occur when chronos achieves a specific critical point of qualitative character. This point in time emerges because a multitude of simultaneously occurring events culminates in a specific “now.” Kairos occurs when those present in a situation become aware of this “now” (Smith 47f.). In this way the very concept of kairos contains a duality that can be explained in terms of chronos versus kairos, or the metaphor of the archer versus the weaver. Carolyn Miller claims that to discover kairos, the speaker must relate to chronos at the same time as the speaker can use kairos to influence chronos (Miller, “Rhetoric”). She compares chronos with the metaphor of the archer in which the circumstances are dictated. The archer must recognize the situation when it arises and seize the opportunity right then and shoot their arrow. This is thus a more static description of the situation in which the speaker must adapt to the prevailing circumstances. Kairos, however, is compared with the metaphor of the weaver who is busy creating the weave himself or herself; that is to say creating the situation-bound context, which indicates the speaker’s ability to influence the course of events. This amounts to greater flexibility, for the speaker to participate in the creation of kairos. An opening for an arrow or a shuttle, a “now,” can accordingly just as well be created as discovered. These aspects show that the concepts of chronos and kairos are

92 | Marie Gelang Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 89–102 brought together in the rhetorical situation and are dependent on each other (Miller, “Rhetoric” 313). The experience that “now” is the “right moment” appears to consist of these two aspects working together in some way. Hence, every period of time contains a tension between what is possible and not possible to do. Not everything is possible at every point in time, nor is everything necessary at all times: it is a matter of specific action, of “the right thing at the right time” (Tillich 33). All in all, kairos emerges as an opportunity tied to a delimited situation whose circumstances create the “right moment.” Kairos requires human action, both verbal and non-verbal. The action should be adapted to the situation, yet still offer something new. It should be accepted by the receivers as the “right action” performed at the “right time.” In this way the concept is directly connected with a rhetorical situation in all its aspects: time, place, sender, and receiver.

Tempo and Rhythm Being situation-bound, the concept of kairos always encompasses a “subject-situation relationship,” because there always has to be someone who knows or believes that “now” is the right time. These “nows” may come and go without anyone discovering them. It is only first when someone seizes the opportunity that kairos arises. According to Isocrates (436–338 BCE), kairos was a matter of the speaker’s ability to know when these “nows” arise and then act as the situation demands.7 For the speaker, the insight that “now” is the right time does not come by itself. Sipiora writes that “phronesis is necessary for the activation of a preliminary, ‘internal’ dialect which, in turn, gives rise to an ‘intelligence’ that expresses itself in words and action. This derived intelligence is based upon a orator’s understanding of kairos” (Sipiora 8f.). An individual’s ability to perceive the “right time” is influenced, according to Gronbeck, by a series of factors, such as social and cultural background, knowledge of different social processes, psychological conditions, etc. The number and variety of factors Gronbeck takes up indicate the complexity of that which creates a sense of the “right time” (Gronbeck 93). One must assume the speaker’s understanding of kairos is based on a combination of practical experience and knowledge together with the ability to be intuitive and spontaneous. Only then can a speaker/human being, using experience or knowledge gained in other ways, learn to recognize and act in this “right moment.” The challenge, then, for the speaker is, within the framework of a number of circumstances that make kairos possible, to create a way of acting that is unique and meaningful (Miller, “Essays” xii–xiii). It is a question of a dynamic relationship between the spontaneous and the planned, yet in which neither speech nor delivery, that is to say actio, become overly strained and unnatural (see Gelang).8 The connection between kairos and actio can accordingly be found in the processes within the rhetorical situation that contribute to making kairos possible.

Kairos, the Rhythm of Timing | 93 One such process that has appeared in manuals as well as in my own and others’ research on nonverbal communication, and that I would like to put forward as the connection between actio and kairos, is the physical performance that contributes to the tempo and rhythmicity of the presentation. Modern research demonstrates and focuses on the importance of rhythm in inter- human communication. Senders as well as receivers respond to minute changes in rhythm of speech and action, above all in conversational settings.9 However, I would like to add tempo as an important factor and propose a distinction between tempo and rhythm in nonverbal communication. The division between tempo and rhythm can be explained by and compared to Miller’s interpretation of chronos and kairos in relation to the rhetorical situation: namely, that the experience of the “right time” depends on the interplay between chronos (likened to the circumstances of the situation) and kairos (likened to the speaker’s ability to influence the situation so that a “now” may arise). Tempo, in Miller’s understanding of the concepts, can be related to chronos; that is, the basic tempo that is built upon a culturally accepted preconception about a certain tempo in a given situation. One can, for example, imagine that the tempo of a performance with stand-up comedians would be different from the tempo that presumably marks a church service. However, rhythm, on the other hand, can be related to Miller’s understanding of kairos, that is, the possibility to influence the basic tempo of the situation so that a “right moment” may occur.10 Emphasizing the connection between tempo and rhythm in actio may shed some light on some of several processes that lead to kairos. The tempo and rhythm of the nonverbal communication can be a part of the action expected of the speaker at the “right moment” as well as a part of the process that leads to kairos. For example, the rhythm of the speaker’s delivery can—with the help of pauses, a gradually rising volume of speech, or rapid gestures—contribute to or hinder the possibility for the “right moment” to arrive. In this way tempo and rhythm can comprise one of the processes in a rhetorical situation that can be explained with the help of that aspect of the concept of kairos that relates to the “right moment.”

An Empirical Study of Actio Qualities I have tested the connection between the “right moment” aspect of kairos and the importance of tempo and rhythm in nonverbal communication on a body of empirical material. The material consists of recorded lectures held by university teachers at a medium-sized university in Sweden. Also included are conversations by focus groups, consisting of students who observed and interpreted the lecturers’ nonverbal communication. I observed the teachers personally, and the focus groups observed them on the occasion of each lecture in question.11 In addition to this material, I will briefly touch on other types of speakers, such as negotiators and football referees.

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Through research on the interaction between verbal and nonverbal communication, it has emerged that the apprehension and interpretation of nonverbal communication are closely linked with speech; verbal and nonverbal communication can be viewed as “two sides of the same coin” (see McNeill). This is an opinion I share; however, since the focus of this empirical study has been to investigate the function of nonverbal communication in a rhetorical situation, the lecturers’ verbal communication was not accounted for. Overall, it can be said that the results of the analysis indicate the complexity of the interpretation of actio. There are many factors that affect how the receivers in a situation perceive and interpret actio. The intention here is not to define all these factors; this presentation is limited to that part of the material that treats tempo and rhythm. Nevertheless, a number of interesting factors emerge that have influenced both my own and the focus groups’ interpretations of the lecturers’ actio, and which therefore deserve brief comment. The context, for instance, is of great importance for the interpretation and appraisal of nonverbal communication. In the focus group discussions, it emerged that the interpretation of what, for example, amounts to a quick or slow tempo depends on the groups’ preconceptions about what actio is to be expected in a lecture situation. Their preconceptions are also the basis of their perceptions of what constitutes a “good” or “poor” lecture. Hence, one can surmise that the interpretations and appraisals of actio are culturally and socially conditioned. However, this does not necessarily imply that the nonverbal gestures that create tempo and rhythm in a presentation cannot be found in non-Swedish cultures or non-university situations. Another factor is that actio is a multimodal activity. Modality in this study indicates a particular nonverbal parameter, such as facial expression, gestures, eye contact, etc. Multimodal activity is therefore all the modalities of the body working together. In the discussions, it emerged that the students in the focus groups for the most part formed an impression of the lecturers’ actio on the basis of an overall view (that is, how the totality of the body’s modalities worked together). Some of the factors that caught my interest were some nuances of action, including tempo and rhythm, I wish to define as “actio qualities.” Actio qualities are those aspects that create nuances and lend variety to nonverbal communication (see Gelang). Energy, dynamism, and tempo are the most frequently mentioned actio qualities in the empirical material. These qualities were discussed both explicitly and implicitly. The focus groups sometimes expressed themselves implicitly: that is, they did not always formulate their opinions in terms of concepts like energy or rhythm, but used other concepts, such as, for example, “tense” or “boring” that I take as expressing a qualitative description of actio. The actio qualities can work together in one and the same movement; for instance, a gesture can be fast, large, and be performed energetically. So, the discussions among the focus group participants did not primarily concern what the lecturers did: that is,

Kairos, the Rhythm of Timing | 95 the number of gestures or choice of poses, but how they acted with the help of various qualities of their nonverbal communication. Focusing on the tempo and rhythm in nonverbal communication, it emerged in the analysis of my empirical material that both can affect the receiver’s interpretation of the sender/speaker’s communicative competence. It became apparent that there is a difference between the perception of a lecturer as understandable enthusiastic, and well-organized, and another lecturer as boring, indifferent, and disorganized. In connection with these judgments to which the students refer, among other things, the tempo and rhythm of the presentation was underscored. With reference to the focus group discussions, I consider tempo to be the fundamental pace that permeates the entire presentation, while rhythm is the variations of tempo that can take place with the help of changes in particular modalities or multiple modalities. One can view tempo as the ability of the lecturer to tie his or her lecture together so that it appears as a complete whole, as well to adjust the tempo of the presentation to the expectations in the given situation. Rhythm, on the other hand, is related to the speaker’s ability—within the framework of the situation’s prescribed tempo— to provide color and subtlety to his or her non-verbal communication, and thereby give additional meaning to the contents of the speech and nuance to his or her personal- ity. Here one can trace the distinction between tempo and rhythm Miller makes: chronos as culturally accepted preconception and kairos as the speaker’s ability to influence the situation. It is naturally the case that tempo and rhythm work together in the presentation. They are mutually dependent in a similar fashion as the concepts of chronos and kairos in Miller’s interpretation. So if the tempo or rhythms are disturbed, the chance of kairos occurring is reduced, because kairos is a moment that occurs when both the sender and receiver are in agreement that the “right action at the right time” has occurred. A concept closely related to this process is the more modern idea of timing, the exact definition of which has also been considered elusive. It is often explained in terms of someone acting at the right point in time. In one dictionary, the concept of timing is described as “the way an action or process is timed, esp. in relation to others” (i.e., how it involves temporal adaptation or coordination) (“Timing”).

The Sense of Timing The skill of timing, doing the “right thing at the right time,” is regarded as important in many different contexts. Several well-known negotiators mention how important it is to possess the skill of timing, not least in crisis situations. Jan Eliasson, a well- known Swedish politician with many years of experience as a UN negotiator (for instance in Darfur), considers a “sense of timing” to be one of the most important qualities that make a successful negotiator (“Jan Eliasson”). During a lecture for

96 | Marie Gelang Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 89–102 football referees, the importance of a good sense of timing came up in the dialogue with the referees. They were of the opinion that timing is decisive for knowing when to stop the game.12 Timing is described as the ability to know when the time is ripe to, for example, reach consensus in a conflict or break off a football match. However, of what this skill of timing consists is difficult for them to explain. When actio is performed with a steady tempo and rhythmic variation, and with energy and dynamism, the students perceive the presentation as committed and dynamic, and the lecturer appears knowledgeable, organized, and communicatively competent. One may assume that these positive judgments are generated by a lecture that on the whole was what we would describe contemporarily as well-timed; that is, the lecturer used his or her actio in a suitable fashion with distinct gestures at the right time, pauses in the right places, etc. This can be contrasted with a lecturer who does things students think do not fit, which could be described as a lecturer having poor timing. Sudden rhythmic variations incomprehensible to the receivers, or other changes in actio, can interfere with the flow of the presentation. When, for example, a gesture comes at the wrong moment it does not have (what can be assumed to be) the desired effect. One of the lecturers sometimes made strange and “irrational” gestures the focus group participants did not think fit the situation. These “irrational” gestures sometimes occurred when the lecturer was trying to make a joke, but the focus group participants did not find the lecturer to be funny. The gestures remained baffling and strange to them. They described the lecturer as not having anything remarkable to say, which stands in contrast to the sudden, strange gestures. When the discrepancies in the delivery became large, and the means of expression, in this case gestures, did not fit into the framework of the expected actio, the focus group reacted with confusion. In my opinion such a gesture lacks timing and obstructs communication. Another lecturer, made sudden pauses, halting in a pose that, to the listeners, did not clearly serve any purpose. Those silences differed from those that served a distinct purpose, for example when the lecturer read in their papers or if the listeners were afforded some time to reflect or take notes. But when the changes came suddenly and without any clear reason, they disturbed the tempo and stuck out like a poorly timed pause, which reduced the chances for kairos to arise. In this way a sense of timing can be encompassed by the aspect of the concept of kairos associated with the “right time.” Based on the above-mentioned studies, I maintain that there is a dimension of the “sense of timing” connected with the concept of kairos and its relation to tempo and rhythm. Nevertheless, kairos and timing differ in some respects. Timing neither comprises “right action” nor those processes within the situation that can lead to the “right moment” when decisive action is demanded. Kairos is not represented in a missed opportunity; if the “the right moment” is missed, kairos has not occurred. On the

Kairos, the Rhythm of Timing | 97 other hand, timing can be used in contexts where someone—as perceived by the individual or those around him or her—failed to use good timing. Since timing is not related to the action itself or its effect, an individual’s subjective judgment of a missed “now” is enough for him or her to be able to claim that he or she failed to execute good timing. Kairos can be said to be an augmented, elevated level of timing, because kairos is the moment when the speaker and the audience together experience an action as well timed.

Conclusion The speaker’s employment of tempo and rhythm in non-verbal communication is one of the processes in the rhetorical situation that facilitates kairos, the “right thing at the right time.” The concept of kairos explains and expresses how a situation contains a number of processes that ought to work together in order for the “right moment” to arise, but does not explain what these processes can be thought to consist of. Emphasizing the aspect of the concept of kairos related to the “right moment,” I maintain that there is a connection between a speaker’s actio and the concept of kairos. This connection is revealed in the rhythm by which the speaker’s actio is given form; tempo supports the rhythmicity of actio. The actio qualities tempo and rhythm can accordingly provide an explanation of one of the processes that affect the possibility for kairos to arise. Tempo in this respect indicates the underlying tact that permeates the entire presentation, while rhythm is the variation of tempo that can occur with the help of changes in one or several modalities. This distinction is not always a simple matter to discover and describe, because tempo and rhythm work together in nonverbal communication. They do, however, together add nuances to the presentation. The tempo must not be too fast or too slow. The speed affected the interpretation of the lecturer as, for example, “difficult to reach” or “dull and grey.” The flow of rhythm is decisive to the lecturer being experienced as enthusiastic, dynamic, and well organized. If the flow is disrupted by frequent coughs, long pauses, jerky bodily movement, and the like, communication is made more difficult and the students will have a hard time absorbing the message. For a lecturer/speaker to be perceived as enthusiastic and communicatively competent, a moderately fast tempo with a rhythmic flow in the speaker’s actio is required. Tempo and rhythm of actio are in this way important for the speaker’s communicative competence and ability to influence kairos. In addition, a speaker, negotiator, or football referee can use his or her experience and competence to see how the participants in a situation, such as football players on a field, use tempo and rhythm in their nonverbal communication. In this way, these actio qualities are something speakers, negotiators, or football referees can avail themselves of while simultaneously using them to understand their surroundings. In the tension between these competencies lies the opportunity for timing, or, more pointedly, kairos.

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Works Cited

Andersen, Øivind. I retorikkens hage. Oslo: Kendon, Adam. Conducting Interaction: Patterns Universitetsforlaget AS, 2000. Print. of Behaviour in Focused Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1990. Print. Argyle, Michael. Bodily Communication. London: Routledge, 1988. Print. ———. Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,2004. Print. Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. Ed. J. H. Freese. Trans. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Kinneavy, James L., and Catherine R. Eskin. Harvard UP,2000. Print. “Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.” Written Communication 17.3 (2000): 432–44. Print. Atkinson, Max. Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics. London: Krause, Steven D. “The Immediacy of Rhetoric: Routledge, 1988. Print. Definitions, Illustrations, and Implications.” Diss. Bowling Green State U, 1996. Emunix. Web 12 Benedikt Frost, Amélie. “On doing the Right Thing Dec. 2006. at the Right Time: Toward an Ethics of Kairos.” Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and LeBaron, Curtis D. “Considering the Social and Praxis. Ed. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin. Material Surround: Toward Microethnographic Albany: SUNY P,2002. Print. Understandings of Nonverbal Communication.” The Sourcebook of Nonverbal Measures: Going Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Beyond Words. Ed. Valerie Manusov. Mahwah: Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. Ed. John L. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. Print. Lucaites, Celeste M. Condit and Sally Caudill. New York: Guilford, 1999. Print. McNeill, David. Hand and Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1992. Print. Cicero. De Oratore. Ed. E. W. Sutton. Trans. Loeb Classsical Library. Cambridge: Harvard UP,2001. Mikkola, Peter. Musikteori II. Stockholm: Void Print. Note AB, 1999. Print. Gelang, Marie. Actiokapitalet — retorikens ickeverbala resurser. Åstorp: Retorikförlaget, Miller, Carolyn R. Foreword. Rhetoric and Kairos 2008. Print. Essays in History, Theory and Praxis. Ed. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin. Albany: SUNY P, Gronbeck, Bruce E. “Rhetorical Timing in Public 2002. Print. Communication.” Central States Speech Journal 25 (Summer 1974): 84–94. Print. ———. “Kairos in the Rhetoric of Science.” A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Helsley, Sheri L. “Kairos.” Encyclopedia of Honor of James L. Kinneavy. Ed. Stephan P. Witte, Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Neil Nakadate and Roger D. Cherry. Carbondale: Ancient Times to the Information Age. Ed. Theresa Southern Illinois UP,1992. Print. Enos. New York: Garland, 1996. 371. Print. Onians, Richard B. The Origins of European “Jan Eliasson — Obama, Darfur och konsten att Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the förhandla.” Online posting. YouTube, 6 May 2009. World, Time, and Fate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Web. 20 May 2009. 1951. Print.

Jørgensen, Charlotte, Christian Koch, and Lone Poyatos, Fernando. Nonverbal communication Rørbech. Retorik der flytter stemmer. Hvordan across disciplines: Paralanguage, kinesics, silence, man overbeviser i offentlig debat. Copenhagen: personal and environmental interaction. Vol. 2. Gyldendal, 1994. Print. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Print.

Kairos, the Rhythm of Timing | 99 Quintilianus. Institutio oratoria. Ed. H. E. Butler. ———. “Gestures as Communication II: The Trans. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Audience as Co-Author.” Research on Language Harvard UP,1953. Print. and Social Interaction 27.3 (1994): 239–67. Print. Richmond, Virginia P.,and James C. McCroskey. Nonverbal Behavior in Interpersonal Relations. Sutton, Jane. “Kairos.” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Boston: Pearson, 2004. Print. Ed. Thomas O. Sloane. Oxford: Oxford UP,2001. Print. Sipiora, Phillip, and James S. Baumlin, eds. Rhetoric and Kairos Essays in History, Theory and Söderqvist-Spering, Åse. Elementär musikteori. Praxis. Albany: SUNY P,2002. Print. Stockholm: SK-Gehrmans musikförlag, 1999. Print. Smith, Craig R. “Roman Decorum as a New Praxis for Existential Communication.” Western Tillich, Paul. The Protestant Era. Chicago: U of Journal of Communication 56 (Winter 1992): Chicago P,1948. Print. 68–86. Print. “Timing.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Streeck, Jürgen. “Gestures as Communication I: Current English. 9th ed. 1995. Print. Its Coordination With Gaze and Speech.” Communication Monographs 60 (1993): White, Eric Charles. Kaironomia On the Will-to- 275–99. Print. Invent. London: Cornell UP,1987. Print.

Endnotes

1. For further discussion, see Tillich. and Eskin cite Aristotle, comparing various Greek concepts with kairos. 2. Taken from Homer’s Odyssey (ca. 700 BCE); see Onions at 343–48. 7. Andersen at 22–23 compiles quotes from a number of the writings of Isocrates including To 3. White at 13 also describes kairos as a Philip 110, Against the Sophists 12f, Archidamos fleeting moment when an opening/opportunity 50, and Panathenaicus 30. presents itself through which something must be driven with an appropriate amount of force to 8. Actio is the nonverbal communication achieve success. performed in a rhetorical situation where the intention is to be, in some sense, convincing, 4. Followers of Pythagoras (570–479 BCE), while the definition of nonverbal communication philosopher and mathematician. can apply to all situations where some form of communication occurs. 5. By ‘dissoi logoi’ I mean ‘thesis versus antithesis,’ which represent the key elements of the 9. Max Atkinson’s later research on applause Greek way of thinking in ancient times. By shows how a speaker can steer processes in the identifying and investigating the polarities, in rhetorical situation to make kairos possible. order to thereafter achieve consensus, they Atkinson investigated politicians’ use of pauses hoped to glean more knowledge about reality. in speech. The studies show how important it is The newfound balance then leads to new that the pauses be in “the right place and be the polarities, and the process continues as right length” to achieve the desired effect. For knowledge is achieved. further reasoning on non-verbal communication see, e.g., Argyle, Jørgensen et al., Kendon 6. Aristotle seldom uses the concept of kairos, (Conducting; Gesture), Poyatos, Richmond and employing other similar ideas instead. Kinneavy McCroskey, and Streeck’s two “Gestures”

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articles. For the importance of rhythm in ancient way of understanding the difference between times see, inter alia: Aristotle, Ars Rhetorica, III. tempo and rhythm. Nevertheless, based on the VIII; Cicero, De Oratore III. XL VI. 184; Quintilian, literature consulted and discussions with Institutio Oratio, I. X. 23–32. practicing musicians I consider it reasonable and also applicable to empirical studies of body 10. Tempo and rhythm are themselves a sort of language. By means of this interpretation, division of time that can encompass both a chronos can be compared with tempo, and determined measurable time and an kairos with rhythm. interpretation of the measurable time. This shows some similarities with music’s conception 11. The examples presented in this chapter are of tempo and rhythm (Mikkola; Söderqvist- taken from a more comprehensive body of Spering). In music, tempo designates the speed material. The original transcriptions have been at which the music is performed. One way to carried out in a methodologically well-tried indicate the tempo is in number of beats per fashion, in several steps and on different levels minute. In musical notation the tempo is usually (Gelang; for the developed method, see indicated by a time signature, such as 4/4 LeBaron). However, it would be neither reader- (four quarter notes per measure), sometimes friendly nor meaningful to present these here, so even by means of a metronome setting. I have rewritten the transcripts as running text, Metronomization determines the speed of the and compressed and selected that which is music, measured by a fixed pulse that can be essential for understanding tempo and rhythm in set from a few dozen to a few hundred beats per actio. In the materials, the lecturers are minute. One dimension of tempo is the presented anonymously. Accordingly, the study rhythmicity of a piece of music. Rhythm is the does not touch on possible differences between distribution of tones and pauses over time, a male and female lecturers. Neither are possible sound’s duration in time. The duration of a tone cultural differences examined, since the entire can be called its rhythmic value. These are often study was carried out in a Swedish context. related to a pulse at a specific tempo. Musical terms such as andantino, andante, and allegro 12. Lecture by Marie Gelang for the Swedish provide the rhythmic interpretation of the basic Football Referee Association, Örebro, Sweden, tempo. This may not be the most conventional 18 November 2008.

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Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry

Lena Hopsch and Eva Lilja

Rhythm might stand for the contrast between balance and movement, rest and conflict, in a piece of art. In this paper, we show that rhythm works as an organizing power as well as a producer of meaning. Both characteristics relate to the fact that rhythms activate internalized bodily experiences. Lena Hopsch has the perspective of producing art, and Eva Lilja forwards the perspective of academic reception analysis.1 The concept of rhythm is basic in all forms of art. It is common in descriptions of music, poetry, sculpture and painting. Sometimes rhythm seems to be too broad a concept to really tell anything important about a piece of art. Certainly there is need for a definition. Here, we explore aesthetic rhythm as a tool for a better understanding of two art forms: sculpture and poetry. We consider rhythm as a form of perception that governs both the experience and the production of artifacts. Our tool is cognitive theory, especially the field of embodiment research. Sensory- motor experience is presumed to determine how a person perceives the world and how one creates meaning from the human body. We proceed from the idea of image schemas as Mark Johnson has elaborated them (Body). An image schema stands for bodily experiences that are transferred into stable patterns of perception. Once you have perceived, for example, what it means to balance your body walking upright, this experience will govern your perceptions. The outer world will be interpreted through bodily experiences since one meets it with one’s body (Merleau-Ponty 19; Johnson Meaning 2). Here we are going to show that the experience of being a moving body in a room is basic for any apprehension of rhythm. For example, we all share the basic experience of learning to walk upright as children. Performing a dance may be regarded as the prototype of a rhythmical lapse. A dancing body moves in time as well as in space; the very word rhythm is used for

Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry | 103 temporal as well as spatial lapses. The evident example of rhythm in time and in space simultaneously is the mousiké of ancient Greece, an art form where dance, music, and poetry were performed at the same time (Lonsdale 6). According to cognitive theory, the rhythm of art works—music, poetry, and picture—have a common root in the human experience of motion (Johnson, Meaning 247). The silent knowledge of how to move will determine any perception of rhythmical patterning. A body moves around its point of balance, and in this process the very movement indicates directions in a room (Olsson 117). Poets say that they walk to get started, and walking must be the most basic of bodily motions. Usually it has been claimed that painting and sculpture are spatial art forms and that poetry and music are temporal forms. However, perception always takes place in both dimensions (Gärdenfors, personal interview).2 In poetry, temporal rhythms dominate, but the visual rhythms of typography give the first impression of a poem: the wholeness of it. In sculpture, the spatial rhythms are most important, but they need some time to be apprehended. The eye will need time to really see the form, and you might have to walk around the sculpture to be able to grasp the form. Sight prefers wholeness, and this is supposed to have evolutionary reasons.3 Listening primarily pays attention to the segments because they appear one after another Johnson claims recent neural research shows that cognitive patterns control our perceptions as well as meaning production in humans (Body). The mind contains spatial as well as temporal patterns, schemas, or gestalts: three words referring to slightly different aspects of the same phenomenon. The word gestalt emanates from the Gestalt psychology of the early twentieth century. Neural research long ago left the theory of Gestalt psychology, but the concept of gestalt turned out to be a useful one. Gestalts, or patterns in time and in space, organize human perceptions (Tsur 116). Our point here is to underscore the case of embodiment—the image schema of balance—when investigating a pattern that emanates from sensory-motor experience (Johnson, Body 65–100).

Three Principles of Rhythm Versification studies have distinguished separate verse systems of different cultures. A verse system must rely on some principle of rhythm in combination with a set of rules (Gasparov 3; Lilja, Svensk Metrik 184). According to these findings in prosody, we have classified rhythm into three categories: serial rhythm, segmental/ sequential rhythm, and dynamic rhythm.4

1. Serial rhythm is the tact or beat in measured music and poetry, but also the rhythm of the colonnade of an antique temple. In this article, it is a walking body, taking one step after another, and moving from one point to another.

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2. Segmental or sequential rhythm marks the sequence of the phrase, which is to be found in versification and music, or the segment of a painting and a sculpture: structured sequences in combination with a powerful segmentation. 3. Dynamic rhythm refers to the forces and directions in two- and three-dimensional artifacts, and the temporal intensification toward a focus in music and poetry (its so-called prolongation). Dynamic rhythms are generated through tensions within the gestalt (Johnson, Body 85). A good example might be the so-called contra posto that can be noticed in, for example, Michelangelo’s David. He is resting on just one foot, something that creates a loose billowing movement up through the body with tensions between his arms and legs. Movements and counter-movements build the balance of Michelangelo’s sculpture; this is balance taken in the most concrete sense of not falling.5

Our analyses show that a piece of art—in music, poetry, and sculpture—mostly exemplifies two or three types of rhythm, as outlined above. The sequences in a piece of art are related both horizontally and vertically in connection with each other. Together they form a hierarchy, as will be demonstrated below in our analyses. The interplay between different levels of rhythm creates a polyrhythmic flow. Every segment relates to a higher level, which in turn relates to the whole poem and the whole sculpture. Every element is ordered in relation to the wholeness of the artwork. The type of relation between the micro and macro levels differs between art forms. In the case of a sculpture, the most important level is the wholeness, which you might grasp in one catch. The segments balance each other relating to this whole gestalt, but within themselves they are often not in balance, something that causes movements. Here you are involved with (at least) two levels. Reading a poem, the different levels are more fixed. The typographic rhythm of the poem as a whole is of course visual. The hierarchy of segments goes from stanzas (mostly visual) to lines and phrases, which are primarily acoustic. Four levels (at least) cooperate to create the rhythm of a poem. The meeting between body and world is naturally, as well as culturally and conventionally, produced. Rhythmic experience is likely to be found somewhere in the tension between universal, cognitive experience and culturally determined aesthetic conventions. The cognitive factors are specifically the experience of balance, direction, and movement. The conventional factors consist of historically determined gestalt patterns (e.g., epochal styles or versification patterns).

Balance The experience of balance is of special interest for the phenomenon of rhythm, wherefore we focus especially on this modality.6 The body moves in relation to its vertical line (i.e., its point of balance). This takes place in both time and space, even

Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry | 105 though temporal and spatial balance would be somewhat different qualities. The point of balance (e.g., in a circle) is the middle point (Johnson, Body 85f.). We refer to Mark Johnson’s image schema of balance for a discussion of aesthetic rhythm. An image schema is defined as a stable pattern of perception (Johnson, Meaning 2).7 In the case of aesthetic rhythm, two image schemas are especially important: force and balance. We mean this in a concrete way, and we use the terms in a physical sense. The word force refers to physical force, the one you use when driving a car or walking through a room. When experiencing rhythm, you will realize how the body is exposed to forces, such as feeling its own weight and moving in different directions. Each human body must balance to be able to stand and walk. This experience recalls the billions of bodily memories of moving in a similar way. The point of balance can be experienced as a line, directed upwards or downwards. The meaning production of a direction downwards will be experienced as weight, while a direction upwards makes for an impression of hovering; these are two patterns widely used by sculptors. This concept of a line exemplifies how an experienced movement will easily be part of the meaning production of an artifact. Mark Johnson points out how image schemas of balance can be interpreted as axis-balance and twin-pan balance (see Fig. 1) (Johnson, Body 86). The experience of balance consists of impulses like weight, force and direction: standing upright you will be exposed to forces like gravitation. In the balance schemas, we perceive force, direction, and weight through the help of bodily memories. Both schemas in Figure 1 are recognized through our own bodily experience of balance. When Maurice Merleau-Ponty stresses that we are not in time and space but inhabit time and space, he points at an artistic experience (161). The human body only exists in time and space, and the concept of balance emanates out of the bodily experience of either axis balance or twin-pan balance. Johnson divides balance into weight and pressure, which means that the balance experience can be divided in the experiences of weight and of pressure in the most concrete meaning of gravity. An image schema stands for bodily experiences that are

Figure 1 Axis balance (left), and Twin-pan balance (after Johnson).

106 | Lena Hopsch and Eva Lilja Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 103–122 transferred into stable patterns of perception (Johnson, Body xix). In the balance schema mentioned previously, we especially perceive weight, force, and direction (88f.). We can recognize both schemas above in our own bodily experience of balance. Each human being must acknowledge the axis when she or he walks, and of course twin-pan balance lives in every body as a memory from childhood. Balance consists of an active interplay of weight and pressure, or, in other words, perceiving aesthetic rhythm evokes bodily memories of weight and pressure. Balance is part of a basic spatial comprehension, starting from the vertical line of a standing body. Yet how to bring this understanding further into the aesthetic field? Concerning sculpture, it is easy to grasp: a sculpture is a kind of body. Additionally, there are no real difficulties in transferring this experience to the surface of a painting, which demonstrates balancing proportions. But what is balance when considering temporal forms? Music and poetry are also made of proportions and relations within and between elements of form. The twin- pan model above is applicable to repeated musical sequences balancing one another as well as to lyrical phrases (segmental rhythm). Repeated sequences might be found also in spatial forms (e.g., the arms and legs of a statue). A walking body makes a row of balanced figures, just like the colonnade of an antique temple. It is a kind of Elvis beat or a nursery rhyme (serial rhythm). Fifty years ago, Roman Jakobson presented his idea of a specific lyrical quality originating from repetitions in a poem through what he called the principle of equivalence (Jakobson 150f.). Repeated form elements were said to be equivalent. Since then, those repeated segments have been called equivalences, which are elements (rather) similar to one another. Analyzing balance in artifacts, you will be reminded of Roman Jakobson’s well-known idea. Balancing form elements must be the same as similar form elements or repeated ones. Repeated form elements could be understood as forms in balance. Instead of equivalent segments, we here choose to name them balancing segments. By using the term balance, we will be able to relate the rhythm of an artwork to bodily rhythms. Most scholars have applied Jakobson’s principle of equivalence for the past fifty years, but establishing this connection to the human body might offer an explanation to the power of equivalent forms (Johnson, Body 85f.). A perfect balance means standing still. But, when talking about (a good) rhythm, there must be one thing more: namely, a tendency to imbalance, a movement (Lilja, “Towards”). Jakobson’s equivalences were never claimed to be exactly similar. They were considered to be approximately equal, and their artistic qualities may depend on this approximation. Equivalence means approximate sameness, while balance pays attention to the salience of small differences within a repeated gestalt, its tendencies at imbalance. Rhythm might be defined as a balanced form about to fall, where threatened balances create movements within its gestalt.

Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry | 107 Gabo and Spatial Balance How can rhythm and balance be built up in a spatial work of art, such as sculpture? Below, I will examine an artwork by the Russian constructivist Naum Gabo (1890–1977). I discuss how balance is created through: 1) dynamic rhythms in the work, which is a tension between forms in the composition, 2) segmental rhythm, which is repeated form elements, and 3) kinetic rhythm, defined as the beholder’s own movement in relation to the sculptural work (Hopsch and Lilja 365). In the works of Gabo we often recognize an empty space activity, such as the core suspended in the center of Vertical Construction no 2 (1956–1966). In fact, this notion of an active, plastic space forms the essence of his entire work of art, where space could be perceived as sculptural material (so he says in his “Realistic Manifesto” of 1920). I will show this very point through an analysis of Vertical Construction no 2 (Fig. 2). This sculpture, Vertical Construction no 2, can be understood as a further development of Gabo’s early work, Kinetic Construction, Standing Wave, from 1920. That construction was composed of a pole set in swing, thereby creating an imaginary, spatial form in space. In the sculpture Vertical Construction no 2, we can experience an inherent inner activity in relation to balance. Significant to Gabo’s works is how he emphasizes space as sculptural material. In all of his works, the surrounding space appears to compact the mass of the

Figure 2 Naum Gabo, Vertical Construction no 2 (1956). Image by Lena Hopsch.

108 | Lena Hopsch and Eva Lilja Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 103–122 sculpture, creating an inward visual tension. At the same time the inner emptiness of the sculpture appears to expand into the surrounding space. Gabo worked early on with the sculpture Kinetic Construction, Standing Wave (Fig. 3) to create a pole set in a swinging motion in order to create an imaginary form in space. However, he was not able to find motors sufficiently small that did not to take the upper hand; therefore, he abandoned these attempts at motorized forms. The twisting and vibrating movements of the standing balance can still be identified in Linear Construction in Space no 2 (1950) (Hopsch and Lilja 367f.). This sculpture appears to be constructed with the aid of pure space, as if it were a drawing in the air. It provides us with a feeling of both a universe in perpetual movement and a dancing Shiva. No matter what we put into the philosophical dimensions of this sculpture, in any case it shows a perpetual movement. The figure of an eight provides the work with continual dynamic movement. A glimpse from a distance is not sufficient to experience this sculpture; it invites us for observation during movement and in time. In their multidisciplinary experiments, artists in the early 1900s were fully occupied with incorporating time into the artistic experience. In order to point out the sculptural possibilities of time in the experience, Gabo spoke of kinetic rhythms generated by activating the body movements of the observer in relationship to the sculpture. In addition, the sculptor himself moves around during the task of developing and discovering the form (Hopsch 53). The sculpture Vertical Construction no 2 has a clear connection to the Nike of Samothrace (also known as Winged Victory of Samothrace; ca. 190 BCE), where a horizontal plane, formed by the wings, balances the vertical line. I would argue that the theme of Nike is temporality. The goddess of victory is captured both in a moment of flight, with widespread wings, and a moment of landing and calm, where we imagine her

Figure 3 Left: Nike of Samothrace, Louvre, Paris (190 BCE). Center: Naum Gabo, Kinetic Construction, Standing Wave (1920). Right: Naum Gabo, drawing for Kinetic Construction, Standing Wave.

Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry | 109 standing in the bow of a boat (Linnér 116; my trans.). Like Gabo in his time, Hellenistic artists were occupied by the notion of time, living as they were, in a period of historical shifts. Many are those sculptors who have been inspired by Nike, such as Swedish sculptor Bror Marklund. His Gestalt in Storm (1964) also works with the theme of mass and space interacting and balancing each other in an act of equilibrium. Naum Gabo’s sculpture Vertical Construction no 2 can be seen in the City Hall of Lund, Sweden. It stands in front of big windows so we can get a glimpse of the city in correlation to the sculpture. It is made up of different transparent layers, so we can look through the construction and into the core of the sculpture. Sheets of steel contrast with thin steel threads to build spatial forms. Inspired by the work of the cubists, Gabo wants us to explore the sculptural form from all angles in relation to the surrounding space and our own bodies. The composition is built both due to the choice of material and due to the form a tension between the inner core and the outer vibrating envelope. A contrapuntal tension is created through the balance of symmetry contrasting with an asymmetric inner center. A vertical direction introduces a shift with a horizontal plane, and the inner movement of the sculpture develops around a stable, transparent core that seems to hang in the air. As said, the major direction in the sculpture is vertical. There is a downward movement in the inner stretched vertical line. The weight of the sculpture is concentrated on a small surface from which the sculpture seems to emerge. The inner core of the sculpture, which is empty, forms the whole drama, seems to emerge and disappear during the spectator’s own bodily movement, perceived from different angles of view. This sculpture is seen as an example of kinetic rhythm—a sense of movement in the object— perceived through the spectator’s own bodily motion while walking around the sculpture.

Balance by Directions and Tensions As already said, balance might be understood as the activity of reading the relations between the form elements — and between mass and space — in a sculptural work. This interpretation of balance is expressed in the works of the painter Wassily Kandinsky. He stresses that the inner-balanced movement of a composition is built by tensions and directions between form elements in the composition (Kandinsky, Punkt och 41). This understanding of visual balance is also expressed in Rudolf Arnheim’s works, which constitute a rich source for our understanding of pictorial-balanced rhythms (Arnheim 414). However, there is one thing more. Arnheim oversees the fact that artists also use their bodily awareness when they compose a work of art, especially when it comes to plastic arts (Hopsch 126). Johnson points at how meaning making in art comes out of bodily experiences (Johnson, Meaning 234). In Vertical Construction no 2, balance is built by the use of divergent directions— vertical and diagonal ones—to create visual tensions building dynamic rhythmic

110 | Lena Hopsch and Eva Lilja Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 103–122 relations. In the notation schema below, I show how spatial rhythm sequences of balance are built by the use of spatial directions within and outside the sculpture. These visual forces are activating space. Below, I make an analysis of rhythm and balance in the sculptural work.

Figure 4 Balanced contrast, drawings by Lena Hopsch.

In Vertical Construction no 2, one can perceive a spatial balance created by contrast—between a horizontal plane and a vertical direction—that forms the skele- ton of the whole sculpture. Verticality consists of both downward pressure and weight as well as a raising movement (Fig. 4; cf. Fig. 1).

Figure 5 Balanced directions, drawings by Lena Hopsch.

By introducing two diagonally placed spherical forms, balance is established between divergent directions. These parts form a segmental rhythm structure where segments are reversed and repeated. The forms are echoing each other, yet they differ (Fig. 5).

Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry | 111 Figure 6 Balanced movements, drawings by Lena Hopsch.

These inner spherical form segments form an asymmetric, balanced tension within the sculpture, creating a sensation of movement. A tension is built between inner asymmetric form elements and the outer overall symmetric gestalt (Fig. 6).

Figure 7 Inner-space relations, drawings by Lena Hopsch.

The segments form divergent cones of pure air that balance inner space. The inner spatial forms are to be seen in relation to the surrounding space (namely, the room where the sculpture is placed). Together, the two spherical cones of emptiness form a spiraling movement inside the sculpture (Fig. 7). This spiraling movement is perceived while moving around the sculpture. It is even more accentuated by motor-driven movement. The beholder can choose between moving around the sculpture him- or herself, or to stand still, just observing the sculpture in kinetic motion.

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Figure 8 Inner-space relations, drawings by Lena Hopsch.

The center of the sculpture is balanced around a central, vertical core, which is empty. The inner form seems to appear and disappear during our own motion around the sculpture. We feel we can grasp it, and in the next moment it is gone. By moving around the sculpture we can repeat this shift over and over again. The perception of the sculpture activates kinetic rhythms; by our own movement, we become a co-actor of the sculptural form (Fig. 8). The whole of the sculpture is at balance, while the inner elements balance one another, as you can see in the figures above. The construction introduces a sensation of motion by a play with our perception. The core seems to appear and disappear when we perceive it during our own bodily motion. The symmetric overall gestalt establishes tension together with the inner asymmetric segments. One can talk of a contra-punctual tension within the artifact. The kinetic rhythms introduce a play between symmetry and asymmetry in Vertical Composition no 2. This means a play between an overall outer form in perfect balance and inner, asymmetric balancing segments. Here, one can talk of balance as an activity, created out of tensions and directions between the segments. Within themselves, the sequences are often not in balance, thus creating a sensation of rhythmic flow. The body image schema triggers the composition of the sculptural form and the perception of the beholder. The concept of balance can easily be understood with the help of bodily experience. Form elements falling out of the vertical line and catching the balance again create the sense of motion, a dynamic rhythm, in the sculptural work. Above, we have defined rhythm as a balanced form that is about to fall, thus creating movements within its gestalt.

Plath and Death: Balance in Versification How to use the tool of balance in versification studies, foremost in the description of free verse? In the first place, balance is to be found in repeated acoustic sequences.

Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry | 113 Next, the visual rhythm of typography uses balancing proportions just as any picture does. A poem from 1962, “Poppies in October” by Sylvia Plath, will show us how it might work:

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. 2 Nor the woman in the ambulance Whose red heart blooms through her coat astoundingly —

4 A gift, a love gift Utterly unasked for 6 By a sky

Palely and flamily 8 Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

10 O my God, what am I That these late mouths should cry open 12 In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers. (Plath 240)

This poem deals with a woman who has been shot, and is now transported to a hos- pital. It is an early morning in October, and men are rushing to their jobs. The poppies of the title are never really mentioned, but some metaphors could be interpreted as poppies, the “skirts” (1), the “gift” (4), and the “mouths” (11). Other red things are compared to poppies, such as the “sun-clouds” (1), the bleeding heart of “the woman in the ambulance” (3), and the flaming “sky” of (6-8). In the last stanza, the “I” of the poem listens to the screaming of the poppies. Plath’s poem is composed through segmental and dynamic rhythms, just like Gabo’s sculpture, and also has a strain of serial rhythm in the third and fourth stanzas. I am going to discuss balance at all four rhythmical levels of the poem, with every component forming its typical gestalt: the visual typography, the stanza, the line, and the phrase. The crucial points are where balance tends to turn over into active movements. The printed picture of the poem is characteristic for its epoch: a straight left margin and a wavering right margin. The emptiness of the white paper is attacking the text, especially in stanza two. Here, I will try to unlock the visual rhythm with the help of three triangles. The printed picture of the poem is inscribed in a rectangle, or what Kandinsky would name a ground surface (Kandinsky, Punkt und 129). This square- shaped form may be parted in several triangular forms. The first one, ‘standing’ on its base tip, follows the first and longest line of the poem, and has its ‘back’ along the left margin. The second one takes the opposite view, ‘resting’ on the bottom line that is also rather extensive. Both of them are strengthening the left margin that

114 | Lena Hopsch and Eva Lilja Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 103–122 forms a stable line already. Together, they constitute two crossing diagonals that divide the rectangular surface.

The third triangle has its base tip at the bottom right, with one line under most of the third line and another line delimiting the empty space within that angle to the right. This third one encloses the empty space of the center; like Gabo’s sculpture, even the visual shape of this poem surrounds an empty room. Kandinsky supposes that the left side of a surface stands for home, but the right side means away, freedom, easiness (Kandinsky, Punkt und 134). This is in accordance with the direction of (Western) reading, which begins on the left side and moves toward the right side. The same pattern is to be found in the typography of most early free verse: the left margin is stable, but the right one wavers. Kandinsky makes the same the observation concerning the direction up and down, where “down” means the stable ground, and “up” indicates expansion and unknown possibilities (131). This is to be compared with the cognitive metaphor “more is up,” and its opposite, depressing downward (Lakoff and Johnson 14). How can we use those observations for a better understanding of Plath’s poem? First, the first line lacks stability, and is too long and too heavy. This line has an abnormal weight, with eight prominences and fourteen syllables. It is placed on par with the extensive bottom line that provides rest. However, line twelve is lighter than line one: it is a little shorter and carries a dancing series of anapaests (an easygoing rhythm). It will not be able to stabilize the visual rhythm to create full balance. The lack of balance causes motion on the surface. Most active is perhaps the third triangle, the empty space in the middle of the surface with its sharp angles.

Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry | 115 Kandinsky reasons about the qualities of different colors (Om konstnären). A mys- tery in this poem is the relation between the red and the blue elements. Red are the blood, poppies, mouths, etc., while blue are the cornflowers of the last line. According to Kandinsky, red rushes but blue is calm. The poppies color everything in striking red, except for the last line where the blue cornflowers loosen the red terror. Eleven shrieking lines are balancing on a small spot of blue quietness. The stanza lengths of this poem balance one another. There are three lines in every stanza, a regularity that plays with the forms of metered versification. Stanzas one and four are about balancing each other’s line lengths (8 - 3 - 5 and 4 - 5 - 5 prominences). They are in balance due to their substantial size and heaviness, in contrast with the short rushing pair of stanzas two and three. Stanzas two and three rush forward with the help of heavy enjambments, one of them even bypassing the pause between stanzas. They consist of one long sentence that forms a falling unity on the semantic level: the “gift” in line four offers the hot kernel of the passage. Here, semantic and acoustic rhythms are in conflict. Stanzas two and three form a prolongation, where the goal is the “gift” but the acoustic rhythm rises strongly. Lines and phrases are acoustic entities, and from now on acoustic temporal aspects will dominate this analysis. Following Mark Johnson, the bodily experience of balance includes weight and pressure (Johnson, Body 85, 98). In other words, balance might be understood as the combinations and relations of weight and pressure. What, then, creates verbal weight? You may understand it as intensity, or, simply, more sound. Prominences are heavier than weak syllables. You can measure the degree of heaviness with the help of the syllable stress ratio, where 1 means that all syllables in the line are prominent, and 2 means that half of the number is prominent (and so on) (Hrushovsky; Lilja, Svensk 433). Semantic weight strengthens the acoustic weight (Lilja, Svensk 357). What is verbal pressure—the combination of force and direction? Transferred to the language of versification, it refers to rising and falling movements emanating from phrase or line focuses. Focus distinguishes the semantically most prominent point of a line or a phrase—the weaker parts are grouping around a strong kernel (Lilja, Svensk 362f.). If focus occurs late in the line it is called a rising movement, and in the opposite case you call it a falling movement. A phrase like o OO o (“should cry open”) is just standing still. The force of the motion can be weaker or stronger—a sharp enjambment may cause a tough rush. You will find the same parameters when using the rhythmic tool of prolongation, but here it is the question of phrases that bear more or less information in relation to the semantic hot spot (Cureton 146ff.). Force is also defined as an image schema (Johnson, Body 42–48, 62). Johnson emphasizes different aspects of dynamic force. Among other things he mentions blockage and removal of blockage. If we transfer these categories to the field of versification, it is easy to recognize the line break—blockage—and its upheaval, the

116 | Lena Hopsch and Eva Lilja Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 103–122 enjambment (the removal). A line break defines versified form in relation to prose. This repeated pause, about a half-second long, basically changes the conditions of verbal possibilities. The peculiar extensions and intonations of the enjambment—a phrase jumping over the line break—include a strong directionality. To conclude, rhythm as balance may be understood as combinations and relations of force, weight and directions. Fig. 1 describes the axis balance and the twin-pan balance, and the arrows point out how the forces work. Moreover, by extension: rhythm might be defined as a balanced form on its way to tumble, where forces attack weights in order to threaten balances, thus creating directions within its gestalt.

Notation Let us look at the notation scheme of the line and phrase rhythm. As much as possible, my reading follows the straight norms of spoken language, but of course my interpretation of the poem will influence the scheme in details:

prominences syllable stress ratio O oo OO OO o / oo O o OO 5 ϩ 3 ϭ 8 1.8 2 O o O o / oo O oo 2 1 3 3 o OOO / oo O o O oo 3 2 5 2.2 (1.33.5)

4 o O / o OO Ͼ 123 1.9 O ooo OO Ͼ 33 2 6 oo O Ͼ 11 3

O ooo O oo 2 2 3.5 8 o O oo O o O o 0 / o O Ͼ 4 1 5 2.2 O oo O oo O o 3 3 2.7

10 O o O / O o O 224 1.8 o OOO / o OO o 3 2 5 1.6 (1.3 2) 12 oo O oo O / oo O o O0 o 2 3 5 2.6 (3 2.3)

Explanations: O - prominence, strong syllable o - weak syllable 0 - weak prominence O - phrasal focus / - pause, phrase limit // - a longer pause Ͼ - enjambment

The syllable stress ratio gives extra weight to lines 1 and 4 and 10–11, as you can see in the right column. In these four lines, the ratio is less than 2, something which

Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry | 117 occurs rarely in naturally spoken language. Their relative weight highlights those lines as the most significant passages of the poem. Line and phrase directions are, in my reading, mostly rising. The poppies are introduced at the very end of line 1, something that causes the rising movement of the line. A spondee situated immediately before the line break—that is the case in many lines here—will create a rising motion as well. In the last stanza, lines 10–11 rather seem to stand still with their heavy burden of prominences. A rising direction is in accordance with ordinary bodily movement. A person typically goes forward. In terms of temporality, a rising movement is consistent with a type of time that also moves forward. In this perspective, rising rhythms seem to be something of an unmarked form, while falling rhythms could be looked upon as marked. A vague tactus is to be heard in some lines. Line 7 might be read in dipodic trochees: O o 0 o / O o 0. Serial rhythm is also present in the row of dactyls in line 9 and the anapaests of line 12, falling and rising, respectively. The reversed directions of stanzas two through three have already been mentioned. The semantic rhythm is falling: the love gift, mentioned firstly, must be understood as the center of this prolongation. Line 4 also has extra acoustic weight (its ratio is 1.9), strengthening the semantics. Nevertheless, the acoustic directions of the passage are mostly rising. Lines 4–5 are closed by spondees that give a heavy forward movement, just like effects of the enjambments of lines 4–6 and line 8; the last one is very strong. This means that semantic direction and line directions are in conflict here. The dactyls of line 9 will harmonize the passage. To conclude, this poem distinguishes itself by extra weight. Spondees and enjambments add acoustic force and the directions are mostly rising. Especially in the middle, force will cause a heavy rising rush. These repeated movements balance one another, but within itself such a rising line is imbalanced. The rhythmical shape of this poem is indeed varied and active. Looking at the most detailed rhythmical level, you will register some heavy figures, spondees and molossus, with a concentration on the first and the last stanza.

L. 1 “sun-clouds / this morning”, “such skirts” 3 “red heart blooms” 4 “love gift”, 5 “[un]asked for” 11 “these late mouths”, “cry op[en]” 12 “cornflow[ers]”

As stated, many of them are situated close to the very line break, something that causes a rhythmical repetition at this crucial place (lines 1, 4, 5, 11, and 12). This adds to five line ends out of twelve, and makes a pattern similar to that of end

118 | Lena Hopsch and Eva Lilja Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 103–122 rhyming. The repeated form element closes the line. Even lines 2-3 (and 7) repeat their very last figure, a dactyl (o O oo). Of course, these heavy figures produce tendencies to balance just by being repeated. Further, in the last stanza, there is some kind of rhythmical balance. Line 10 consists of two cretica (O o O), and line 11 varies a molossus (o OOO) with an antispast (o OO o). This very heavy antique passage is then followed by some nice anapaests in line 12. At the phrase level of this poem, you will find phrases both in balance and out of balance. A creticus (o O o) as well as an antispast (o OO o) balance within themselves even if they not balance each other. The heavy first line makes a slow start introducing the bloody poppies. Then, the rising motion grows faster to end up in the gallop of the third stanza (lines 7-8) that closes by a row of falling dactyls. The heaviness of lines 10–11 make this passage just immovable. Here, the reader is forced to linger. After that, the poem concludes with some anapaestic cornflowers. I will propose that the rhythmical analysis underlines some aspects of the narrative. A heavy em dash could signal panic, and here it underlines an ethos of terror. What about death rushing toward you? However, the last stanza breaks that hurry. The poppies are screaming and time stands still. Above, I mentioned Kandinsky’s characteristics of red and blue color. Red is the color of rush, but blue gives quietness. For eleven lines, the poppies paint the poem in red, but the twelfth line rests. Maybe we can interpret the blue shade as a sign of the death of the woman from line 2 (cornflowers in frost do not indicate springtime), something that would cooperate with the other surprise of the end line, namely the friendly anapaestic rhythm. This noisy and unruly piece ends up in peace. I have distinguished between four rhythmical levels in my analysis. Stanzas and phrases aim toward balance in many ways. Two broad stanzas contrast two thin ones, but they are all made of three lines. Phrases repeat a couple of rhythmical patterns, something that produces tendencies to rhythmic stability. The visual rhythm of the printed picture also aims at balance, but the all too-heavy first line causes trouble in this respect. The empty space with its sharp corners in the middle of the surface underlines that visual imbalance. The lines mostly repeat a rising acoustic rhythm where the tempo changes several times. This pattern shapes some balance, but within themselves lines are imbalanced. The crucial points are where balance tends to turn over into active movements. An expressive rhythm should give an impression of balance without seeming too stable. Slightly touching the limit of chaos gives rhythm that extra thrill.

Conclusions We started this investigation with a dancing body in ancient Athens, claiming that the experience of aesthetic rhythm goes back to the bodily experience of balance. We

Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry | 119 assume that the word rhythm is basically used in the same way concerning spatial as well as temporal artifacts. The balance of a sculpture emanates out of dynamic tensions and repeated sequences, both perceived in time. The balance of a poem emanates out of repeated sequences in reading time and dynamic tensions in typography. We have demonstrated that balance might be temporal as well as spatial. However, the forms of perception seem to have varying importance. Visual assimilation prefers the whole form. Looking at a sculpture, you will initially take it in as a whole. The opposite holds for temporal art forms like poetry: the ear prefers the segment, and it will take you some time to grasp the whole poem (so-called spatial reading). The core concepts here are gestalt and movement. Rhythm takes place within a gestalt, where activities aimed at equilibrium fight with displacements to create motion. Conflicting form elements create tension and imbalance, but the whole artifact demonstrates some kind of balance. Much of the motion in a gestalt emanates from asymmetric sequences, which are imbalanced within themselves but gallantly balance another asymmetric sequence. We have also shown a difference between sculpture and poetry in this respect. A sculpture, which stands closer to the human body, more obviously balances its sequences into a wholeness of equilibrium. The poem shows more exceptions from the basic concept: imbalanced segments are more frequent in temporal art forms. This is the case in our two analyses above, but also in other adjacent articles referenced in the works cited. We started by calling rhythm a happy contrast between balance and movement in a piece of art. Rhythmical movement might be defined as a balanced form about to fall. Aesthetic rhythms activate internalized bodily experiences, creating meaning out of so-called ideated sensations: the memory of bodily movements and their emotional counterparts.

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Works Cited

Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A ———. Punkt och linje till yta. Varberg: Polyfem, Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: U of 1995. Print. California P,1974. Print. ———. Punkt und Linie zu Fläche. Beitrag zur Cureton, Richard. Rhythmic Phrasing in English Analyse der malerische Elemente. 10th ed. Bern: Verse. London: Longman, 1992. Print. Benteli, 1955. Print.

Gasparov, M. L. A History of European Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors Versification. Trans. G. S. Smith and Marina We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1980. Print. Tarlinskaja. Eds. G. S. Smith and Leofranc Holford-Strevens. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Print. Lilja, Eva. Svensk Metrik [Swedish Metrics]. Stockholm: Swedish Academy, 2006. Print. Gärdenfors, Peter. Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought. Cambridge: MIT, 2000. Print. ———. “Towards a Theory of Aesthetic Rhythm.” Versatility in Versification: Multidisciplinary ———. How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Approaches to Metrics. Ed. Tonya Kim Dewey and Evolution of Thinking. Oxford: Oxford UP,2006. Print. Frog. Berkeley: Peter Lang, 2009. Print. 273–92. Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics ———. Personal interview. Sept. 2005. Ser. 74. Hopsch, Lena. Rytmens estetik, formens kraft Linnér, Sture. Från Alexander till Augustus: En [The Aesthetics of Rhythm, the Power of Form]. glanstid i antikens kultur [From Alexander to Göteborg: Chalmers Univ. 2008. Print. Augustus]. Stockholm: Nordstedts, 2007. Hopsch, Lena, and Eva Lilja. “Principles of Print. Rhythm: Temporal and Spatial Aspects.” Changing Borders: Contemporary Positions in Lonsdale, Steven H. Dance and Ritual Play in Intermediality. Ed. Jens Arvidson. Lund: Greek Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, Intermedia Studies, 2007. 361–76. 1993. Print.

Hrushovsky, Benjamin. “On Free Rhythms in Margolis, Howard. Patterns, Thinking, and Modern Yiddish Poetry.” The Field of Yiddish: Cognition: A Theory of Judgment. Chicago: U of Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature. Ed. Chicago P,1987. Print. Uriel Weinreich. New York: Linguistic Circle of New York, 1954. 219–66. Print. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Kroppens fenomenologi [Phenomenology of Perception]. 1945. Göteborg: Jakobson, Roman. Poetik och lingvistik [Poetics Daidalos, 1997. Print. and Linguistics, Style in Language]. 1960. Stockholm: Norstedt, 1974. Print. Olsson, Cecilia. Dansföreställningar: Dansestetiska problem i historisk belysning och Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily speglade i två dansverk [Performances of Dance: Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Aesthetic Problems in a Historical Perspective]. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1987. Print. Lund: BokBox, 1993. Print.

———. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. London: Faber, Human Understanding. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Print. 2007. Print. Tsur, Reuven. Towards a Theory of Cognitive Kandinsky, Vassily. Om konstnären [About the Poetics. 2nd ed. Brighton: Sussex Academic, Artist]. Stockholm: Gummesons konsthandel, 2008. Print. 1916. Print.

Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and Poetry | 121 Endnotes

1. In this article, Lena Hopsch wrote the Naum The basis of the classification is taken from Gabo analysis and Eva Lilja the Sylvia Plath Richard Cureton. analysis. The Introduction and the Conclusion were written together. 5. An analysis of this sculpture is to be found in Hopsch and Lilja (367f.). 2. We refer to Gärdenfors’s Conceptual Spaces and How Homo, as well as our interview with 6. Discussing balance, we primarily follow Gärdenfors in 2005. Johnson’s Body, where the fourth chapter discusses the image schema of balance. 3. The suggestions in this paragraph have been claimed by a row of experimenters within various 7. Somewhat different definitions of “image disciplines. schema” are to be found in Piaget as well as in Merleau-Ponty. 4. An overview of the principles of rhythm is to be found in our essay “Principals of Rhythm.”

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Subversive Rhythms: Postcolonial Prosody and Indo-Anglian Poetry

Peter Groves

Rhythm, seemingly so abstract a concept, can be a potent signifier of cultural difference and identity: consider, for example, the complex multi-layered rhythms of African drumming or classical Indian raga, and how disturbingly anarchic these must have seemed to British imperial administrators, attuned as the latter were to the dreary simplicity of Hymns Ancient and Modern. Those who executed the project of Macaulay’s famous Minute on Indian Education (1835) hoped to attune Indian ears—or those, at any rate, of a class of potentially useful intermediaries, “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Sharp 107–17)—as much to the music of Shakespeare and Tennyson as to their ideological baggage (indeed, the two are difficult to uncouple), and the partial success of this Anglification project can be seen in the slightly wan but metrically perfect pentameter of nineteenth-century Indian poets, such as Henry de Rozario, Toru Dutt, and Sarojini Naidu. Nevertheless, the pentameter did not take deep roots in India. Although many modern Indian poets have continued to write in English (not out of nostalgic cultural loyalty, but because it is the language in which they were educated), they have done so for the most part in free verse—more consistently, indeed, than in the West, where iambic pentameter has maintained a strong presence over the last century from Yeats, Stevens, and Auden through Lowell, Larkin, and Harrison to the New Formalists. Kaiser Haq remarks that at school, the pentameter verse of “the great English poets—Milton, Wordsworth, . . . Keats—. . . didn’t particularly appeal,” and recounts what he calls a “conversion experience”: “Moving from poem to poem in our textbook we came to Lawrence’s ‘Snake.’ And it opened up a whole new world. I could feel the music of its free verse as I hadn’t felt the music of any other English poem” (Haq).

Subversive Rhythms: Postcolonial Prosody and Indo-Anglian Poetry | 123 In consequence, he “started scribbling free verse” (Haq). O.P. Bhanagar, rejecting the notion “that Indian poetry in English can rock and twist and hool a hoop [sic] well with English poetry in the West” (18), insists that: “English should serve our purpose. It must bring out the Indian life rhythm [rather] than inject the academic English rhythm into Indian poetry” (17). For him, “Free verse in India is not a symp- tom of chaos but a remedy for ordering the chaos” (16).

Free Verse and the Free Decasyllable The initial appeal of free verse to non-native speakers lies in its immediacy: the fascinating rhythms of a poem like “Snake” are simply a more heightened and pointed patterning of cadences already present in non-poetic discourse. Iambic pentameter has no such immediacy because of the rather complicated way by which it exploits the prosodic phonology of English. The rules that govern it cannot be made completely explicit without at least some knowledge of linguistics, and have only been explored in detail over the last forty years.1 Recognition of the pentameter must therefore be acquired, rather like one’s first language, by a sort of osmosis which requires prolonged exposure. It requires, of course, familiarity with the prosody of English speech (Zulfikar Ghose in “One Chooses a Language” speaks of his childhood self “imitat[ing] the accents/Of English soldiers, their pitch and their tone”), but it does not depend on being a native speaker; Toru Dutt handled the meter with great sophistication, no doubt in part because as a child she “read Paradise Lost over and over so many times that [she] had the first book and part of the second book by heart” (Das 18). Indeed, since reading any sort of poetry is getting rarer in a culture dominated by more immediate forms of entertainment, pentameter is now imperceptible to many native speakers of English, as any patron of amateur Shakespeare will recognize; Professor Haq’s complaint that “the prosody of traditional English verse . . . is alien to us. Just note how awkwardly our students read it” could be echoed in departments of English in contemporary Australia, Britain, or the United States. Of course, Haq’s students have more excuse for their bafflement, having learned the language from books: the stress-patterns of English words are not fully predictable and are only sketchily represented in the orthography, and the uncertainty and variability in stressing that in consequence tend to characterize some forms of Indian English will inevitably disrupt perception (and production) of the meter.2 Given the zest with which modern Indo-Anglian poets have embraced free verse as a way of representing “Indian life rhythm,” it may seem odd the generation that came to adulthood in the early years of Indian independence—poets like Kamala Das, Zulfikar Ghose, and to a lesser extent A.K. Ramanujan, Nissim Ezekiel, and Rakshat Puri—have shown such interest in isosyllabic meter. This is a form that has never been popular among British and American poets. It measures verses solely by the number of syllables, without regard to stress, as in French, and its unpopularity is

124 | Peter Groves Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 123–134 prima facie surprising, given that the same poets have been enthusiastically imitating the forms of French poetry for centuries.3 Nevertheless, outside the small circle of those who have experimented with isosyllabics, such as Marianne Moore and W.H. Auden, poets have tended to be indifferent, or even hostile. Basil Bunting calls it “silly—how do you distinguish it from prose?” (Cookson and Dale 13), and Michael Hamburger has “never used [iso]syllabics, and cannot see the point of them as a structural frame. The ear doesn’t count syllables” (26). Similarly dismissive are Adrian Henri (“redundant,” 34), Peter Levi (“uninteresting,” 38), John Heath-Stubbs (“totally spurious,” 29), and Peter Dale (“You don’t need anything but ten or eleven fingers and cloth ears,” 15). Even those who have flirted with isosyllabics have (with the sole and distinguished exception of Elizabeth Daryush) shunned the ten-syllabled variety, or “free decasyllable,” presumably because of the anxiety that (since some, but not all, decasyllables will be construable as iambic pentameter) a poem in free decasyllables will look like a bungled attempt at pentameter. Yet, it is the free decasyllable that has proved the most popular isosyllabic meter among modern Indo-Anglian poets.

Overt and Covert Meters The main objection poets make to syllabic meter is its failure to communicate intelligible form: Thom Gunn gave it up precisely because he found the result “indistinguishable from free verse” (Cookson and Dale 23), and it has been suggested that “absent the whole notion of meter as pattern, one may question whether syllabic verse is ‘metrical’ at all” (Preminger and Brogan 1249). I call it a meter because it permits unmetricality: it represents, that is, an objective regulation of the poetic line by phonological criteria (and thus may be distinguished from the quantitative experiments of the Elizabethans and Victorians, for example, which were based on more or less imaginary properties of syllables). Nevertheless, we need to distinguish it from traditional kinds of meter in that it is undetectable to one who is experiencing the work as reader or audience rather than examining it: as a structural device, that is, it is ‘covert,’ discoverable only by investigation. Traditional meter, by contrast, is part of the reader’s experience of the poem: such communicable or ‘overt’ meter works by producing a felt prosodic equivalence between lines. In French, for example, syllables are roughly equivalent in prosodic weight and timing and therefore can be used to measure sections and short lines; in English, however, syllables vary enormously under the pressure of a prosody that stretches and squashes them to fit roughly evenly-timed segments of speech demarcated by beats. Take the following list of fruit: at a constant tempo the first four syllables take up about as much time as the remaining twelve, because both sections have just four beats:

Subversive Rhythms: Postcolonial Prosody and Indo-Anglian Poetry | 125 Dislocating the Pentameter Syllabic meter, therefore, is a covert form in English, and although a few experimenters (see Ghose’s friend B.S. Johnson’s “A Note on Metre,” for example) have claimed otherwise, most are content to acknowledge this. For W. H. Auden, it was as an arbitrary ludic constraint: “To me, a poem is . . . always a verbal game. Everybody knows that you cannot play a game without rules. One may make the rules what one likes, but one’s whole fun and freedom come from obeying them” (Cookson and Dale 9). Zulfikar Ghose positively celebrates the meter’s covertness, describing overt “stress metre” as a “refuge” for “incompetent poets, whose rule seems to be how the lines sound and not how they scan” (“Defence” 53). Of course, covert form in itself is nothing new or particularly strange: examples include topomorphic and numerological patterning in Renaissance poetry, or the rhyme-scheme of a poem like Dylan Thomas’s “Prologue,” in which line one rhymes with line 100, line 2 with line 99, and so on. It is not that covert form is irrelevant to one’s experience of the work of art, but rather that its effects are more subtle, more diffuse and more difficult to predict than those of overt form: Alastair Fowler has suggested that the covert architectonic structures of a mid-length poem such as Gray’s “Elegy” may be perceived unconsciously (124). Nevertheless, covert meter as a deliberate technique of composition appears to be an invention of the restless twentieth century, along with painting in shades of black and composing silences for the keyboard; I say “as a technique of composition” because the prosodically distorted way in which Latin was traditionally read in England (which survives in such legal-Latin as nisi prius and prima facie) meant that (as Derek Attridge has shown,4 Classical Latin meter remained covert to Latinate Englishmen and women at least up to the middle of the last century and the advent of a revised pronunciation. Covertness in the meter of “learned” languages is almost something to be expected: it is perhaps relevant to remember that in India, English is itself a learned language, a formal discipline acquired through education, not unlike Latin. An old-fashioned British Latin master would understand Ghose’s seemingly paradoxical warning that “the danger of depending too much upon the ear is to suggest that anything which sounds right to the ‘auditory imagination’ is also metrically right” (“Common Sense” 26).

Disrupting the Pentameter But meter has important functions that have nothing to do with communicability: it is also what Edward Lucie-Smith has called “a scaffolding on which one writes the poem” (qtd. in Orr 125). As David Wright, the deaf South African poet, has pointed out, formal constraints in verse “do not . . . confine so much as compress and focus, just as you obtain power from steam by restricting its field of expansion.” Unable to hear stresses and “requiring a frame of which [he] could be certain, . . . [he] decided

126 | Peter Groves Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 123–134 on a mathematical one—[his] verse would be contained by a count of syllables” (Cookson and Dale 56). Robert Frost used to say that he would “as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down” (qtd. in Barry 159). Syllabic meter can be a way of restoring that net—the productive tension or resistance of the language- material—while retaining the open-ended cadences of free verse. One compelling motive to choose syllabic meter, therefore, might be a desire to take advantage of the power of metrical constraint while avoiding the ideological baggage traditional forms bring with them. A meter that has been the vehicle of a long and complex cultural tradition becomes eventually much more than a mere principle of form. Since skill in the form cannot be acquired in isolation, as a simple technique or set of rules, but must be absorbed along with the poetic tradition itself, the two become inextricably linked: for all but the most powerfully original of poets it becomes difficult to write it except as an heir of that tradition. We need only compare the novel accentual-syllabic verse of medieval Latin, utterly unlike any previous product of that language, with the Renaissance Latin hexameter, much of the time little more than a kind of echo-chamber, reverberating with the rhythms, the dictions, and the cultural perspectives of Virgil, Ovid, or Juvenal. The problem is compounded with the English pentameter, since even mere correctness cannot be achieved without such immersion: Aurobindo Ghose’s pentameter epic Savithri resonates with the blank verse cadences of Milton and Tennyson. Part of the appeal of syllabic meter in English may therefore lie in the denaturing effect it has upon traditional poetic discourse. It may become a way of dispossessing—and thus possessing—English as a poetic vehicle for those who write it as a second language, particularly in a post-colonial context: poets like Ghose himself, or Kamala Das, both of whom were born in the 1930s under the British Raj. Both poets have explored the problem of writing poetry in someone else’s language—Ghose in “One Chooses a Language” and Das in “Introduction”—and what is particularly interesting is that they chose free decasyllables to do it: indeed, of the 35 poems in Ghose’s Jets From Orange (1967), 23 are in free decasyllables, as are eight of the 50 poems in Das’s Summer in Calcutta (1965). So far from avoiding the ideological baggage of the pentameter, free decasyllables seem to confront it directly. They avoid the danger mentioned above, of appearing to write failed pentameter, because there are virtually no constraints within the free decasyllable on word choice or word order: the pentameters that do occur in their work are in natural English, and show no sense of strain. Failed pentameters, by contrast, tend to show evidence of having been bent and twisted, however unsuccessfully, toward the pentameter structure. Take, for example, the following sonnet by the pseudonymous Indo-Anglian poet Dorseynaph Elrosenfyr: although the first two lines are pentameters and (at least in terms of their syntax) more or less natural English, the third line, which is unmetrical, is not merely contorted but unintelligible, and the other unmetrical lines in the poem

Subversive Rhythms: Postcolonial Prosody and Indo-Anglian Poetry | 127 (asterisked) cannot be thought of as natural English (the words that derail the meter are underlined).5 It reads:

My lady smiled when like a flowercup / I took her in my arms in thought, and wept: / *Whilst of all complainings made a bud. Up / I looked at her, and sighed: such pity pressed / Out of her that she took the bud, caressed / It gently and to her own bosom, though, / *Throbbing as fast as my tears ran, fixed. / *Then, then, I did also smile, and we slow / Buried ourselves in a pure kiss to know / *Neither its end, nor beginning. So high, / So deep! Our breath ceased to move to and fro, / It seems to me that kiss is lasting by / The music of eternity: ‘tis so. / *But who is the flower cup, she or I? (Elrosenfyr 42)

Yet at the same time, because they are intended as pentameters, Elrosenfyr’s non-pentameters each fail at only one point (underlined), whereas Ghose’s and Das’s free decasyllables, not aiming at pentameter, may show multiple disruptions when considered as pentameter, sometimes two or three to a line:

*The memorial to Petrarch is plain / *at Fontaine de Vaucluse where the mountain / still dominates the waters it lets run. (Ghose, “One Chooses a Language” 1–3)

The difference is a crucial one, because while failed pentameter allows the Western reader a complacent superiority, the free decasyllable is an alarming dislocation of his or her expectations: the poet, disconcertingly, does not seem to care about getting it right. It looks like pentameter, but it does not sound like it: it flows without awkward- ness or strain, but it will not play by the proper rules (Donald Hall nicely observes that “syllabics . . . give a sense of randomness within control” [413]). For the Indian reader, of course, there may be something liberating in this subversion of so august an English institution. Homi Bhabha has remarked of Indo-Anglian poetry that:

There is a sense, quite apart from the claims of its ‘nationalist’ detractors, in which it suffers a crisis of identity because its origins are seen to be inauthentic— unoriginal—and its priority is overshadowed by a history of Western precursors. . . . The history of such dominat’ion makes Indo-Anglian poetry a particularly interesting case of what Harold Bloom has called ‘the anxiety of influence.’ (136)

There is no doubt that iambic pentameter, the vehicle of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Yeats, the dominant meter of serious English poetry for most of the last seven hundred years, is the Big Daddy of English versification; cheekily replacing it with a non-scanning simulacrum can be seen not just as a strong misreading, in Bloom’s sense, but as a kind of Oedipal emasculation.

Subverting the Pentameter But there may be a deeper reason that led Indian poets to subvert the pentameter in this way, which derives from the accidental fact that (as I noted above) the ability

128 | Peter Groves Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 123–134 to recognize pentameter—traditionally known as an “ear” for the meter—must be acquired by absorption and cannot be learned from a book (by contrast, a beginner armed with a list of rules and a dictionary can tell metrical French alexandrines or Latin hexameters from unmetrical ones). Because having an “ear” has for this reason been largely confined to the leisured and educated, it has performed the function of a social shibboleth, another way of sorting out the right sort of people who know what to do with a fishfork and which way to pass the port. George Saintsbury, writing in the early years of the last century, appeals not to a list of metrical rules but to the practice of “every well-educated and well-bred Englishman, who has been accustomed to read poetry and utter speech carefully” (21). Having an “ear” for meter is thus rather like having “taste” or “breeding”: such language fetishizes a particular internalized cultural code into a seemingly natural distinction of social class—and in a colonial context, of course, of race. One important effect of the free decasyllable and its capacity to record natural speech-rhythms, then, is to subvert and demystify the pentameter’s hegemonic claims to naturalness and centrality, to expose it as a mere historically produced convention. The point about the free decasyllable, after all, is that it exists in a historical context in which it is defined in opposition to pentameter, as a kind of anti- pentameter. Eavan Boland has ascribed to Marianne Moore’s isosyllabic verse “a dissonance which is something like atonal music: a quarrel with historical expectations at its heart,” and this seems peculiarly apt as a description of Ghose’s own practice (qtd. in Wallace 50). “Address to Sixth Formers,” for example, opens with a classic end-stopped pentameter with a confident initial reversal that then dissolves into conversational decasyllables in the following two lines, as though the first line mimics the naïve assurance of the children asking the question and the following lines the unraveling or deflating of that posture:

What is the use of poetry, you ask, / and first I must tell you that it isn’t / the kind of question you’re used to asking. (ll. 1–3)

What Ghose does in a poem like “One Chooses a Language” is to maintain a kind of complex subversive dialogue with the pentameter: take lines 11–13, about his childhood encounter with English:

I stuttered and chewed almonds for a cure. / My tongue, rejecting a vernacular / *for a new language, resisted utterance.

After two pentameters (always a possibility with the free decasyllable) we get exactly halfway into a third, and the line that mimetically “resists utterance” derails itself as a pentameter on the word resisted.6

Subversive Rhythms: Postcolonial Prosody and Indo-Anglian Poetry | 129 Ghose, who was living in Bombay as a child in the 1940s, a Muslim among Hindus, was permanently exiled by the Partition from his native Sialkot, at about the time he was “rejecting a vernacular / for a new language”; he has remarked:

to be living in the country you were born in and to be told one morning that it is not your country is a devastating experience . . . . The partition coincided with a very serious illness of which I almost died, and so that time remains in my mind as if I had experienced a symbolic death. One way or another, I’ve always been writing about it. (qtd. in Shamsie)

He has since, as an expatriate, forgotten how to speak Punjabi, leaving him in the uncomfortable state of being without a first language. The poem reflects his anxiety at his own rootlessness, his fears that “choosing a language” is not quite the straightforward slot-machine transaction that the first section makes it out to be (“One chooses a language, puts in a coin, / and understands”). We notice that the pentameters are not disposed by chance: each of the first three stanzas is given a seemingly confident conclusion by coalescing into pentameter in the last line, just as the covert couplet-rhymes that precede them emerge in the last two lines into overt rhyme (overt rhyme, rhyme that the reader or audience notices, requires that both rhyming syllables carry beats). In the last stanza, however, “back on the ferry . . . on the stateless sea,” returning to an England that is no more home to him than France, this confidence evaporates, and pentameter collapses into a meandering of hypermetrical lines that for the most part abandons even the minimal structuring of covert rhyme:

The wind turned the houses inside out at / Gordes, but why is Les Baux so deso- late? / The weather, or commercial demands, change: / the people go elsewhere, learn a strange / tongue to make a new living; refugees / all from want. I’m a tourist among these / ruins. My Michelin Guide in hand, / I read about this earth and understand. Back on the ferry connecting two shores, / on the stateless sea among anecdotes / and duty-free liquor, I’ve nothing to say / who said little between Dunkirk and Marseille. / There’s England, my dictionary my ignorance / brings me back to. I give poetry readings / where people ask at the end (just to show / their interest) how many Indian languages I know. (17–32)

Ghose’s practice, reflecting his belief in isosyllabics as a meter whose “subtler rhythmic effects . . . have yet to be appreciated” (Ghose, “Defence” 53) could be summed up in the late Elizabeth Daryush’s reflections of her own craft:

First . . . the line-ending, the highest point of emphasis and tension, being no longer led up to by steps of regular stress, must be established and maintained

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by other means. The first few lines of a syllabic poem should where possible be complete sentences or phrases. Rhyme is almost indispensable, but since it can be unaccented [i.e., covert] it need be neither over-obvious nor monotonous. (24–25.)

Kamala Das, by contrast, breaks all these rules and seems uninterested in syllabic meter as a rhythmical form: she makes little or no use of rhyme, covert or overt, and disregards line-endings altogether. Her most famous poem, “An Introduction,” is in violently enjambed hendecasyllabics, which makes it even less likely she should stumble on pentameters by chance: of its 59 lines, just five are pentameters, and those that do occur are disrupted by strong enjambment. Her aim, indeed, seems to be to write the free decasyllable as though iambic pentameter had never existed. Her protest “Why not let me speak in / Any language I like” is aimed not only at “critics, friends [and] visiting cousins” but at the Western reader: the claim “The language I speak / Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses / All mine, mine alone” can be read less as an apologia for writing in “queer” English than as an aggressive annexation of the language itself, accompanied by her tolerant acceptance of its own “distortions” and “queernesses.” Das’s denaturing of the pentameter goes beyond even Ghose’s in that Ghose’s at least pays homage to its history as an essentially oral meter (we may note that lines 4 and 5 of “One Chooses a Language” are headless pentameters, a form most familiar in the oral tradition of Shakespeare’s blank verse but excluded from the literary tradition for prescriptive reasons). Das’s free (hen)decasyllables are, however, a purely visual medium, mimicking the appearance of traditional verse with their initial capitals but mocking that appearance in their sound: Chris Wallace-Crabbe speaks of her “nerveless enjambments” (218), presumably alluding to the fact that where pentameter enjambments create a tension between the completion of the metrical pattern and the onward thrust of the syntax, that tension is lacking in syllabic verse, where the reader has no experience of metrical closure in the first place. The experience of Das’s enjambments is thus purely visual, an effect of the eye-movement that intervenes between preposition and noun in “in / Malabar” or verb and clitic object in “leave / Me”:

. . . I am Indian, very brown, born in / Malabar, speak three languages, write in / Two, dream in one. Don’t write in English they said, / English is not your mother- tongue. Why not leave / Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins, / Every one of you? Why not let me speak in / Any language I like? The language I speak / Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses / All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half / Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest. (Das, “An Introduction” 4–13)

One explanation for this difference between the two poets is that Das, as a woman, has a further kind of alienation and exclusion to deal with, a further kind of

Subversive Rhythms: Postcolonial Prosody and Indo-Anglian Poetry | 131 subordination to challenge and contest. Her avoidance of poetic closure and shape- liness can be seen not only as a disruption of the hegemonic pentameter but, as Wallace-Crabbe suggests, “a series of flank attacks . . . on masculine discourse” by which she subverts masculinist “norms of poetic expectation” (221):

Where we expect progressive argument, she gives us rough transitions. Where we expect full stops, commas. Where we expect irony, crude contrasts. Where we anticipate some kind of conclusion, odd suspensions. (220)

As Chelva Kanaganayakam has remarked of the Indo-Anglian novel:

[T]he decision to write in English immediately places the [Indian] author in what is ostensibly an awkward situation. To write about a people in a language that is, for the most part, alien to them is to incur the charge of appropriation. The charge is not without some validity, for writers have, often unconsciously, slipped into essentialisms that distort the reality of the ethos they depict. The response to this impasse is not to abandon writing in English altogether, but to write in a manner that acknowledges its own artifice, and in the process turn the limitations imposed by language into strengths. (47)

The rhythms of one’s native language are a peculiarly intimate possession, even in the artificial but deeply naturalized form of a sophisticated meter like iambic pentameter, and the disruption and subversion of those rhythms is subtly disconcerting for the native speaker. By detaching and alienating pentameter from the English poetic tradition, by exposing its artifice and demystifying its fetishized “naturalness,” Indo-Anglian poets like Ghose and Das have obviated Kanaganayakam’s “impasse” and achieved what Bill Ashcroft would call a “post-colonial transformation” of English poetic rhythm (Ashcroft).

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Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill. “The Post-colonial Transformation of ———. Jets from Orange. Macmillan, London: Globalization Discourse.” Conf. on Globalisation 1967. Print. and Postcolonial Writing: An Australia-India Exchange. U of Calcutta, Alipore Campus, Kolkata, Groves, Peter. Strange Music: The Metre of the India. 8 Feb. 2006. Plenary speech. English Heroic Line. Victoria (B.C.): U of Victoria P,1998. Print. ELS Monograph Ser. 74. Attridge, Derek. Well-weigh’d Syllables: Elizabethan Experiments in Quantitative Verse. Haffenden, John, ed. W. H. Auden: The Critical Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1974. Heritage. London: Routledge, 1983. Print.

Babha, Homi. “Indo-Anglian Attitudes.” TLS 3958 Haq, Kaiser. “An apology for Bangladeshi poetry (3 Feb. 1978): 136. Print. in English.” Daily Star. Daily Star [Dhaka], 7 August 2004. Web. 10 Jan. 2006. Barry, Elaine. Robert Frost. New York: Ungar, 1973. Print. Johnson, B.S. “A Note on Metre.” Poems. London: Constable, 1964. 53. Print. Bhanagar, O. P. “The Indian Poetry in English: The Contemporary Situation.” Studies in Contemporary Kanaganayakam, Chelva. “Indian Writing in Indo-English Verse: A Collection of Critical Essays English: Counterrealism as Alternative Literary on Male Poets. Ed. A.N. Dwivedi. Bareilly (India): History.” University of Toronto Quarterly 69.1 Prakash Book Depot, 1984. 10–28. Print. (2000): 43–57. Print. Brooks, B. G. “Syllables are not Enough.” TLS 3230 (1964): 93. Print. Orr, Peter. ed. The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets. London: Routledge and Cookson, William, and Peter Dale, eds. Agenda: Kegan Paul, 1966. Print. Special Issue on Rhythm: Vol. 10, No. 4–Vol. 11, No. 1. London: Agenda, 1973. Print. Preminger, Alex, and Terry Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Daryush, Elizabeth. “Note on Syllabic Metres.” Princeton: Princeton UP,1993. Print. Collected Poems [of] Elizabeth Daryush. Ed. Donald Davie. Manchester: Carcanet, 1976. 24–25. Print. Saintsbury, George. A Historical Manual of English Prosody. London: Macmillan, 1914. Print. Das, Harihar. The Life and Letters of Toru Dutt. London: Oxford UP,1921. Print. Shamsie, Muneeza. “Ghose, Zulfikar.” Litencyc.com. The Literary Encyclopedia, 14 Feb. Das, Kamala. Summer in Calcutta. New Delhi: 2003. Web. 5 Dec. 2005. Everest, 1965. Print. Sharp, H., ed. Bureau of Education: Selections Elrosenfyr, Dorseynaph. The Unpoetic Age. from Educational Records: Part I: 1781–1839. Lucknow (India): Lucknow Publishing, 1942. Print. Delhi: Natl. Archives of India, 1965. Print. Fowler, Alastair. Triumphal Forms: Structural Wallace, Robert, ed. Meter in English: A Critical Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry. Cambridge: Engagement. Fayetville: U of Arkansas P,1996. Print. Cambridge UP,1970. Print.

Ghose, Zulfikar. “A Poet of Common Sense.” TLS Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. “The Loud Posters of 3176 (11 Jan. 1963): 26. Print. Kamala Das.” Kamala Das: A Selection With Essays on Her Work. Ed. S.C. Harrex and Vincent ———. “Defence of Syllabics.” TLS 3229 (16 O’Sullivan. Adelaide: Centre for Research in the Jan. 1964): 53. Print. New Literatures in English, 1986. Print.

Subversive Rhythms: Postcolonial Prosody and Indo-Anglian Poetry | 133 Endnotes

1. For a fuller discussion of this see Groves. syllables ϩ 6, or 6 ϩ 6), each section terminated by a stressed syllable. 2. I have noticed a variety of stressings in the English of Indian academics that appear to be 4. Attridge. based on analogy with related words: suBURB (c.f. suBURban), meMOry (meMOrial), proDUCT 5. Modern linguistic theories of meter have (proDUCtive), STRAtegic (STRAtegy), ORganic identified unmetricality not just as a property of (ORgan), narRAtive (narRAtion), and so on; I whole lines but also as a point of failure within should add that some apparent variability in the line, a violation of the Stress Maximum stress in Indian English may arise from the Constraint (Halle and Keyser) or the fact that some Indian languages have, like Monosyllabic Word Constraint (Kiparsky). Points French, a much less marked stress-pattern, of failure are identified here in terms of the producing a variety of English better adapted to “Base and Template” theory set forth in Groves’s isosyllabic meter: one writer has suggested that Strange Music (see note 1). “reading . . . modern ‘syllabics’ unaccented, in the French way, . . . produces a strange and not 6. Since Ghose is writing decasyllabics, unattractive rhythm not dissimilar from that utterance is meant to be disyllabic here (as in produced by . . . English-speaking Indians or normal speech); if it were pronounced utt-er-ance Pakistanis” (Brooks 93). the line would pass as loose Jacobean pentameter (anathema to Ghose) with a 3. More precisely, lines of Classical French verse so-called “feminine epic caesura.” are composed in isosyllabic sections (e.g., 4

134 | Peter Groves Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 135–148

AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies

Shintaro Miyazaki

It is impossible to think a rhythm. (Valéry 1340)

Ouverture In a post-digital era, where digital computerized technology is no longer a novelty but already ubiquitous, it is crucial to understand the meaning-creating potential of rhythm in a “media archeological,” techno-cultural, and epistemological sense (Ernst 31; Huhtamo and Parikka). And while doing so rhythm should be defined as an inter-modal1 tool and model for analyzing cultural objects and their hidden relations with current techno and media-cultural situations. “Algorhythm” is a heuristic combination of the words ALGORITHM and RHYTHM. Algorithm is a term crucially used in computer science and means a finite sequence of step-by-step instructions, a procedure for solving a problem, often used in computers as a fundamental principle of software or in everyday life, for example as cooking recipes. Rhythm, on the other side, is defined by Plato as a time-based order of movement, where movement should be understood as movements of materials that can be measured by technical—but at the same time epistemological—tools.2 “Algorhythms” are consequently combinations of symbolic and real physical structures. They occur when real matter is controlled by symbolic and logic structures like instructions written as code. “Algorhythms” let us hear that our digital culture is not immaterial, but lively, rhythmical, performative, tactile and physical, and, most importantly, that “algorhythms” are not just normal rhythms. Their transmissions and storages can nowadays be quick enough to deceive our senses, and also their manipulative power—namely their speed and quality of calculations—became in the last decades faster than our human senses. “Algorhythms” oscillate “in-between” the symbolic and the real, between codes and real

AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies | 135 world processes of matter (Tholen 53). Thus, they become a third form beside the real and the symbolic. The “algorhythmic” therefore, and not the Lacanian imaginary, is the real modus operandi of our information society.

Return — Fast Rewind Music has not always been reduced to the realm of sound. In the west, from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance, music was linked to arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, and was part of the mathematical sciences and functioned as an epistemological model of the world. Plato defines “harmonia” as the well-proportioned structure of the world, and was inspired by the Pythagorean concept of the “music of the spheres,” which was grounded in the ratios used to divide lengths of a string (Cornford 66–68). Pythagoreans believed in numerical relationships, which explained the existence of everything on every level, including the seasons, the orbits of planets, and human beings. They even argued that the universe was itself a harmonia, constructed as a kind of musical structure. Boethius, around 500 CE, defines in De institutione musica the terms musica mundana, humana, and instrumentalis. The first is the music of the universe, the second the music in the human body and the third the music in the musical instruments. Harmonia was then regarded to be an important factor for the functioning of the universe, human body, and musical instruments at the same time. The concept of “algorhythms” was inspired by those old transmusical notions, which can be resumed as epistemological tools for understanding the world by musical categories like harmonia, melody, or, as I may suggest, like rhythm. In almost every information technological device, one can find integrated circuits, microchips, or other semiconductors, which allow one to control electric potentials, and thus the flow of electrons, in a very precise way. Changes of electric potentials applied to an electro-mechanical transducer (such as a loudspeaker) produce, if they are periodical and change between twenty and twenty thousand times a second, hearable musical tones. Even short changes of electrical polarity are hearable as short crackles.3 More metaphorically, electronics, while operating, are always producing some kind of hidden sonic structures. This leads to the idea that technologies that store, transmit, and manipulate information can as well be explained by musical terms, since most contemporary devices, tools, and media using those technologies have at least one component if not the most important that works electronically.

Rhythm, Time, Notation, and Machines As mentioned previously, Plato defines rhythm as a time-based order of movement. The suggestion here is to define order as a traceable continuous stream of perceivable and measurable physical processes. One example is a sequence of beats of some drum played by a human, another example could be in terms of Bruno Latour as an “actant,” like a turntable, a tape recorder, a radio, or a computer, which are all,

136 | Shintaro Miyazaki Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 135–148 like humans, able to reproduce or synthesize rhythms. There is a temptation to claim that human rhythms are more lively, groovy, and emotional, but ultra-fast computers and digital technology in general are nowadays able to simulate up to a certain extent human errors: artifacts and processes, which are generally perceived as being human or being analog in contrast to the monotonous and cold logic of digital machines. Additionally, more and more digital processes manipulated and controlled by algorithms happen in real time nowadays. In the last decades operations of media technology, thanks to improvements in calculation time, reached such a velocity that they can process time-critical affairs, where time plays a crucial role that things happen promptly. Otherwise, human lives are lost, large amounts of money disappear, or interactivity does not work at all. Time-critical4 media technology, a term coined by German media archeologist Wolfgang Ernst, plays an important role in computerized— thus, in my terms “algorhythmized”—everyday live. Though I suggest the importance of transmusical concepts of rhythm, it is essential to explain some of its fundamental musical aspects and its underlying archetypical relations with encoding and decoding processes, which are crucial for media operations. Most of these aspects are summed up in the term notation. The word notation etymologically arrives from Latin nota: mark or sign (Harper, “Notation”). Consequently, semiotics comes to mind when writing about notation, but also the relation of material, sign, and meaning. In traditional musical notation, there is the symbolic immaterial meaning of the materialistic real musical sign, which produces—while reading them—a mental sequence of ideal (thus symbolical) durations, which the musician transforms to real actions of sound production. Rhythm therefore needs the symbolic as well as the real to come to existence. Some careful considerations need to follow: First of all, the notion that digital data is another sort of musical notation needs to be introduced. The word ‘data’ etymologically arrives from datus, an act of giving, and therefore refers to the procedural, and both operational and performative, nature of digitizing (Harper, “Data”). Considering their sequential form, discreteness, finite- ness, and their hidden potential for actions, musical notes are similar to data and algorithms. They are, like data, symbolic representations of something from the real world. A sequence of rhythm played by a drum player might be an example for musical notation coming into action; a numerical array retrieved from changes of an electric current during a certain time is an example of a sequence of data. Second, rhythm is also strongly correlated with a term called meter, which is as well related to notation. Meter has two separate layers of meaning. One is connected with notation; therefore, the symbolic and the other are connected with real physical aspects. In this sense it is similar to the term rhythm. Notably the connotations and etymology are slightly different. Meter is associated with the Greek word meson, which means

AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies | 137 “to measure,” whereas rhythm derived from the Greek word rhythmos, which refers to a sort of flowing or streaming character of something (Beneviste 1: 333). Third, while analyzing different computerized processes in our post-digital techno- culture it is useful to expand the definition of rhythm and to assume that even irregular rhythms or wrong rhythms are still rhythms when they can be integrated in a time scale of regular small-scale time units. This would then also include hearable outputs of algorithmically controlled stochastic processes like Markov chains. Fourth, on the other side, exactly those errors or little irregularities make a monoto- nic rhythm become human, tactile, performative, or musical. It is known that minimal delays or offsets make an otherwise monotonous rhythm feel groovy. Fifth, the boundaries of human senses as well as the current status of scientific objectivity5 and measurements must be considered, which is an important point to understand the concept of “algorhythm.”

Rhythm versus Meter Let us first imagine an infinite sequence of even, isochronous, periodical beats. This is called meter. Then second, imagine that there are more louder beats in a limited section of, for example, 2 times 3 beats. This sequence of “one, two, three, one, two, three,” where there is an emphasis on one, could be called a three-quarter bar, where the basic quantity of a note is a so-called quarter note. The same sequence can also be called meter or even rhythm. This is where the difficulties begin. Both rhythm and meter can denote the same physical and perceptual processes. At first sight it is very clear. As it is general knowledge, meter functions as a framework for rhythms. For a given piece of music , where the tempo is defined as 120 beats per minute for one quarter note, there is the possibility to choose a simple meter or a compound meter. We choose a simple meter like 8/4. Now one musical measure has eight quarters of a duration of 500 milliseconds, because 60,000 ms, which is one minute, divided through 120 equals 500 ms. Now we fill this empty sequence with a rhythm represented by some notes of following lengths: 500 ms, 1000 ms, 250 ms, 500 ms, 50 ms and 1250 ms, which are all together 4000 ms, the length of one musical measure under the above-defined tempo. In the following illustration it is very easy to identify where the rhythm is and where the meter is:

Figure 1 Rhythm and Meter

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Here, the meter is a mental sequence of eight unhearable notes with a duration of 500 ms, which should be called symbolic meter. If this meter becomes audible by adding, for example, a second line of musical notes played simultaneously, then this abstract, unhearable meter takes on a physically real, hearable meter. It would be a completely monotonous, exact measured sequence of beats, which would be perceived by humans as exactly the same. This kind of meter should be called real-world meter. The important point here is that although humans perceive them as exactly the same, they may not be uniform on a physical micro temporal level. A sequence of short pulses, each with durations of 500 ms, could contain some errors, resulting in a sequence, for example, with 499 ms, 500 ms, 501 ms, 499.5 ms, 500.5 ms, etc. To be more specific: imagine a mechanical metronome with a pendulum plays a pulse. After a certain time the energy put into the metronome by, for example, a wind-up spring mechanism gets lost and the metronome gets slower. Similar issues can happen to crystal oscillators, which operate as clocks6 for transmission and calculation synchronization in computers and other digitally operating devices. For example, a normal 32 kHz crystal tuning fork changes its frequency slightly in relation to the temperature of its environment. In a real-world application, this means that a watch made using a regular 32 kHz crystal tuning fork will keep correct time at room temperature, lose two minutes per year at Ϯ10°C room temperature and lose eight minutes per year at Ϯ20°C room temperature due to the instability of the quartz crystal. Consequently a real-world meter is physically considered just another form of rhythm, a rhythm, which seems to be very exact, but is not when measured in the scale of microseconds. It is a kind of measurable irregular rhythm, as I mentioned above. The differences and errors are here just in the time scale of micro- or even nanoseconds. To come back to the musical and hearable rhythm, the human tolerance level to sense a regular pulse begins at 125 milliseconds (Roads 17; Fraisse 156). Everything faster is not distinguishable. 50 ms is the next tolerance limit for perceiving individual pulses. Everything faster will be perceived as tone. To come here to a point, it is important to understand that, just like the human perception process of rhythm is based on a symbolical framework of a certain meter, digital processes work correctly and produce perfect results “as long as the operation[s] of each component only produce fluctuations within its pre-assigned tolerance limits” (Von Neumann 294). This is one of many reasons for my attempt to suggest the term “algorhythm” as a heuristic term to understand digital media and technology.

Errors, Materiality, and Individuality Humans are machines with very low frequency bandwidths, to paraphrase a notion by Friedrich Kittler, who was inspired by Joseph C. R. Lickliderís famous text “Man- Computer Symbiosis” (1960). But fortunately there are media technologies and “experimental systems,” a term coined by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, which enable

AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies | 139 knowledge production, expand our senses, and let us measure the world. Nevertheless, measurements are just approximations; if a symbolic and logic structure like an algorithm takes action in the real world (as this is crucial during processes of media technology), and if these actions change some measurable physical properties, then it is more accurate to explain the whole process with the term rhythm than with the words clock, meter, or regular pulse. To formulate it from the opposite perspective: even if we want to call it a regular pulse, an exact meter, or a correct clock, it is in physical terms not correct. Because exact measurements are in any case not possible, as physicist John Robert Taylor notes in the introduction section to An Introduction to Error Analysis (xv). An intensified media archeology, as I would here suggest to understand our current media and techno culture, must stay always on the physical side of things, but nevertheless still be able to analyze cultural processes on an epistemological, if not philosophical, level. The knowledge of digital or computer forensic sciences may help here. They form a corrective of our naïve view on technology when these new disciplines teach us that even mass-produced hard disks, microchips, and CPUs as well as digital media data like emails, digital photographs, etc., have individual traceable measurable characteristics. Digital Forensics lately became a mainstream tool in criminal investigations and was made understandable to a broader audience, for example, by a publication called Scene of the Cybercrime by Debra Shinder (2001). Matthew Kirschenbaum in Mechanism: New Media and the Forensic Imagination describes digital forensics as a further media archeological method to examine machinic individualities at the micro level (9–20). He interestingly distinguished between forensic materiality and formal materiality (10), which I would expand and combine with the media-theoretical distinction between the symbolic and the real, which was developed from Jacques Lacan’s “three orders” the real, symbolic, and imaginary by German media theorists like Georg Christoph Tholen and Friedrich Kittler in the late 1980s. The real physical properties are constituent for forensic materiality, whereas formal materiality is a symbolic representation of the so-called ones and zeros, the absent and the present, which can be retrieved from the real physical signals wan- dering trough the CPU and busses to the RAM, etc. A formal materiality is, for example, a table of hexadecimal values in a sound file (.wav or .aiff) read with a hex editor, which can reveal some hidden metadata in a file. Accordingly, with this distinction, I would differentiate between rhythm and meter, where rhythm refers to the physical, tactile, erroneous qualities having individual traceable characteristics, and meter builds the symbolic framework needed to keep everything approximately in order. Investigative methods of computer forensics provide accurate methods to understand those individualities on the micro level, both in time and space. Another helpful distinction is the ubiquitous hard/software dichotomy. Forensic materiality is

140 | Shintaro Miyazaki Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 135–148 closer to the hardware side of digital technology, whereas formal materiality is more a concept on the software, thus the symbolic, not the real-world side. Software analysts of hard disk data or network traffic data can only reveal information of artificially naturalized “real” numbers and structures of a data packet, but cannot go further to the actual physical constitutive signals of data traffic. For this one needs to directly measure the electronic signals from the circuits.

Rhythm versus Melody There is still one important distinction for rhythm that needs to be defined before conducting a media-archeological cut into current everyday “algorhythms”: the difference between rhythm and melody. As explained earlier, changes of electric potentials applied to an electro-mechanical transducer, like a loudspeaker, produce musical pitches if they are periodical and have a frequency within 20–20,000 Hz. Change of musical pitch within time is widely defined as melody. Despite that musical pitch is a temporal phenomenon, it still has some static component due to its periodical nature. There are two arguments I can proffer against the use of the term melody for describing real-time signals of digital technology. Melody is restricted to periodical signals, which excludes the whole world of non-periodical signals; and as well, it is merely a very fast sort of perceived real-world meter, which I defined above as a sub- set of rhythm. All uniformly structured rhythms, which are faster than about 50 ms, sound like musical tones, although they are structurally and physically considered rhythms. As media archeology is not only about human senses, but also about machinic materialities, physical properties, forensic scientific individualities, and to cover-up the widest possible range of fluctuating phenomena, I would like to call those sonic structures rhythms as well when contemplating from a machinic perspective.

Finally, a Media-Archeological Cut After these preliminary considerations, I define “algorhythm” as a term that denotes the crucial, dynamic, time critical, real-time manipulative processes that happen when digital technology operate in ultra high-speed operation rates: in this medial in-betweenness, real physical, dynamic and noisy, erroneous RHYTHMS are produced by discreet step-by-step formalistic, static, and abstract symbolic instructions written and coded as ALGORITHMS. If it comes to offer some exemplification of the concept of “algorhythm,” I need to choose from a vast range of possibilities, which go from current mobile communication systems like UMTS or GSM to so-called computer bus7 systems like USB or Firewire, and other systems of data storage, transmission and manipulation. Therefore, I narrow the object of study for the present case to the Ethernet, which is a broadly used computer networking technology for local area networks (LANs). Most wired local internet network systems are based on Ethernet, which are then usually

AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies | 141 connected via DLS (Digital Subscriber Line) to the telephone network. In that case, there is a DLS-Modem, a modulator and de-modulator, and a router, where one or several computers are connected. Initially, the OSI-Reference Model (Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model), with seven different layers starting at the lowest with the “physical layer” and then “data link layer,” “network layer,” “transport layer,” “session layer,” “presentation layer,” and, on the top, the “application layer” is an important key concept for understanding “algorhythmics.” The idea of this layered reference model of network architecture started in 1977, and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) later began to develop its OSI framework architecture. The “physical layer” consists of the basic hardware transmission technologies of a network. It underlies the logical and symbolic data structures of the higher-level functions in a network, thus it is invisible from the software side of computer system analysis tools. Further, the terms “algorithm,” “data,” and “protocol,” used in communication and information sciences, must be (re)defined for my media archeological approach. Observed and measured in the level of the physical circuit, all three concepts are “algorhythms” when their static stored codes transform into computational run time. Nevertheless, it is important to make precise distinctions between those three terms. First, algorithms are abstract, symbolized step-by-step instructions normally written in pseudocode or drawn in flow-chart-diagrams. When writing or thinking about new software programs, a professional programmer usually rewords the pseudocode into a proper software programming language. Often he or she skips the first step to write a pseudocode and writes directly in his/her favorite programming language. A compiler then encodes in several complicated processes the algorithmic instructions from a higher programming language level to the most lowest level called machine code, which will be then executed by the computer architecture (CPU, busses, RAM, etc.) as a electronic stream of basic computer instructions. Second, data is a kind of material, which can be transformed by different algorithms. Nevertheless, at the lowest physical level of machine code, data and instructions are not distinguishable. They are all micro-rhythmically structured sequences of electronic signals. Hence, I suggest they be called “algorhythms.” To explain this more deeply, it is important to understand that the first digital computers, like the EDSAC (1949), stored both data and programs in the same memory, which is in principle still happening nowadays each second while using a computer from the early twenty-first century. This principle is called “von neumann architecture,” and was first disseminated by the Moore School Lectures (1946) of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and adapted worldwide afterwards. Third, a protocol is a set of rules used by computers to communicate with one another across a certain network. It is a convention, standard, or specification that controls and enables the connection, communication, and data transfer between

142 | Shintaro Miyazaki Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 135–148 computing hardware. Protocols may be implemented by hardware and/or software. At the lowest physical level, a protocol defines the behavior of a hardware connection and defines when and how other algorithms, which, for example, are securing the flawless transmission of data, should operate on which kind of data. A protocol is thus a sort of meta-algorithm. Coming back to the Ethernet protocol, which is standardized in IEEE 802.3,8 it is important to know that it deals exactly within the above-mentioned physical layer. Basic principles of the Ethernet protocol were developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in California during the early 1970s by Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs, who were inspired by earlier works, especially those of the ALOHA-Project, which were one of the first data packet radio transmission systems, developed at University of Hawaii. In 1976, Metcalfe and Boggs published a scientific paper called “Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks,” where the principles of IEEE 802.3 were already declared. In 1980, the work group 802 of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) declared in February (which is denoted by the 2 of 802) the remainder of the still in-use Ethernet protocol. Interesting for my exemplification is a standard called Ethernet 10 Base-T, which was used mainly between the early 1970s and until around the turn of the millennium. It has a bandwidth of 10 Mbits per second. The word “Base” implies a digital base-band transmission, which means that there are no modulations or demodula- tions happening at this stage. Still, it is important to know that there is a line code (sometimes called digital base-band modulation), which encodes the pure bit stream to a more stable coded stream for a more secure transmission. The line code used in 10 Base-T is called Manchester Code, which produces a self-clocking signal. Manchester Coding was used for the first time at the University of Manchester in the context of early computer Manchester Mark 1 in the early 1950s (see Fig. 2). The T of 10 Base-T refers to twisted pair cable, which is a method to reduce electromag- netic disturbances or in my terms “wrong algorhythms” to a minimum. The first and easiest method to hear “algoryhthms” of Ethernet is when one merely hooks up one pair of the 10 Base-T cable into an audio mixing device with preamplifiers and adjust the volume to a certain level. One can hear, when there is

Figure 2 Manchester Code

AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies | 143 transmission activity between two computers, a stream of sounds similar to a Geiger counter. If we inspect the structure of the transmitted data packets (also called frames), which means that we need to measure, digitalize, and record the electric signals in the Ethernet cable fluctuating between Ϫ2.5 Volt and ϩ2.5 Volt with a ultra-fast digital-analog converter,9 we will find on a macroscopic level some little ultra-short high-bandwidth bursts, which have a very high pitch when they are made audible by adjusting the playback rate of the digital data recording to the standard playback rate for a Compact Disc (CD), namely 44100 Hz (see Fig. 3). On a closer look, and if we slow down the playback rate, we can see and hear the structure of one data frame on the physical layer (Fig. 3) and compare it to the model defined by the specifications in IEEE 802.3 (Fig. 4). As it is observable the content of both diagrams, the graphical plot of the real physical signal and the model of a data frame defined by IEEE 802.3 more or less match. We can easily recognize the different sections of data. One special issue we were confronted with, when conducting this experiment in physical measurement, was the capacity of our semi-professional equipment. The sampling frequency of our USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) was a bit too slow for the complete reconstruction of a 10 Mbit per second signal. Nevertheless, we were able to clearly recognize all data sections, especially the start preamble, which was rhythmized in to synchronize sender and receiver. The preamble consists of 7 octets of alternating zeros and ones (which looks like this: 10101010 10101010 10101010 10101010 10101010 10101010 10101010) and an octet called SFD (Start Frame Delimiter), like 10101011, which I marked as section P on the graphical plot of the digitally measured and reconstructed signal (Fig. 3). As data becomes a stream of signals, it becomes an operational process, and it can be understood as an “algorhythm,” and special meta-algorithms called protocols define for each individual case of transmission the framework of those data streams, which changes slightly from protocol to protocol. Other algorithms work with the data or produce the data transmitted. All are either implemented in a special hardware or are programmed in the “application layer.” In the case of Ethernet 10 Base-T,there are algorithms for protecting data collision, when several computers are connected together, or there is a little algorithm called “checksum algorithm,” which is used to detect if the data packets has been transmitted successfully. Sometimes the whole data is encrypted. In that case, some complex encryption algorithm is operating. To sum up the rhythm-analysis10 of “Ethernet,” a still-ubiquitous infrastructure of our telematic society,11 it is important to remark that the analysis of the object of study was conducted from three different perspectives, which could be categorized as micro-, meso-, and macro levels. In the present study case of Ethernet 10 Base-T, there was a micro-rhythmic Geiger counter-like sound on the macro level, a more rhythmical sequence of ultra-high pitches short bursts on the meso level, and on the

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Figure 3 One data packet of IEEE 802.3 (Ethernet), digitalized with USRP (Hardware) and gnuradio (Software) and visualized with Audacity by the Author with help by Martin Howse. Data packets were synthesized with a software called Scapy.

AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies | 145 Figure 4 Comparison of IEEE 802.3 Data Packet Model and real measured signal. micro-level, there was a more or less melodic, but in strict physical sense still rhythmic, noise-like sound motif. With an inter-modal and trans-musical definition of the term rhythm, it is possible to link it with different time scales from nanoseconds up to several years. Not only time scales, but also proper scales not in real, but symbolic space, are possible as the OSI-layered model illustrates. Different algorithms work together from different symbolically networked locations. The implication is that an analysis on “algorhythms” must also deal with symbolic and logically complex mathematical processes controlled by algorithms, which produce at the end “algorhythmical” sequences of oscillating matter. The next step of an analysis on “algorhythms,” which are operating almost all the time in our little digital gadgets should be the realm of real-time applications. Due to the still-accelerating operating rate of digital technology and the miniaturization of processor technology, which once was called Moore’s Law, we are able now with the aid of digital technology to do things, or, more precisely, let things do with seeming instan- taneity. Time-critical real-time information technologies are the result of an escalation of algorhythmic technologies. Basic principles of such time-critical processes are algorithms, which are calculated and then transmitted as algorhythms over a physical channel so quickly that our humans senses are deceived and can not perceive the delay, which is needed to calculate and transmit those “algorhythms.” A real-time video communication system is an example of that kind of time-critical networked system of algorhythms, where real-time compression algorithms are needed to reduce the required data transfer amount per seconds (called bandwidth) to a reasonable number. To make a final point, “algorhythms” become more and more crucial building blocks—or in musical terms, leitmotifs—of our current post-digital society, where “the digital” itself is neither perceivable nor visible anymore. To disclose those hidden realties of our culture, we need critical methods like media archeology. Technologies, and this implies also media technologies, do not wait to be analyzed by the humanities, yet they mas- sively influence our way of thinking, seeing, hearing, acting, and living.

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Works Cited

Baier, Gerold, and Thomas Hermann. “The “IEEE Get Program: IEEE 802.3: Ethernet.” Sonification of Rhythms in Human IEEE.com. IEEE Standards Association, n.d. Web. Electroencephalogram.” Proceedings of the July 2009. 10th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2004), 6–9 July 2004. Law, John. “Notes on the Theory of Actor- Ed. Stephen Barrass and Paul Vickers. Sydney: Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity.” Int’l Community for Auditory Display, Systems Practice and Action Research 5.4 2004. PDF. (1992): 379–93. Print.

Beneviste, Émile. “La notion de ‘rythme’ dans Kittler, Friedrich. “There Is No Software.” Stanford son expression linguistique.” Problèmes de Literature Review 9.1 (1992): 81–90. Print. linguistique générale. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Vol. 1. 327–35. Print. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanism: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge: Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. MIT, 2008. Print. Fundamentals of Music. Trans. Calvin M. Bower. New Haven: Yale UP,1989. Print. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Cornford, Francis MacDonald. Plato’s Cosmology: Tube. Palo Alto: Stanford UP,1997. Print. The Timaeus of Plato. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. Roads, Curtis. Microsound. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. Print. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone, 2007. Print. Tholen, Georg Christoph. “In Between: Time, Space and Image in Cross-Media Performance.” Ernst, Wolfgang. Das Gesetz des Gedachtnisses: Peformance Research 6.3 (Winter 2001): Medien und Archive am Ende (des 20. 52–60. Print. Jahrhunderts). Berlin: Kadmos, 2007. Print. Valéry, Paul. Cahiers/Notebooks. Vol. 1. Ed. Brian Stimpson, Paul Gifford and Robert Pickering. Fraisse, Paul. “Rhythm and Tempo.” The Trans. Paul Gifford. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Psychology of Music. Ed. D. Deutsch. Orlando: Lang, 2000. Print. Academic P,1982. 149–80. Print. Volmar, Axel, ed. Zeitkritische Medien. Berlin: Harper, Douglas. “Data.” Etymonline.com. Kadmos, 2009. Print. Online Etymology Dictionary. Web. 15 July 2009. Von Neumann, John. “General and Logical Theory of Automata.” Collected Works, Vol. 5: Design of ———. “Notation.” Etymonline.com. Online Computers, Theory of Automata and Numerical Etymology Dictionary. Web. 15 July 2009. Analysis. Ed. A. H. Taub. Oxford: Pergamon, 1963. 288–328. Print. Huhtamo, Erkki, and Jussi Parikka, eds. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Shinder, Debra Littlejohn, and Michael Cross. Implications. Berkeley: U of California P,2011. Scene of the Cybercrime. 2nd ed. Ed. Michael Print. Cross, Burlington: Syngress, 2008. Print.

AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday Technologies | 147 Endnotes

1. It is reasonable to speak about visual, bodily, defines it in her publication with Peter Galison social, neuronal, or chemical rhythms. Indeed, entitled “Objectivity.” there is an alternative scientific approach, called sonification or auditory displaying, where rhythm 6. Engineers speak of clocks rates for CPUs or is a important concept to understand all kinds of Busses, which are called, interestingly enough, processes. A leading conference and annual “takt rate” in German. Takt, which is derived from meeting is organized by ICAD (International Latin “tactus” and stands for sense of feeling or Community for Auditory Display), which is a touch, is the German expression for meter. forum for presenting scientific results on the use of sound-to-display data or monitor systems. One 7. In computer architecture, a bus is a convincing realm of study is human brain activity subsystem that transfers “algorhythmic” data during epileptic attacks, pioneered by Gerold between computer components inside a Baier and Thomas Hermann. computer and/or between computers.

2. These measurements of materiality allow us 8. See “IEEE Get Program.” to hear, see, or feel represented information about changing physical properties, and are 9. For the measurements and digitalization of therefore pre-forms of media technology. the Ethernet 10Base-T signal, we used a software and hardware environment called GNU 3. Acoustic waves are caused by mechanical Radio (Software) and USRP (Universal Software vibrations, which produce fast movements of air Radio Peripheral). See also gnuradio.org molecules (oscillations of pressure transmitted (accessed 15 July 2009). Thanks to Martin through a solid, liquid, or gas). If the oscillation Howse. is periodic, one can hear a musical tone; if non- periodical, transitional waveforms are summed 10. Henri Lefebvre coined the term up by the word “noise.” And if the waves are very rhythmanalysis (Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and short, they have percussive characteristics. Everyday Life. 1992. London: Continuum, 2004).

4. For further reading, see Volmar. 11. Other algorhythms can be detected in Morse code, ASCII-Code, USB, Firewire, Wifi (W-LAN), 5. Objectivity is always constructed, as Lorraine Bluetooth, GSM, DECT (a standard for home-use Daston, Director of the Ideals and Practices of wireless phones), and UMTS, but also Rationality Department at the Max Planck everywhere inside the electronic circuit Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, architecture of digital technologies.

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Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field

Jodi Brooks

The rhythm of in/visibility is cut time: phantasmatic interruptions and fascinations. Fred Moten1

In his 1952 novel Invisible Man, the American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison famously described invisibility as the sense of being “never quite on the beat.” In a frequently cited passage from the novel’s prologue, Ellison foregrounds the experience of time that underlies racial invisibility:

Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong’s music because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cig- arette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’s music. (11)

For Ellison, invisibility is characterized by both a positioning in time and a particular form of time-consciousness. While the former is tied to the experience of not corre- lating with, or being comprehensible to, a dominant organization of time, this position(ality) can also, Ellison suggests, produce a particular temporal sensibility. The experience of invisibility can generate a “different sense of time,” a heightened time- consciousness characterized by an alertness and attentiveness to what could be

Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field | 149 called time’s “rhythms.” With his aural perception aided by the reefer, Ellison’s invisible man hears time’s “nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead” and “slip[s] into the breaks and look[s] around.” Ellison’s Invisible Man shifts the terms in which invisibility is understood, suggesting that questions of visibility and invisibility (and therefore of legibility and illegibility) cannot be separated from questions of time and its rhythmic expression. For Ellison, because invisibility is tied to an experience of time, it can be expressed as and through its rhythmic structure, and this rhythmic structure is one in which the off-beat is dominant. By describing invisibility in terms of its rhythmic structure, and foregrounding the forms of time consciousness it entails, Ellison provides a way of understanding how invisibility can be given form and how, therefore, it can be made transmissible. Ellison’s fiction and his essays have been influential in shaping both the American novel and American literary theory, and his 1952 novel Invisible Man continues to be recognized as one of the most important contributions to twentieth-century American literature.2 His work has been equally significant for American musicology, where his essays on the blues, bebop, the tango, and other musical forms have set a bench- mark for writing on forms of popular music.3 But the significance of his work extends beyond the more expected terrains of literary theory and musicology. Over the last two decades, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in Ellison’s work across a variety of disciplines, from sociology to photography studies to political theory (Judy; Blair). In Anglophone film theory, however, Ellison’s work barely receives a mention. One could well argue, of course, that there is nothing particularly odd about the work of an American novelist writing in the post-World War II era having had little influence on or significance for contemporary film debates—film, after all, is not a key concern for Ellison (though he was a keen photographer). However, when one considers that some of the central issues and concerns underlying Ellison’s work resonate with key questions in both contemporary and classical film theory, then the apparent dearth of interest in Ellison’s work in contemporary film debates is somewhat more surprising. Ellison’s work is characterized by an interest in the relations between cultural forms and forms of historical thinking, in historically specific modes of perception—in particular, the new modes of perception enabled by technologies of reproduction (both visual and sonic)—and in the ways in which vision and visibility are structured through organizations of time.4 Ellison’s concerns, in other words, meet up with many of the key concerns of film theory debates, both past and present. In particular, Ellison’s interest in the relations between cultural form, the technical media, and forms of historical consciousness, has a particular resonance with and value for those debates that have drawn on the work of cultural theorists like Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Ellison’s proposal that invisibility entails both a position in an organization of time and a form of time-consciousness foregrounds the relations between representations

150 | Jodi Brooks Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 149–168 of time and forms of social experience. Like Walter Benjamin’s favored figures of the gambler, the whore, and the flâneur, Ellison’s invisible man could be understood as a social type both marked by and illuminating the temporal structuring of experience in modern life. Like Benjamin, Ellison too locates and foregrounds the rhythmic structure of forms of social and historical experience, particularly those forms of experience invisible or illegible and “marginal to the historical record” (Holland 1). In this respect, one of the things Ellison’s proposal of invisibility offers to contemporary film and cultural theory debates is, quite simply, a way of understanding a form of experience that has often been overlooked in work that has set out to chart the relations between forms of social and historical experience and film’s forms of representation and reception. As such, drawing on Ellison’s understanding of invisibility to conceptualize how film may give form to this form of social experience can extend the terrain opened by Benjamin’s work on film and modernity and the more recent work in film theory developed in its wake. Just as Benjamin traced the relations between the temporal structuring of experience in modernity and the ways this temporality has been—or could be—mimicked, or alternatively critically embraced, in particular film practices (such as in his comments on slapstick, for instance), the rhythmic and temporal structure of invisibility (a form of social experience inseparable from twentieth-century modernity) could also, presumably, be given form in the moving image.5 Ellison’s analysis of racial invisibility foregrounds how forms of social and historical experience can be given form and “sounded out” in cultural forms through their rhythmic structure. (One might also argue that bringing Ellison’s work into dialogue with Benjamin’s and Kracauer’s work can help draw out the importance of rhythm in their work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernity, though this is not my focus here). In this respect, the value of Ellison’s work (and Invisible Man in particular) for film theory is not so much that it can add another marginalized social experience or social “type” to a discipline’s repertoire. What makes Ellison’s description of invisibility so suggestive for understanding how film can summon invisibility and stage disappearance is the idea that invisibility can be made visible through particular representations of time. The rhythmic structure Ellison locates in invisibility, however, is a rhythmic structure that would not, at first view, easily translate to a medium like film. How could “time’s nodes”—and the space around the beat—be conceived in a medium so frequently understood as constrained by the so-called compulsory temporality of the apparatus (understood as the constant forward movement of frames moving through the projector and pulsing on a screen)? Drawing on Ellison’s proposal of invisibility for film raises a number of questions about how we think about film and rhythm: questions, in particular about how—and where—rhythmic structures and beats can be produced and made palpable, and therefore also about film’s forms of temporal representation. Here, Ellison’s form of musical thinking is particularly valuable, suggesting a framework for locating and drawing out invisibility’s “beat” in particular film practices.

Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field | 151 Ellison was first a student of music and one of the defining features of his thought is the way that he thinks in and through sound. Ellison, who wrote that “one of the chief values of living with music lies in its power to give us an orientation in time,” is a writer attuned to the rhythmic structure of cultural forms (Ellison, “Living with Music” 14). As such, his form of musical thinking is particularly valuable for a time-based medium such as film, as it can focus both our eyes and ears on the forms of rhythmic expression at play in a film or in a particular image practice. Attentive to the rhythmic structure of a cultural form or practice, and sounding out the experience of time and form of historical thinking it might represent, what Ellison’s work offers to film theory is a way of reading the temporal structure at play in a scene, shot, or sequence by, to borrow a phrase from his essay “The Golden Age, Time Past,” stirring the eye’s ear (52).

Invisibility’s Time Signature Invisibility, Ellison suggests, has a kind of time signature, and it is through this time signature that invisibility can be staged, recognized, and made transmissible. The idea of the time signature is particularly useful for understanding how film can give form to invisibility as it embraces in its field both the sense of a temporal mark (what we could regard as its indexical aspect), as well as offering a way of identifying particular temporal structures through their formal, and more specifically, rhythmic, features. Each of these meanings is important for how the idea of the time signature is being used here, but my use of the term time signature is also informed by Paul Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy is interested in historically and culturally specific forms of memorative communication, and he uses the concept of the time signature to refer to the temporal structure of a social practice or cultural form. One of the central concerns of the book is with how “black expressive cultures practice remembrance,” and how “this active remembrance [is] associated with a distinctive and disjunctive temporality of the subordinated” (212).6 As with Ellison’s description of the rhythmic expression of racial invisibility’s temporal structure, the time signatures that interest Gilroy are characterized by the asynchronic and temporal disjunction. Gilroy, not surprisingly, turns to Ellison’s work for his discussion of this disjunctive temporality, and he draws on the oft-cited prologue to Invisible Man in particular. While invisibility’s time signature could be broadly described as being based around the off-beat, it is an off-beat in which the space around the (anticipated) beat is acti- vated and primary. As Invisible Man’s narrator says in the passage quoted above, invisibility “gives one a slightly different sense of time,” one in which “you’re never quite on the beat” but “sometimes ahead and sometimes behind.” In other words, it is not simply the missing of the beat that is important here, but rather that the space around the beat is charged; after all, these are breaks one can “slip into” and “look around.” Invisibility’s time signature could therefore be thought of as that of the

152 | Jodi Brooks Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 149–168 breach or caesura, but it is a caesura in which the emphasis lies on the interval opened through the breach rather than the cut itself. Gilroy’s concept of the time signature is particularly useful for understanding how such forms of temporal disjunction can be produced in a time-based media like film, and this is largely because of its attention to questions of rhythm. Gilroy’s use of the term time signature both summons and diverges from the term’s more familiar meaning of referring to the numerical fraction that sits on a musical stave and indicates the meter of a piece of music. Gilroy, a theorist whose writing and thinking is always steeped in sound and marked by an attentiveness to the rhythms not only of cultural forms but also to those of a concept and of writing itself, clearly draws on the musical meaning of the time signature in his discussions of the time signatures of the black Atlantic. However, at the same time—and this is crucial to how I draw on his concept here—his proposal of the time signature also diverges from its more familiar meaning in significant ways. Whereas on the musical stave a time signature indicates the meter or measure of a piece of music, Gilroy’s time signature would seem to refer to the rhythm of a cultural form or social practice. While rhythm and meter have often been equated in film theory, meter (or measure) is that which provides rhythm with a framework in and against which rhythm can chart its own movement. One of the few film theorists to have directly addressed the difference between meter (or measure) and rhythm is Jean Mitry, who outlined the distinction between the two terms in his book Semiotics and the Analysis of Film.7 In the context of his discussion of the various understandings of film rhythm in the work of interwar French film theorists and filmmakers, Mitry writes,

Measure is nothing more than a practical convenience. It is the process of ordering rhythm intellectually, a means of observing it, of giving it a fixed framework within which and by reference to which it may promote its expressive mobility. Thus measure regulates rhythm without however submitting it to an autocratic rule for fear of harm- ing its spontaneity. Indeed rhythm is by no means subject to measure; rather the reverse is true, rhythm using measure as a point of reference in its free development. Be this as it may, measure, originally used to regulate rhythmic flow without circumscribing it within a narrow framework, allowing the stresses to fall on a particular measured phrase, finally came to control rhythm itself. The divisions of rhythm had to coincide with the divisions of measure and the stresses had to fall on the ‘down-beats’ (or strong beats). In this way, rhythm became subordinate to measure—which explains the pervasive confusion of the two. (212)

If we follow Mitry’s definition it would seem that what is often, and somewhat loosely, referred to as rhythm in film is often closer to measure. The difference between meter and rhythm is central to invisibility’s time signature and is particularly important for understanding invisibility’s representability in moving image forms like film. One of

Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field | 153 the advantages of Gilroy’s use of the term time signature is that it would seem to be concerned with the relations between rhythm and meter in a particular rhythmic structure and with the conception of time made palpable through this relation.8 Gilroy’s concept of the time signature is crucially tied to his focus on the forms of “double consciousness” that have been central to the intellectual traditions and expressive cultures of the black Atlantic. As Gilroy argues, this doubleness—which W. E. B. Du Bois famously argued was “the founding experience of blacks in the West”—has played a key role in the intellectual history of the black Atlantic (Gilroy 91). Du Bois described double consciousness as the

sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (364–65).

While variously proposed and understood, this doubleness, as Patricia Williams has argued, is seen as conveying the “experience shared by so many African Americans of trying to negotiate the space between one’s humanity and one’s stereotype” (Williams, “The Fourth Wall” 7). And as Williams goes on to add, “I would tweak the notion a little farther and describe it as a sense of ‘double being.’ It isn’t just about feeling split inside; in today’s culture, where visual media can replicate your image and blast it everywhere, it’s more like having two entirely separate bodies. The force DuBois described as ‘the eyes of others’ today has lights! Camera! Action!— as well as scriptwriters on very large budgets” (7). In The Black Atlantic, the social practices and cultural forms that interest Gilroy are those whose rhythmic structures express this doubleness through the relations they establish between rhythm and meter. Like Ellison’s concept of invisibility on which it strongly draws, Gilroy’s time signatures of the black Atlantic express forms of social and historical experience through missed and suspended beats. Forms of syncopation and temporal disjunction characterize the time signatures that populate his book, and these time signatures, therefore, are characterized by a rhythmic structure that works with and against meter. For this reason the time signature that expresses the diaspora temporality of the black Atlantic for Gilroy is that of the caesura. As such, for Gilroy, we could say, the caesura and other such forms of temporal disjunction operate as both the content of a tradition and its mode of transmissibility. Gilroy’s idea of the time signature offers a way of addressing those experiences of time that are characterized by an experience of being out of step with dominant organizations of time, of occupying the space “around the beat,” or what we could also, perhaps, describe as the experience or sense of being untimely. Because the time signatures Gilroy focuses on are characterized by syncopation and temporal disjunction,

154 | Jodi Brooks Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 149–168 the implicit distinction his concept draws between rhythm and meter is both necessary and enabling for his argument (Gilroy, after all, is less interested in metrical structure per se than in the ways rhythmic beats can carry social and cultural memory and articulate forms of social and historical experience). Invisibility’s time signature—that of never quite being on the beat—foregrounds and heightens a tension between meter and rhythm: its time signature is characterized by a rhythmic structure that activates and animates the space around a beat, a rhythmic structure in which missed beats and ghosts of beats foreground both what the beat orders and what it denies. It is perhaps a little ironic to use Gilroy’s work to think about how film could access and express invisibility’s time signature. Gilroy’s focus in The Black Atlantic is not, of course, on film, nor is he a theorist renowned for his interest in film. More significantly, his work often tends to be characterized by a disinterest—or more accurately, perhaps, a disappointment—in film and in moving image culture more generally. This disappointment in or indifference to film is largely a result of it lacking, for Gilroy, the antiphonic possibilities of music, but it is also tied to his understanding of film’s forms of rhythmic expression.9 Film, Gilroy implies, isn’t capable of the rhythmic complexity of music (and he is certainly not alone in this assumption about film’s rhythmic capacities). In this respect his understanding of film—or more generously perhaps, his assessment of much contemporary cinema—is often counter to that which I’m developing here, even though he provides some of the conceptual tools to argue for and begin to address film’s forms of rhythmic complexity and play. While Gilroy is perhaps not the most film-friendly cultural theorist, his concept of the time signature is particularly suggestive for approaching questions of time, reference, and historical experience in film. His idea of the time signature can help turn our attention to film’s rhythmic practices, to the beats—both audible and inaudible—that can be found, to varying degrees, in all films.

Tracking the Filmic Caesura If invisibility’s time signature can be thought of as that of the missed beat and the caesura, then film’s capacity to represent invisibility will be tied to its capacity to produce stalled or suspended beats. In many ways film would seem to be well placed to create the sense of being out of step and of missing the beat that Ellison describes, precisely because of its capacity to play with the sense of time’s movement. After all, as a time- based medium with numerous rhythmic means at its disposal, film is not simply a medium that can produce rhythmic beats. It can also create the sense of their withholding or suspension, stalling or eliding the fall of an anticipated beat in such a way that the space around the beat (or what Ellison calls “time’s nodes”) can be foregrounded. To understand how invisibility’s time signature might operate in a medium like film, questions of rhythm—of film’s rhythmic means and potential, as well as the conceptual tools and framework that would be necessary for “hearing” and analyzing

Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field | 155 film’s rhythmic articulations—must inevitably become central. But what kind of rhythm analysis might be required to locate and amplify invisibility’s time signature in film? What critical approach might give us something like Ellison’s form of sonic thinking and enable us to listen to what Ellison has called the “lower frequencies?” Few would dispute that rhythm has had a checkered history in film theory debates, with critical interest in film’s rhythmic elements slipping in and out of favor as an area of concern as the discipline has evolved. Certainly, film’s rhythmic elements and potential were a key concern for many of the European avant-garde film movements of the 1920s, linking the work of filmmakers as diverse as Sergei Eisenstein, Germaine Dulac, and Hans Richter. Many of these filmmakers not only explored questions of film rhythm in their films but also wrote about the promises and possibilities of a rhythmical cinema.10 Eisenstein’s and Pudovkin’s famous dispute was based in part on what Eisenstein saw as Pudovkin’s failure to distinguish between meter and rhythm in montage. If, as many theorists have commented, the musical analogy was central to conceptions of film in the interwar years the move to a language analogy in the postwar years took the attention away from film’s rhythmic means. In the decades following, interest in filmic rhythm slipped to the sidelines, particularly in academic film theory debates where it was increasingly associated with formalist analysis and often dismissed as such. Over the last decade however there has been a renewed interest in questions of rhythm in film theory and film criticism. This has partly been a result of new work drawing on phenomenological approaches to film (particularly Laura Marks, Vivian Sobchack, and more recently Malin Wahlberg in her book Documentary Time), and partly a result of a (re)turn to an interest in questions of film style in film criticism. No less important has been the interest in and impact of Gilles Deleuze’s two volumes on cinema (The Movement Image and The Time Image). Questions of rhythm are starting to (re)gain currency in recent film theory and film studies debates and they are doing so across an eclectic body of work, embracing areas as diverse as rhythm as sensation and rhythm as authorial signature. If it is important to remember, as Marsha Kinder reminds us, “how dependent all representations are on the modulation of rhythm” (76), then how such modulations are produced and how they are made palpable are productive areas of enquiry and bring the spectator into the picture in various ways. One of the central premises of this essay is that missed beats and other such forms of temporal disjunction in film need to be approached and understood in terms of rhythm, because in both analogue and digital film (as is also the case in video), temporal economies and conceptions of time are primarily expressed and represented through rhythmic means such as shot duration, figure movement, editing, and sound-image relations. Each of these rhythmic means can be set against one another to produce a kind of counterpoint where beats collide, fracture, or are missed, and it is at these points that invisibility’s time signature can appear. Of

156 | Jodi Brooks Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 149–168 course here we are primarily dealing with visual or inaudible (and most certainly, affective) rhythms—and not simply those created through editing, but also those that can course their way through a shot or scene through figure movement, pulses of light or color, or other such rhythmic means. “Missed beats” and other such forms of temporal disjunction can arise in film when different temporal economies and conceptions of time—expressed as rhythmic structures—are juxtaposed. They can arise, for instance, through the juxtaposition of different performance styles—where each performance style carries its own rhythm or they can be generated through the stalling of the narrative or shot into a cliché.11 Malin Wahlberg discusses similar kinds of temporal anomalies in her recent book Documentary Time, and one of the concepts that she draws on to develop her analysis is Erving Goffman’s concept of the “frame-breaking event.” As Wahlberg argues, “Time experience in cinema raises questions whether, when, and how a specific screen event stands out as an anomaly” (Wahlberg 44). For my purposes here, Steven Feld and Charles Keil’s idea of “collaborative expectancies in time” is particularly useful, primarily because of the ways that it foregrounds the place of the listener or viewer.12 While Feld proposes the idea of collaborative expectancies in time in relation to music (he uses the concept to define groove and style and the relations between musicians and their listeners), the phrase also offers a useful way of thinking about representations and sensations of time in film. Because film is a time- based medium, the production of “collaborative expectancies in time” between film and viewer is central to a film’s production of meaning and affect. These expectancies in time constitute the rhythms—both audible and inaudible—that course through a film and underlie its representations of time. Of course the primary expectancy in time at play in a film is no doubt that of temporal movement itself: the expectation that the film will move, unfold, and come to an end, and that diegetic time and apparatus time are both brought to a close at the same time. But this expectancy in time is driven, punctuated, and supported by a number of other expectancies in time—those based in generic organizations of time and in narrative for instance; these, in turn, are supported by other temporal expectations, such as those produced through things like figure movement and performance, shot duration, and editing. These expectancies in time are primarily constituted and felt rhythmically, and for this reason, disparities between the anticipated fall of a beat and the actual fall always make the missed beat palpable in some way. The thwarting of collaborative expectancies in time in a film is most obvious when there is a disparity between the anticipated duration of a movement, a shot, or a sound, and its actual duration. In such instances, the anticipated can haunt the actual through the missed beats that are left suspended. It is this co-presence—in which actual duration is haunted by anticipated duration—and what it gives rise to that enables the production of the missed beat as a temporal breach in film. When actual duration is

Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field | 157 haunted by the missed beats of anticipated duration, their co-presence produces a fissure in time. Marking a space in which something fails to appear or be visible, these missed beats conjure and sound out a blind field. What such disparities do is refute the image’s claims to temporal unity and singu- larity. I would describe them as filmic caesuras even though they do not conform to more familiar ideas of the caesura as a cessation or stopping, for in film of course there is always the continuous movement of the apparatus itself as the projector transports film frames before a beam of light. If the caesura interrupts temporal continuity through the creation of a break or cut, then in film the caesura would always be set against the time of the apparatus: it is a temporal fissure that takes place in and against the temporal movement of the film itself. In this respect, rather than seeing the compulsory temporality of the projection apparatus as an obstacle to the production of such forms of temporal disjunction, it can—like film’s other rhythmic means—also operate as a means for enabling them. And while the caesura is no doubt always a suspension of time that takes place in time, in film this tension between two organizations of time—one that passes and one that does not—is rendered particularly palpable because the pulse of the projector always underlies the temporal suspension. The filmic caesura does not arise from arresting the movement of or in the shot, but results, rather, from the interruption of a temporal continuum: it is both the cut or break that interrupts a temporal continuum and the interval that is opened through this interruption. As such, the filmic caesura can be understood as a particular kind of image or, to borrow a phrase from Ackbar Abbas, a particular “practice of the image.” To say that the filmic caesura is a particular kind or practice of the image is not, however, to say that it is a particular kind of shot, for whereas a shot is determined by the cuts that frame it, the image, here, refers to an expression of time. The filmic caesura, in other words, is defined by its temporal structure, and is produced through the rhythmic tension between anticipated beats and their suspension or withholding. While we are most conscious of the filmic caesura’s thwarting of collaborative expectancies in time when there is a disparity between the anticipated duration of a movement or shot and its actual duration, this is by no means the only way in which filmic caesuras can be produced. I have written elsewhere on some of the ways in which invisibility’s time signature can surface in a film through anomalies in shot duration or through the appearance of counter-rhythms within a shot. As I will go on to discuss, such collaborative expectancies in time can also be foregrounded and thwarted through the organization of shots, by playing with a style of editing and drawing out and thwarting its anticipated beats.

Missed Beats and the Spectator Because it always entails the thwarting of an expectancy in time, the filmic caesura and its missed beat always hails the spectator, operating as a form of deixis. If the

158 | Jodi Brooks Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 149–168 sensation of time that the missed beat or temporal breach produces—that of being untimely, or what Ralph Ellison famously described as being never quite on the beat— results from the thwarting of expectancies in time, then it is a time signature that would also perform a particular kind of recognition of the spectator. By thwarting the spectator’s “expectancy” in time, such missed beats and the sensations of time that they entail would seem to recognize the spectator in his or her invisibility and untimeliness. What sets the spectatorial address of the temporal breach or filmic caesura apart from that of other representations of time that we find in cinema is that the temporal breach unanchors the spectator from the sense of temporal movement and direction that are central to both diegetic and apparatus time. In her book The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary Ann Doane identifies cinema’s “multiple temporalities” as being those of the apparatus (which she describes as “linear, irreversible, ‘mechanical’”), the diegesis (“the way in which time is represented by the image, the varying invocations of present, past, future, historicity”), and “finally” the “temporality of reception” (30). If the filmic caesura or temporal breach was read through Doane’s account, it would seem that the breach results from (and at the same time produces) the unharnessing of these various temporalities from one another. The disparity between actual duration and anticipated duration can unyoke diegetic time from apparatus time by foregrounding the mechanical temporality of the apparatus and leaving it exposed. In the process, what Doane calls reception time becomes unan- chored from both apparatus time and diegetic time because the foregrounding and thwarting of collaborative expectancies in time would seem to place the spectator outside the film’s organization of time. By creating the sensation that the spectator has been unbound from the film’s temporal movement, the breach enables a form of time consciousness and produces a particular sensation of time, a sensation of time that is characterized by temporal dislocation and untimeliness: the sense of being out of synch, off the beat, untimely. In this respect the temporal breach would seem to enable what Dana Luciano has described as “the potentiality of a minoritarian angle of vision,” and does so through a particular representation and sensation of time (Luciano 253). This is not to suggest that the filmic caesura and its missed beats will always necessarily be read as rhythmic appearances of invisibility’s time signature (though I would argue that missed beats in film inevitably produce the sense of a blind field, a kind of temporal “elsewhere” the contours of which haunt or threaten to erupt into the perceptual field). What I would suggest, however, is that there is much to be gained by looking at the form of time experience such representations and sensations of time might both solicit and enable in the spectator. As a way of looking at some of the diverse ways in which invisibility’s time signature can operate in film, I want to turn to a much-discussed scene from a classical Hollywood woman’s film. A number of factors motivate my choice of this scene. The scene itself was the subject of extensive discussion in feminist film debates in the

Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field | 159 1980s and 1990s, so much so in fact that the scene is perhaps one of the most- discussed scenes from a film in Anglophone film theory. The film, of course, is King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937), and the scene is the closing scene of the film. While racial invisibility is far from the film’s radar or worldview, invisibility and disappearance are central themes in the film. But, as I will discuss, one of the things that makes this scene so remarkable is that invisibility is not simply a narrative theme here. Rather, in this final scene, the film makes invisibility visible and it does so through the production of a kind of negative image or blind field, a blind field summoned through a missed beat. In the closing moments of Vidor’s Stella Dallas, Stella becomes a spectator to a scene predicated on her absence, a scene she has nevertheless enabled. The scene is that of her daughter Laurel’s wedding, a wedding that stands for both social mobility and happiness in the film (though as the spectator has been a silent and privileged witness to the failed pay-offs of Stella’s own attempts at happiness through marrying up, this equation is marked with a degree of doubt only partly lessened by the differences between Laurel and her mother). Stella, who has handed her daughter over to the “second” Mrs. Dallas—a woman whose femininity and middle-class standing are more assuredly accomplished than her own—has removed herself from her daughter’s life so that Laurel can slip into upper middle-class femininity without glitch, reflection, or residue. Returning from we-know-not-where, Stella, makeup-free and dressed in a trench coat, watches the marriage from the street, standing alongside other passers-by who gather outside the stately home’s picture window to catch a glimpse of the production. Stella is eventually moved on from her spectatorial position by a police officer, but not before claiming her rights as both spectator to and director of the scene. Holding her position before the screen-like window, she asks for a few minutes more, wanting to wait until the bride lifts her veil to receive the marital kiss. Occupying the foreground of the frame, Stella is framed as the scene’s primary spectator, her experience of the scene privileged over that of the characters within it. Yet, while Stella is a spectator to this event, she is nevertheless invisible to it: the scene before her proceeds—and can only proceed—without her physical presence. Stella, it seems, is a spectator to a scene in which she has no place—or rather, in which her only place is, in fact, that of invisible and inaudible spectator. Vidor’s Stella Dallas is a canonical text in studies of the woman’s film and theories of female spectatorship, and the film has been discussed and debated in and across some of the most important and formative work in feminist film theory by theorists such as Linda Williams, E. Ann Kaplan, and Patricia White.13 The film has been a particularly productive site for examining the classical Hollywood woman’s film’s troubled representations of female subjectivity and desire and its inscriptions of a viewing position for the female viewer. Through its portrayal of its protagonist’s attempts to create a life that contains a degree of movement, freedom, and pleasure,

160 | Jodi Brooks Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 149–168 and the constant thwarting of her attempts by a self-righteous middle class that finds her femininity wanting, the film brings together some of the key concerns of feminist analyses of classical Hollywood: femininity as performance/masquerade, the representability of female desire in the classical Hollywood form, and the woman’s simul- taneous hypervisibility (as spectacle) and invisibility (as subject). Stella Dallas’s closing scene has been the object of particular interest for these debates because of the way it works with—and literally stages—the maternal melodrama’s theme of maternal sacrifice (for Stella to be a “good mother” she must give up her own desires, and in this film, as in other maternal melodramas of the 1930s, this sacrifice entails relinquishing the child itself).14 As Stella stands before a screen-like window, dressed anonymously in trench coat and tomboyish hat, watching a scene that is both seemingly within reach and yet separated by an unbridgeable distance, she performs a particular idea of female spectatorship, one in which female spectatorial pleasure is based in longing and a desire to be swallowed by or become one with the image. It is largely for this reason that the film’s close has played such an important role in studies of the woman’s film and its inscriptions of a female viewing position, with Stella, unseen and rapt before the scene that unfolds before her mirroring the position of the implied female viewer in the audience. Precisely because this scene has primarily been read as one in which Stella is positioned as spectator to a scene of her own effacement and forgetting, it has offered a particularly rich instance of the precariousness of the female gaze in the woman’s film.15 Like a number of other classical woman’s films, Stella Dallas could be understood as a story of a woman’s invisibility, and much of the discussion around the film has focused on Stella’s apparent effacement or banishment in the film’s closing sequence and on the nature of that effacement. Yet, while the film’s final scene certainly revolves around questions of disappearance and invisibility, it is equally about appearance and visibility; after all, it is only at the film’s end that Stella defeats the forms of effacement and erasure that she has confronted throughout the film (and in this respect the film is working within the terms of melodrama’s recognition of virtue). What makes the film’s closing sequence so affectively charged is the way that it hov- ers between visibility and invisibility, disappearance and appearance. The sequence holds these opposing terms suspended by failing or refusing to provide a return of the gaze, the failure of this anticipated shot to appear operating as a kind of missed beat. What Stella Dallas summons in its closing scene is what could be called a cinema of the unseen, a cinema of invisibility and an invisible cinema that the images upon the screen summon and gesture toward. In her retrospective reading of the critical discussion that took place around Stella Dallas in the feminist film debates of the 1980s, Linda Williams comments that “With the great advantage of hindsight, I would say that the entire Stella Dallas debate was over what it meant for a woman viewer to cry at the end of the film”

Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field | 161 (“Melodrama revised” 47). While Stella Dallas became a key site for critically addressing what it means to be moved by a film, no less significant in this work were—and are—the conflicting readings of what the viewer may, in fact, be being moved by. As Stanley Cavell writes in his book Contesting Tears, “How we imagine” Stella’s “walking away from the world of the transparent and reflective screen” is “fateful” (211). The question of what “moves” the viewer in the final scene is not only significant in terms of the interpretations of the “politics” of the film’s (precarious) resolution—for instance whether, as Doane argues, it offers little more than “a ritualised mourning of the woman’s losses in a patriarchal society” (Desire 78). This question is also significant in terms of how we understand the kind of image practice the scene entails and the forms of spectatorship that it solicits and enables. What moves the viewer to tears in this scene may not, in fact, be Stella’s absence from the wedding scene and her (self) banishment to the street and anonymity, but the fact that the film traces and makes palpable an elsewhere that it does not, and perhaps cannot, show, and that this elsewhere is figured as one of possibility. While Williams’s characterization of the Stella Dallas debates is an apt account of some of the underlying stakes of this work, what is lost in this characterization is the degree to which the explo- ration of the production of the scene’s affective force frequently revolved around a sense that the film moves into a different kind of image practice in this scene, staging and playing out its protagonist’s disappearance/appearance through the summoning of a blind field. In her groundbreaking study of the woman’s film The Desire to Desire, Mary Ann Doane argues that Stella Dallas closes on a kind of double disappearance, with Stella’s disappearance from the story being filmically staged through her becoming one with the image itself. As Doane writes:

When the policeman tells Stella to “move on” at the end of the film, she pleads with him, “Oh please let me see her face when he kisses her.” What Stella desires, as spectator, is a close-up. When she walks away smiling, toward the camera and into close-up, she becomes that close-up for the spectator, who empathizes with her fate. (Desire 78; emphasis added)

For Doane, Stella has not only been erased from the scene of her daughter’s wedding, become invisible to its players, and is about to disappear from (and with) the film itself: her disappearance in the film’s story is further heightened by a disappearance at the level of the image itself. Stella disappears in the image by becoming a particular kind of image as the film proffers one of its few facial close-ups of its star. What she desires is a close-up and what she becomes is a close-up, and, as Doane suggests here, the “she” in question slips and slides between Stella and the film’s implied (female) viewer. In his book Contesting Tears, Cavell takes this idea of Stella entering into an exchange with a cinematic gaze one step further, though as

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Cavell argues, rather than witnessing Stella’s disappearance we are in fact specta- tors to her appearance. As Cavell writes: “as Stella walks toward us, her gaze, transforming itself, looks toward us, as if the screen is looming, its gaze just turned away, always to be searched for. (For what it grants; for what it wants)” (216). For Cavell, Stella’s disappearance—or rather departure—from this story marks the opening or promise of her appearance elsewhere:

Her walk toward us, as if the screen becomes her gaze, is allegorised as the presenting or creating of a star, or as the interpretation of stardom. It is the negation, in advance so to speak, of a theory of the star as fetish. This star, call her Barbara Stanwyck, is without obvious beauty or glamour, first parodying them by excessive ornamentation, then taking over the screen stripped of ornament, in a nondescript hat and cloth overcoat. But she has a future. Not just because now we know—we soon knew—that this woman is the star of The Lady Eve and Double Indemnity and Ball of Fire, all women, it happens, on the wrong side of the law; but because she is presented here as a star (the camera showing her that insatiable interest in her every action and reaction), which entails the promise of return, of unpredictable reincarnation. (219)

While Cavell reads the scene in terms of Stella’s appearance (as Stanwyck-as-star-to- be) and Doane in terms of her disappearance, each makes their case by suggesting that what takes place in this scene is a shift between two different kinds of image practices that we could loosely, though somewhat problematically, identify as those of narrative and spectacle, and in this respect Cavell’s reading is closer to Doane’s than it may at first appear. For Doane, Stella disappears by becoming lost in—and as—a close-up. For Cavell, on the other hand, she appears, or comes into visibility (as a star-to-be), by becoming one with the screen itself (as if the screen becomes her gaze): for Cavell, it is almost as if she has been “touched” by the blind gaze of the projector and in turn becomes that gaze for the spectator. The difference between their readings revolves in part around what each sees as taking place through this appearance and/or disappearance. Whereas for Doane, the scene offers an aestheticization, if not sublimation, of loss, for Cavell, it is about Stella’s freedom and her setting forth to some other place. This departure, moreover, is one that she sets out on with another woman’s blessing, and for both it is this shift into a different image practice that inscribes a spectatorial position for the female viewer. Cavell identifies a crucial element of this scene overlooked in much of the theoretical work on the film: underlying the scene’s movement between disappearance and appearance is an act of recognition and a circuit of invisible looks that crosses between character(s), screen, and spectator. Stella, who has consistently been either shamed or misread by nearly every character in the film, is here recognized as not only “good” (in keeping with melodrama’s concern with moral legibility and the

Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field | 163 recognition of virtue), but also, and more importantly for my interests here, as different (as Cavell matter-of-factly notes, “We know that Stella has no taste for men in general”) (217). Indeed, as Patricia White has argued in her analysis of the ways in which this film enables a lesbian spectatorship, the indirect exchange of looks between the first and second Mrs. Dallas at the close of the film is crucial. Whereas for Doane it would seem that the (problematic) pathos of the scene lies in the fact that Stella is banished from the story to be trapped, eternally, as spectator at the window of that which she can neither have nor be, for Cavell the force and poignancy of the scene lies in its acknowledgement of difference, an acknowledgement that takes place through the accepting and loving gaze bestowed upon by Stella through/by the screen within the screen, a gaze that the film cannot present directly. This gaze, moreover, takes the form of the wedding scene itself, for this “picture” is quietly framed and presented for Stella by the second Mrs. Dallas, who, in arranging for the curtains to be open, acknowledges Stella’s presence and difference and gives her permission to depart. As Cavell argues, in this scene “the film screen is being identified as a field of communication between women” (213). In this respect, the scene is structured through a relay of invisible/hidden looks that open and trace a blind field in the film. Stella receives and is touched by the gaze of the second Mrs. Dallas not through an exchange of looks staged through classical narrative’s shot-reverse shot structure, rather she is touched by the screen-like window which serves as a stand-in for that gaze.16 The closing scene draws to a pitch a theme that has patiently bided its time throughout the film: recognizability. In many ways, what moves us in this scene is the belated (and loving) recognition of Stella’s difference. While the recognition of virtue is a central feature of melodrama, what is significant here is that this recognition takes place in and is staged through a blind field, at the limits of vision. Cavell’s claim that in the film’s closing scene the screen itself serves as a means of communication between women suggests that there is a different logic of the image at play in this film: the screen (both the screen of the film and the window-as-screen within the film) mediates contact and recognition between these women by serving first and foremost as a site of inscription, bearing the traces of a gaze that isn’t shown directly. What we move into in the final scene is an image practice in which there can be no reverse shot, and there can be no reverse shot because a screen mediates the gaze (if the displaying of the wedding scene through the window stands in for a look of recognition at Stella, then Stella cannot return that gaze). The shot-reverse shot structure becomes irrelevant and the story takes place elsewhere, in an off-screen space that cannot be accessed directly but that is signaled through a missed beat and the sensation of time that it activates. In this respect, questions of disappearance and appearance, invisibility and visibility are not simply narrative themes in this film: they also inform and underscore the film’s image practice.

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While Stella’s gaze cannot be returned within the film’s story without dire consequences (the film could not be brought to a close if Stella were to re-enter the story), the film itself returns her gaze and it does so by and through a missed beat and the temporal breach it traces. In this respect, while this breach is certainly in the service of the narrative and its orchestration of affect, the fact that Stella Dallas’s final scene opens (and takes place in) a blind field is nevertheless significant in terms of spectatorial address and the position it offers to its viewer. Through the displacement of recognition from the realm of the diegesis to that of the image itself, (the experience of) non-recognition is made recognizable, and in so doing the film itself seems to be addressing a spectator as invisible and in their invisibility. Stella Dallas’s final scene gestures toward a cinema of invisibility or of the unseen, and it does so through the appearance of a missed beat. What defines this cinema of the unseen is that it takes place in a blind field, a blind field that results from the production of a temporal breach. Appearing as and through a temporal breach, this cinema of the unseen is characterized by a troubling or faltering of film time. As such, it entails what could be called a particular practice of the image as well as a particular relation to the image. Hailing the spectator through a missed beat, the spectator is directed to a blind field. Invisibility’s time signature establishes a different logic of vision, displacing the visible, manifest image in favor of that which haunts its borders.

Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field | 165 Works Cited

Abbas, Ackbar. “On Fascination: Walter Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Benjamin’s Images.” New German Critique 48 Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, (Fall 1989): 43–62. Print. 1993. Print.

Blair, Sara. “Ellison, photography, and the origins Hansen, Miriam. “Benjamin, Cinema and of invisibility.” The Cambridge Companion to Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Ralph Ellison. Ed. Ross Posnock. Cambridge: Technology.’” New German Critique 40 (1987): Cambridge UP,2005. Print. 179–224. Print.

Brooks, Jodi. “Ghosting the Machine: The ———. “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Sounds of Tap and the Sounds of Film.” Screen Street.” Critical Inquiry 25.2 (1999): 306–43. 44.4 (Winter 2003): 355–78. Print. Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead: ———. “‘Worrying the Note’: Mapping Time in Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. the Gangsta Film.” Screen 42.4 (Winter 2001): Durham: Duke UP,2000. Print. 363–81. Print. Jacobs, Lea. The Wages of Sin: Censorship and Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood the Fallen Woman’s Film, 1928–1942. Madison: Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: U of Wisconsin P,1991. Print. Chicago UP,1996. Print. Judy, Ronald A. T. “Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Cowan, Michael. “The Heart Machine; ‘Rhythm’ Years.” Boundary 2 30.2 (Summer 2003): 1–4. and Body in Weimar Film and Fritz Lang’s Print. Metropolis.” Modernism/Modernity 14.2 (2007): 225–48. Print. Kaplan, E. Ann. “The Case of the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor’s Stella Dallas.” Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Heresies 16 (1983): 81–85. Print. Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, Kinder, Marcia. “Violence American Style: The 1987. Print. Narrative Orchestration of Violent Attractions.” Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Violence and American Cinema. Ed. David J. Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Slocum. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print. Indiana UP,1987. Print. Luciano, Dana. “Coming Around Again: The ———. The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Queer Momentum of Far from Heaven.” GLQ Cambridge: Harvard UP,2002. Print. 13:2–3 (2007): 249–72. Print.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Souls of Black Folk.” W.E.B Mitry, Jean. Semiotics and the Analysis of the Du Bois: Writings: The Suppression of the African Film. Trans. Christopher King. Bloomington: Slave-Trade/The Souls of Black Fold/Dusk of Indiana UP,2000. Print. Dawn/Essays. Ed. Nathan Huggins. New York: Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Library of America, 1996. 357–548. Print. Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: U of Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. London: Penguin, Minnesota P,2003. Print. 1965. Print. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and ———. Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz the Moving Image. London: Reaktion, 2006. Writings. Ed. Robert G. O’Meally. New York: Print. Modern Library, 2001. Print. Wahlberg, Malin. Documentary Time: Film and Feld, Steven, and Charles Keil. Music Grooves. Phenomenology. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, Chicago: Chicago UP,1994. Print. 2008. Print.

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Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves ———. “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke UP,2005. Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama.” Print. Cinema Journal 24.1 (Fall 1984): 2–27. Print.

White, Patricia. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Williams, Patricia J. Open House: of family, Cinema and Lesbian Representability. friends, food, piano lessons, and the search for a Bloomington: Indiana UP,1999. Print. room of my own. New York: Farrar, 2004. Print.

Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revised.” ———. “Teleology on the Rocks (or spirit- Refiguring American Film Genres: History and murdering the messenger).” The Alchemy of Race Theory. Ed. Nick Browne. Berkeley: U of and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge: California P,1998. Print. Harvard UP,1991. 55–79. Print.

Endnotes

1. This is taken from Moten’s book In the Break: in modernity, see Miriam Hansen’s essays The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (72). “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience” and “Benjamin and Cinema.” 2. As Moten writes, “Few really read this novel. This is alarming even though you can’t really 6. While the time signature only directly comes read this novel. That’s why it calls for and tries to into play in the book’s final chapter, it is open a new analytic way of listening and reading, nevertheless central to The Black Atlantic’s an improvisation attuned to the ensemble of project, and is one of the means through which work’s organization and production, the Gilroy examines various kinds of memorative ensemble of the politico-economic structure in practices in black Atlantic cultures and the which it is produced and the ensemble of the “politics of time” they entail. As such, the idea of senses from which it springs and which it the time signature underlies The Black Atlantic’s stimulates” (67). project of rethinking modernity—its parameters, foundations, and the ways it temporalizes 3. As Ronald A. T. Judy comments in his history — “via the history of the black Atlantic introduction to a special issue of Boundary 2 on and the African diaspora in the western Ellison’s work, while “not a systematic hemisphere” (17). philosophy of music,” Ellison’s understanding and explorations of the “relationship between 7. See also Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s singular forms of musical expression and discussion of rhythm and meter in A Thousand historical ways of thinking [. . .] exhibits the sort Plateaus at 313. For a useful discussion of the of seriousness and rigor commonly associated desire to reduce film to its rhythmic elements with the writings on music of Theodor Adorno and the centrality of optical rhythms for and Edward Said, and has significantly informed European avant-garde filmmakers in the 1920s, the current received conception of the blues” (2). see Michael Cowan, “The Heart Machine.”

4. For a particularly generative and astute 8. Weheliye also discusses the importance of reading of Ellison’s work and his analysis of the the distinction between meter and rhythm for ways that the technical media, in particular understanding Western modernity and the ways technologies of sound reproduction, shape that its “supposed linearity of hegemonic time” modern life, see Alexander G. Weheliye’s can be reimagined “from the (aural) vantage Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity point of the oppressed” (104–05). (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 9. “It seems important to emphasize,” Gilroy writes, “that the power of music and sound are 5. For discussions of Benjamin’s work on film in receding not just relative to the power of the text relation to the temporal structuring of experience and the performer but also as the relentless

Invisibility’s Beat: Ralph Ellison, Rhythm, and Cinema’s Blind Field | 167 power of visual cultures expands. The emergent Wisconsin Press, 1991), and Patricia White, culture of the black image offers no comparable Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and experience of performance with which to focus Lesbian Representability (Bloomington and the pivotal ethical relationship between Indianapolis: Indiana UP,1999), 107–08. performer and crowd, participant and community” (203). 15. Doane writes of this sequence: “Stella is a lesson for the female spectator in more ways 10. As Michael Cowan writes in his essay on than one—what she learns and figures at the rhythm in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, “the appeal window is distance. But the position of the exerted by the very fantasy of a rhythmical distanced spectator can be assumed by her only cinema on avant-garde artists stemmed in large at the cost of an identity, of recognition. part from a problem of legitimacy: the cinema’s Nevertheless, Stella, at the window, is not, ability to visualize movement differentiated it cannot be, a voyeur despite the policeman’s not only from literature, but also from painting exhortation to move on (and hence the and static photography and so seemed to offer suggestion of the illegality of her vision). Her a key to claiming a unique aesthetic domain” visual pleasure is not (at least explicitly) a sexual (226). one—it must be mixed with tears and suffering. Although much of my analysis of the woman’s 11. See my essays “Worrying the Note” and film stresses the refusal to attribute the gaze to “Ghosting the Machine.” the woman in a non problematic way, there is also a sense in which the woman is socially 12. Steven Feld and Charles Keil, Music positioned as a spectator—asked to assume a Grooves, chapter 4. For a dynamic discussion of place outside the ‘real’ arena of social relations this concept, see Weheliye at 81. and power, with all the connotations of passivity, waiting, and watching normally attached to the 13. See Linda Williams, “‘Something Else function of spectatorship. But, in Stella Dallas, Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the the production of a distanced spectatorial Maternal Melodrama,” Cinema Journal 24.1 position for the woman is synonymous with her (Fall 1984): 2–27; E. Ann Kaplan, “The Case of own negation as a mother, at least in any the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor’s material sense. Her sacrifice, her very absence Stella Dallas,” Heresies 16 (1983): 81–85; from the scene, nevertheless insures her Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The transformation into an Ideal of Motherhood” Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington and (Desire 77–78). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987); Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood 16. In this respect, the sequence could be Cinema and Lesbian Representability thought of as a queer compliment to Doane’s (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana discussion of The Purple Rose of Cairo in the University Press, 1999). See also Linda introduction to The Desire to Desire. For Doane, Williams’s discussion of the debate that took the latter offers a particularly concise example place around this film between a number of of the cultural stereotype of the (heterosexual) feminist film theorists in the 1980s and her female spectator entranced before the image. retrospective interpretation of the stakes of that In this Woody Allen film, the distance between debate in her essay “Melodrama Revised,” in audience and screen is collapsed when the Nick Browne (ed.) Refiguring American Film male star of the film steps out from the screen Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley: University to take the rapt female spectator in his arms. of California Press, 1998), 42–88. In Stella Dallas on the other hand, as spectator, Stella is touched by the screen/the gaze of the 14. For discussion of the maternal melodrama other woman while the film’s spectator, seated and its theme of sacrifice see Lea Jacobs, The before the angled and glowing gaze of Stella, Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman’s receives the promise of the possibility of such a Film, 1928–1942 (Madison: University of touch.

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The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions

Jan Hein Hoogstad

From the ocean comes a notion that the real eyes lies in rhythm, and the rhythm of vision is a dancer. From the lookin’ come the seeing, one with real eyes realize the rhythm of vision is a dancer, and when he dance, it’s always on the one. —Parliament, “Mr. Wiggles”

There is something inherently misleading about the word “revolution.” While the term suggests a change of astronomical proportions, those expectations are hardly ever met. That does not mean that revolutions have not happened, do not happen, or will not happen; rather, they come in unexpected shapes, forms, colors, and sizes. The revolution I will discuss in the following pages is tiny. Still, even this assessment of its size is not accurate. For, in this particular case, visual metaphors are inaccurate altogether. Neither a telescope nor a microscope can help observe it. This revolution cannot be seen at all. Resorting to other sensory metaphors, for instance sonic ones, does not help much either. While we expect a revolution to arrive with a big bang, such loud sounds are hardly ever heard. As a matter of fact, the revolution I address in this essay is so silent it can hardly be heard. Ironically, this major breakthrough almost gets lost amongst the plethora of sounds and noises that surrounded it. Raising the volume does not help, since that only amplifies background noise. This strange revolution is neither a whisper nor a scream but occurs somewhere in-between sounds. It belongs to a realm that is neither visual nor acoustic. The event I would like to nominate as a revolution is James Brown’s introduction of “the One” into popular music. While this term initially designated the first beat of

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 169 a measure, its meaning in funk music has become irreducible to its original use. This essay tries to unravel what James Brown and his successors—Sly Stone, George Clinton, Betty Davis, Bootsy Collins, Rick James, and Prince, to name but a few— mean when they speak of this enigmatic term. However, the One also exceeds its musical and even musicological relevance. Therefore, this essay removes the term from its original context and inserts it into another: political philosophy. Within this new context, I argue, the One could revitalize the concept of revolution. The aim of this essay is to transform James Brown’s practice of rhythm into a philosophical concept of revolution. The artist’s shifts, suspensions, and interruptions demonstrate that change does not depend on the extremity or novelty of interventions, but on their critical timing. Before I can conclude that revolutions need to be rhythmic, though, I need to explain why I consider James Brown’s practice of rhythm to be revolutionary. This is a challenge, since the One has proven to be an impossible term to grasp. Many musicians, critics, and musicologists have tried to define this term, but its meaning constantly slips away. Even James Brown himself gives multiple, often conflicting, accounts of the One. This ambiguity, I argue, is an inherent quality of the One rather than a shortcoming of the definitions. In this essay, I do not offer yet another definition. Instead, I will explain how Brown’s revolutionary interventions are embedded in a practice of rhythm. Before I can analyze the One in practice and in detail, however, I (tentatively) need to lay out some of its interrelated characteristics. The One repeatedly releases rhythm from its secondary and instrumental role in relation to melody and harmony. Through precisely timed and carefully performed interventions, James Brown manages to foreground the groove as soon as it threatens to disappear. Paradoxically, cuts, shifts, and suspensions disrupt the rhythm so that it becomes or remains present. This loss and gain of momentum cannot be explained by the (lack of) complexity of the percussive patterns alone. Rhythm is not only a quality of a song, an artist, or even a performance. It also depends on the interaction with other musicians and the listener. Band and audience, however, cannot be directly controlled by the artist. In order to lure them into his sphere of influence, Brown’s rhythmic interventions cunningly double as tests.1 The artist’s heavy reliance on antiphony (call and response) clearly exemplifies this tactic. Simple phrases such as “Get on the good foot,” “Turn me loose,” “Hit me,” and “Give the drummer some” may appear to be lyrics, but are actually tests-in-disguise. Call and response, though, do not always come in the form of meaningful phrases. Nonsensical shouts, bodily movements or gestures, and percussive sounds often fulfill the exact same function. In fact, these percussive modes of antiphony are the model for verbal ones, not the other way around. Disruptions are tactically employed to probe the quality of a rhythm. They do not have to make sense in order to work. The mere fact of a response is the sole measure of quality. If the band and the listeners react appropriately—whatever that may mean—to Brown’s

170 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196 call, then the groove passes the test. If they do not, then the rhythm is apparently not good enough and in need of another intervention. Funk is, thus, as much a discursive practice as it is a musical genre. It can only be understood as the interplay between the music, its performers, and their audience. Brown’s interventions presuppose a continuous awareness and deep knowledge of this practice of rhythm. James Brown himself, however, is an integral part of this complex web of relations. It is impossible to determine where the performer ends and the practice begins. Although this statement applies to all artists— and subjects for that matter—Brown is a hyperbolic example thereof. Nowadays, his name primarily refers to a recognizable sound rather than a concrete individual. As a matter of fact, much of the music that is endowed with this “James Brown Sound” is neither written, performed, nor produced by the artist. Nonetheless, I believe that this misnomer is actually appropriate. Despite the myths, which are mostly distributed by the artist himself, the godfather of funk was not an autonomous genius. The sound that now bears this name is decisively shaped by many other famous (Bootsy Collins, Bobby Byrd, Fred Wesley), lesser-known (Phelps “Catfish” Collins, Marv Whitney), and forgotten musicians and technicians (Bob Both) who worked with Brown, as well as those who either influenced him (Ray Charles, Little Richard) or who were influenced by him (Sly Stone, Miles Davis, George Clinton, Prince). Moreover, the “James Brown Sound” would not be the “James Brown Sound” if fans, critics, and causal listeners would not recognize it as such. And why stop there? Apart from other people, non-human elements, such as recording studios (Sterling Sound, Twain Recording) record labels (King, Polydor) radio stations (WJBE in Knoxville, WRDW in Augusta) and performing venues (The Apollo), are at least equally important to this recognizable sound. The name “James Brown” therefore does not exclusively belong to an individual artist—let alone a solipsistic monad—but invokes a complex, discursive formation of intra, inter-, and extra-musical elements: a practice of rhythm. Within this discursive formation, sudden shifts and unexpected breaks are paradoxically the glue that hold the heterogenous and often conflicting elements together. Even though it is impossible to clearly delineate the borders of Brown’s practice of rhythm, it should not be confused for a stable, coherent, all-encompassing unity. Music critic and funk historian Rickey Vincent, for instance, mistakenly conceives the One as a primal, pseudo-religious force that connects everyone and everything. Philosopher Henri Lefebvre attributes similar mystic powers to rhythm in general. In both cases, this abstract unity can only be established by bluntly glossing over concrete differences. Neither Lefebvre nor Vincent actually differentiate between different kinds of rhythm. Musicologist Olly Wilson, on the other hand, carefully specifies the musical tendencies that distinguish African-American music from other genres: downbeat, simple and complex syncopation, improvisation, and antiphony. Although James Brown makes extensive use of all of these tendencies, they will prove to be

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 171 insufficient to distinguish his particular practice of rhythm within the total field of African-American music. The reason for this, I argue, is that funk’s defining characteristic—the One—is not a tendency but an act. It is an operational rather than an ontological term: the One is not, the One does. The revolutionary force of Brown’s discursive operations cannot be explained through their musical content alone, no matter how meticulous the analysis may be. Brown’s rhythmic interventions need to be placed in the discursive formation they simultaneously hold together, stem from, belong to, and break with. This practice of rhythm is far from a homogenous and harmonious arrangement. On the contrary, funk actually needs the continuous presence of tensions, for instance between the music, its performers, and their audience. Whereas these conflicts are often temporarily and partly suspended, a definite and complete resolution never takes place. More importantly, the eternal continuation of a state of tranquility is not only impossible but would also be undesirable. No tension means no rhythm. The One is thus a discursive operation as well as an ethical imperative: any established status quo must be disturbed. Brown’s heavy reliance on (different modes of) syncopation and other forms of arrhythmia underscore that the disruption of the groove is as important as its continuation. Shifts, cuts, and suspensions are not external enemies to an otherwise well-tempered practice of rhythm. Rather, these acts of displacement are immanent and necessary conditions that guarantee its vitality. By repeatedly inserting arrhythmia into its core, James Brown emancipates rhythm from its musical, and even auditory, constraints. The One shows that rhythm does not maintain a privileged relation to sound. Interventions cannot be heard directly. Sounds, noises, and even rhythmic patterns are merely those effects of underlying operations that present themselves to the listener. Still, a practice of rhythm is not only inaccessible to the ear, but to all the other senses as well. Thus, one can only approach it through its effects. Sensible manifestations are all there are, and yet they are not. Rhythm is always in excess of epistemological positivities. Whereas this may sound mystic, musicologist Anne Danielsen uses Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual to explain that it is not. Deleuze argues that even the simplest relation is irreducible to its individual components. This does not make relations esoteric or unreal, but simply virtual. Since the rhythm in funk consists of many, heterogeneous percussion patterns, and—more importantly—the complex relations between them, Danielsen claims that it constitutes a virtual structure rather than a manifest one. I argue, however, that she thereby misunderstands Deleuze’s concept. The virtual is neither a manifest nor a latent structure; it is not a structure at all. Like rhythm, it is not a mode of being but a way of doing: a practice. As a result, Danielsen’s analysis only tells one half of the story. It only explains the facts of rhythm, but fails to give an account of its acts. Rhythm is not only virtual, the virtual is also rhythmic. James Brown’s interventions exemplify that there is no pre-given, hidden network of

172 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196 relations, but only rhythmic series of precise and specific discursive operations: the virtual is not a structure, the virtual structures. This power to create, organize, transform, and destroy can only be explained by the fact that the virtual is inherently rhythmic. The One reveals that rhythm and the virtual are actually two sides of the same coin. Both concepts signify a practice that repeatedly performs spatializing and temporalizing operations. Even a latent structure is still only an effect of these irreducible acts. Brown’s interventions do not exclusively belong to music, sound, images, smells, movements, gestures or anything else for that matter. The One is the virtual and rhythmic interplay between heterogeneous types of sensory data. James Brown’s shifts, suspensions, and disruptions show that there is no need to conceptualize revolutions as the violent coming of the radical new. His practice of rhythm re-imagines revolutions as irreducible acts of displacement that need to be repeated over and over again. Brown’s interventions were neither the first nor the last of their kind, and—after prolonged exposure to funk—may even no longer appear to be very spectacular to contemporary, let alone future, ears. Still, that does not negatively affect the One’s critical potential. Its revolutionary power does not lie in newness or extremity, but in unveiling the simple fact that rhythmical interventions can successfully create, structure, sustain, transform, and (eventually) destroy a practice. Simply put, James Brown constantly performs the right discursive operation at the right time and the right place. For him, there is no revolution without a rhythm and vice versa.

Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag The James Brown sound I didn’t learn from nobody. It’s from me. I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know. —James Brown

If the One is a revolution in music, when and where did it take place? If it is not, what are the reasons it is so often considered to be one? In order to answer these questions, I need to turn to the origin of the One. More precisely, I will analyze the inscribed stories, recording sessions, and live performances of its beginnings. Since it is impossible to reproduce the place, time, and further conditions of this revolution’s emergence, inscriptions are all that remain. Whenever memory falls short, imagination takes over. The invention of the One has been told—not in the last place by James Brown himself—many times, in slightly different versions. In spite of small variations, the narrative accounts are similar enough to constitute a more or less consistent story. In fact, minor inconsistencies actually increase the authority of the story. Disputes about details distract from the underlying consensus. Agreement, however, is not a given but the product of complex discursive operations. Like all origin stories, this shared account of the One’s origin simultaneously affirms and obscures its own mythical status. On the one hand, frequent and

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 173 prolonged repetitions are a necessary condition for an event’s recognition and inscription. On the other, the same repetitions make it impossible to separate fact from fiction. Still, the myth of the One needs to be unraveled. Not because its deconstruction will increasingly recover the true circumstances of its invention, but because it will reveal how this particular revolution is discursively constructed, transformed, and sustained. At first sight, Brown’s major breakthrough seems to be restricted to a minuscule intervention. On “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (1965), the singer broke with the conventions of the popular music of his time. Instead of emphasizing the second and fourth beat of every measure, Brown accentuated the first and the third: “I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat. Simple as that really” (Brown qtd. in Parales). Simple as it may have been, it is difficult to precisely determine what James Brown actually did. In spite of the singer’s own words, for one, his revolutionary intervention cannot be reduced to the introduction of the downbeat. Sound recordings contradict the written accounts of the One’s origin. They reveal—as I will explain in detail later—that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is far from the downbeat’s first, or most exemplary, occurrence in music history. At best, the song marks a break with the conventions of the soul and pop music of its time. Not nearly enough to qualify this song as a revolution, or so it seems. Could it be that the problem lies in the term “revolution” itself? Does not the idea of a radical break belong to a now outdated, naïve conception of politics and history? Did not the wars and struggles fought in the name of this idea only result in violence and disillusionment? Has “revolution” become so ambiguous and problematic that it would be better to avoid it altogether? In spite of all these objections, I believe that the concept of “revolution” still has the potential to shape, transform, and consolidate critical practices of politics and history. My reasons for holding on to this word, however, do not lie in its contemporary but in its original meaning. The origins of philosophical concepts such as “revolution” are no less mythical than those of “the One.” If anything, their authority depends even more on the denial and suppression of their own historicity. As Michel Foucault showed over and over again, philosophy constantly obscures the fact that its concepts are a product of negotiations, exclusions, omissions, and other discursive operations. In the case of “revolution,” however, there is no need to deconstruct the myth: time already did. Five hundred years of negotiations have changed the concept of “revolution” beyond recognition. As opposed to “the One,” the differences between the past and present versions, which I will describe below, do not dissimulate an underlying, shared narrative. They delineate two entirely different concepts of “revolution.” This separation into a contemporary and an early account of revolution opens up a space in which the concept’s future meaning can be negotiated. Etymologically, the concept combines precisely the two contradictory movements that I need to call James Brown’s practice of rhythm a revolution. In her book On Revolution (1963), Hannah Arendt points out that the term was first used in

174 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196 sixteenth-century astronomy. The original, literal meaning of “revolution” in that discipline is, at least at first sight, the opposite of its metaphorical use in philosophy and politics. It does not refer to the human-ignited process that leads to a radical new order in history, but rather to the eternally recurring cyclical motion of the stars: an unstoppable, natural force outside the reach of human agency. As Arendt states:

While the elements of novelty, beginning, and violence, all intimately associated with our notion of revolution, are conspicuously absent from the original meaning of the word as well as from its first metaphoric use in political language, there exists another connotation of the astronomic term which I have already mentioned briefly and which has remained very forceful in our own use of the word. I mean the notion of irresistibility, the fact that the revolving motion of the stars follow a preordained path and is removed from all influence of human power. (40)

Arendt distinguishes two aspects of astronomical revolutions: irresistibility and cyclicality. In the contemporary, philosophical, or political use of the term, the emphasis lies on the first of these two terms, whereas the second seems to have all but disappeared. Nevertheless, I contend it is a mistake to assume the moment of a radical new beginning has completely replaced the cyclical aspect of a revolution. Whereas novelty may appear to be irreconcilable with the idea of a recurring cycle, I will argue to the contrary. In order to demonstrate that phenomenon, however, it is necessary to make a further distinction within the concept of cyclicality itself. A cyclical movement is more complex than it seems; thrice as complex to be precise. A cycle is not a single but a twofold motion. Two elements are necessary to define a cyclical movement: it has to consist of both a radical change and a return. To distinguish a cycle from mere movement, both of these aspects need to be present. Neither of them can be more important than the other. The fact of the return does not reduce the change to a mere surface effect, nor does the radical nature of the change relativize the return. Whereas in theory both aspects of a revolution are of equal importance, in practice the stress constantly shifts from the one to the other; sometimes the movement of change is accentuated, sometimes the instance of the return. Together, I would argue, this moment and motion are not completed or synthesized into a full cycle, but the periodic oscillation between change and return constitutes a simple—concept of— rhythm. This is where I would like to locate revolutions. They take place neither in a visual nor in an acoustic or any other sensory realm. Revolutions are rhythmical.

Everything Is on The One My contention is that there were three B’s, and now there’s four: Beethoven, Bach, Brahms and now, Brown. —James Brown

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 175 Another shift: from the rhythm of revolutions back to a revolution in rhythm. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is commonly recognized as a landmark in the history of popular music. The mythical status of the song is captured by the following quote from Rickey Vincent’s groundbreaking study Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of the One:2

The Godfather himself broke down the breakthrough song, the 1965 “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”: “That was the turnaround song. It turned everyone around. Because I went on one and three as opposed to the music (count) bein’ written on two and four. But I also took gospel and jazz and defied all the laws.” The jerky guitar, absurdly offbeat bass line, and sharp burst of brass and guitars had a percussive feel that was never heard before. (60)

In this quote, there is absolute consensus between Brown and Vincent about the importance of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” In fact, the critic’s appraisal flows smoothly into the artist’s touting of his own horn, and vice versa. They proclaim in uni- son that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” was nothing short of a revolution; the song’s minor shift from backbeat to downbeat proved to be more than just a rhythmic slip. Vincent equates the surplus value of Brown’s intervention with the One. To him, this enigmatic concept infinitely exceeds the first beat of a measure. The One refers to the spiritual unity of the entire universe. The gospel according to Vincent goes as follows: in the beginning there is the One; the One constitutes a rhythm, then this rhythm connects the different members of a funk band, then this funk band includes the audience in its circle of oneness, and so on, until it finally unites the entire universe. James Brown’s rhythmic slip becomes a cosmic slop. Vincent claims that the power of the One to “raise rhythm to a cosmic level” derives from African spiritual performances, in which “everyone’s individual rhythms are essential to the total vibe” (37). To establish the importance of this African legacy for funk, the critic uses the five so-called tendencies of African music that composer and musicologist Olly Wilson defines in his essay “The Heterogenous Sound Ideal in African-American Music” (1992). According to Wilson, African music is marked by:

● a tendency to rhythmical contrasts; ● a tendency to sing and play in a percussive manner; ● a tendency to include call-and-response structures; ● a tendency to create a high density of musical events; ● a tendency to incorporate the body in music making. (159)

Wilson subsequently argues that the same tendencies are also present in African- American music. Vincent uses this argument to root funk in African spirituality. He can only draw this conclusion, however, because he reads the word “tendency” as “feature”

176 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196 or “quality.” Tendencies are dynamic: they tend toward something else. In the case of African and African-American music, Wilson argues, there is an inclination toward heterogeneity. For him, the common denominator of those forms of music therefore does not reside in the tendencies themselves but in a shared, normative ideal. Both African and African-American music tend toward what he calls a “heterogeneous sound ideal”:

By this term, I mean that there exists a common approach to music making in which a kaleidoscopic range of dramatically contrasting qualities of sound (tim- bre) is sought after in both vocal and instrumental music. The desirable musical sound texture is one that contains a combination of diverse timbres. (159)

Although Wilson searches for the common traits of African and African-American music, he is cautious not to treat them as one monolith. He does not claim that these two categories of music are identical, or even that they exist as such. On the contrary, Wilson does not generalize; he differentiates and pluralizes. The five tendencies function as heuristic tools. Together, they constitute an analytic framework that enables the comparison, differentiation, and classification of different practices of African and African-American music. Whereas these practices all share the same abstract, negative ideal—heterogeneity can only be envisioned as the absence of uniformity—they do not necessarily have any concrete positivities in common. In fact, both practices can both fully subscribe to Wilson’s heterogeneous sound ideal, and still sound completely different. The five tendencies thus should not be confused for aesthetic qualities. The degree to which they are present or absent is not in any way a measure of the authenticity, Africaness, purity, originality, or even heterogeneity of a given musical practice. By using “ideal” and “tendency,” Wilson underlines that practices of African and African-American music strive for rather than realize their heterogeneous sound ideal. The unbridgeable difference between this abstract ideal and its concrete manifestations forms the unstable yet common core of all African and African-American music. Tension is the norm rather than exception. Wilson, however, does not understand this inherent impurity and instability as a lack; displacement constitutes the drive behind the practice. Putting an end to this movement in the form of an origin or a telos is neither possible nor desirable. Vincent, on the other hand, confuses Wilson’s formulation of the five tendencies with a positive definition of the heterogeneous sound ideal. Moreover, he temporally and spatially locates this ideal in precolonial Africa. The “authentic” roots of funk, and all other forms of African-American music, according to Vincent, reside in the motherland. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” marks a return to that origin and must therefore be understood as the continuation of an ancient spiritual tradition. In his view, James Brown’s revolutionary shift is actually a religious leap backwards: Many of the world’s religions (particular African ones) emphasize a “cosmic oneness” with everything, rather than the Western Christian concepts of man

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 177 “fearing” God, man versus nature, mind versus body, intellect versus intuition. The African spiritual root of The Funk is important because the essence of funk music, as well as the funk attitude, is a return to certain traditional ways, among which are the basics of music-making; a celebration of the earthy, funky, emotionally vital way of life; and a cosmology of “oneness” in which everything and everyone in the universe is interconnected. (258)

In his interpretation of “The One,” Vincent uncritically reproduces all stereotypes of both black music and the daisy age, with one small, yet for our current purposes highly significant, difference: rhythm has replaced harmony in its role as cosmic unifier. From the first beat of a measure to the entire universe, from an African past, via an African-American present, to a global or even cosmic future, Vincent attributes infinite powers to the One. Ironically, the heterogeneous sound ideal Wilson recognizes as a common thread in African and African-American music practices is transformed into an homogenizing cosmology.3 Whereas Vincent uncritically repeats and affirms the mythical account of the One’s revolutionary origins, musicologist Anne Danielsen actually debunks the same legend. In her book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament, Danielsen argues that many of the features with which “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” has become synonymous—such as downbeat, syncopation, vocal percussion, the One—were retroactively attributed by musicologists and critics. In an attempt to revise this long history, she goes against the grain by performing a meticulous analysis of James Brown’s songs. While Danielsen acknowledges Brown’s significant contribution to popular music, she points out that his signature sound was gradually introduced throughout the 1960s rather than in a single, landmark song:

Certainly, many of the songs from this period—from “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” in 1965 to the more fleshed-out funk tunes of the early 1970s—are more or less funk. They are, however, something else as well. It is usually different aspects of different songs that point toward the “new style”: all of the features listed above—semi-improvised vocals, one-chord “harmony,” implied polyrhythm, the rhythmic riffing of the horn section and the guitar, the fragmentation of the bass line, and an overall percussive approach—are relevant, but they are seldom, if ever, present at the same time. The transition from rhythm and blues to funk, the former represented by tunes like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” (1965), the latter by “Cold Sweat” (1967), is in many ways rather vague, either because the new features to some extend were already there or the older ones remained present. (39)

Just like Vincent, Danielsen defines funk with the help of Olly Wilson’s five tendencies (31–32). As opposed to the critic, though, the musicologist does not use them

178 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196 to repeat the myth of the One but to unravel it. By confronting the narrative accounts with the actual music, she reveals that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” does not really contain the tendencies for which it is known. Only a few of them are present in a premature form. Even the much-lauded downbeat, for instance, is mostly missing from the song: “Moreover, the tune is characterized by a faster tempo than ‘Cold Sweat’ and by an obvious backbeat” (74). Danielsen successfully deconstructs the myth of James Brown’s spontaneous invention of funk during the recording of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Her close analysis of the music reveals that the origin of the One is in fact plural and dispersed. Its telos, on the other hand, is single and localizable in Danielsen’s account. Pure, “fleshed-out,” funk does exist, but James Brown’s sixties music just is not it, yet. Again, Wilson’s heuristic tools are mistakenly understood for aesthetic qualities. In Presence and Pleasure, funk’s telos is normatively defined as the full presence of all five tendencies. Danielsen argues that it took a decade before all the pieces finally fell into place. James Brown’s “The Payback” (1971) almost got it right, but the promise of pure funk was first fulfilled in Parliament’s “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” (1975). By making James Brown’s rhythmical interventions part of a teleological narrative, Danielsen fails to accept the full consequences of her own deconstruction. Instead of dismantling pure funk as a mythical product of precise and specific discursive operations, the musicologist eventually resorts to a logic of authenticity. Whereas the analysis successfully avoids the clichés and generalizations that other critics offer, it is normatively motivated by a similar, monotheistic conception of pure funk. The One is still one and not many. The only significant difference with Vincent is that Danielsen’s point of reference lies in the near future rather than a distant past. This telos, in the form of the full presence of all five tendencies, implicitly devalues songs like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” as lesser, or not-yet, funk. As a result, James Brown’s 60s funk has to settle for being the aesthetically inferior predecessor to George Clinton’s “fleshed-out” 70s flavor:

So, even though James Brown and his bands in most ways fulfill the style tentatively summed up in The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock’s attempt at a “definition” of funk—“bass-driven, percussive, polyrhythmic black dance music, with minimal melody and maximum syncopation”—there might be a higher order than the alphabetical at work when the next definition to appear is “Funkadelic: See George Clinton.” (Danielsen 91)

Whereas Danielsen’s depreciation of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is laid out through a subtler argumentation than Vincent’s appraisal, it is based on the exact same evaluative gesture: first, an particular set of aesthetic qualities is declared “pure funk” and then used as a standard to determine the aesthetic value of the song. The actual evaluation took place at the very moment that the norm was set,

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 179 not when it was applied to “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag.” Just as Vincent, Danielsen defines pure funk as the full presence of Wilson’s five tendencies. Once these evaluative criteria are set, further assessment is merely a formality. Whether pure funk is realized in African music or P-Funk does not really matter. Such apparent differences only distract from the fact that the critic and the musicologist share a common set of aesthetic values. Given this normative bias, Vincent’s overly simplistic appraisal of “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” is wrong from the start. Compared to a standard—any standard— everything else falls short by definition. Still, Danielsen’s meticulously argued depreciation of Brown’s landmark song is equally rigged. Her negative assessment is right no matter what. An analysis of every other piece of music would have produced the same outcome. The shortcomings of “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” are not the surprising foundations of Danielsen’s analysis, but the product of a (logically, not temporally) preceding evaluative gesture. The musical facts that support her judgment could only be discovered after pure funk’s criteria were defined. Such a normative bias is not a mistake as such. On the contrary, it is an epistemological precondition for all forms of content analysis. For positivities to appear, a random set of values needs to be defined as norm. Without such arbitrary decisions, there would be literally nothing to analyze. Problems only arise when these evaluative gestures, and the normative bias they produce, are not made explicit. In such cases, arbitrary norms are often treated as absolute standards, and epistemological positivities confused for objective facts. Danielsen’s analysis of “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” suffers from precisely that mistake. The musicologist—probably unwittingly— obscures the fact that she sets a norm and not merely discovers facts. Her analysis does not reveal any flaws inherent to the song. Instead, all these apparent shortcomings of “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” are actually produced by her own evaluative gesture. Except for confusing aesthetic judgments for analytic facts, I argue, Danielsen makes a second mistake that prevents her from properly recognizing the revolutionary interventions Brown’s landmark song: a work-based aesthetics. The musicologist tries to locate pure funk in the music itself, and thereby reduces a dynamic, open practice to a static, closed structure.4 Olly Wilson manages to avoid this pitfall by strictly separating the abstract norm from concrete music. His “heterogeneous sound ideal” can only be defined negatively, and thus can never be realized in a landmark song, an exemplary performance, or even an entire oeuvre. As a result, the five tendencies of African and African-American music are constantly engaged in multiple, open-ended practices. Danielsen, on the other hand, conflates the norm and its concrete manifestations. Her ideal—pure, “fleshed-out” funk—actually exists in the music of Parliament/ Funkadelic, and is clearly defined by a specific set of recognizable, musical characteristics. As a matter of fact, only because their end is presumably already fulfilled

180 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196 can funk’s tendencies be mistaken for aesthetic qualities. Removed from their unreachable goal, they are no longer in a constant state of excess. By substituting an abstract ideal for a concrete norm, Danielsen tames an excessive and vital practice of rhythm and turns it into a well-defined but lifeless genre of music. Her normative, work-based approach to aesthetics rids Brown’s shifts, interruptions, and suspensions of their most important quality: the fact that they are interventions, acts, or, in my preferred term, operations. Vincent and Danielsen both fail to recognize the revolutionary aspect of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Their focus on the origin/telos of funk prevents them from truly acknowledging his rhythmical innovations. It does not make sense to declare the One ‘groundbreaking’ when it is considered either a mere repetition of African music or an immature version of P-Funk. But, even though the critic and the musicologist retroactively forge Brown’s interventions into a continuous, linear narrative, they still need them to be interruptions. In their respective narrative accounts, these necessary displacements are manifested in the One’s itinerary. Depending on whose version you follow, funk traveled either all across time and space from precolonial Africa to postcolonial America (Vincent) or, in a much less adventurous, version from Charlotte, North Carolina in the 1960s to Detroit, Michigan in the 1970s (Danielsen). These spatial and temporal shifts, are not accidental detours. They are discursive operations that authorize, negotiate, rewrite, repeat, consolidate, and continue the myth of the One. Along with rhythmic interventions, Brown’s revolutionary practice is also constituted by narrative detours such as these. The same principle that applied to revolutions and music, is equally valid for stories: interruptions keep them going. Ironically, accounts that aspire to break with the commonly accepted version of a narrative— Danielsen’s deconstruction of the One’s mythical origins, for instance—often are most apt to sustain and continue it. Revolutions, music, and stories, none of them can do without irreducible acts of displacement: their rhythm needs to be syncopated.

Talkin’ Loud & Sayin’ Nothing Since it seems to be impossible to explain Brown’s revolutionary interventions through an analysis of the music alone, it may help to shift to a philosophical perspective on rhythm. Without explicitly mentioning the term, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre uses the idea of syncopation (i.e., the displacements of beats or accents) to revitalize the concept of rhythm. In Elements of Rhythmanalysis: An Introduction to the Understanding of Rhythm (1992), he rejects the mechanical connotations that the concept has acquired in common parlance. Lefebvre insists that rhythm is more than the periodical repetition of notes, movements, or objects: We easily confuse rhythm with movement, speed, a sequence of movements or objects (machines, for example). Following this we tend to attribute to rhythms a mechanical overtone, brushing aside the organic aspect of rhythmed movements. Musicians, who

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 181 deal directly with rhythms, because they produce them, often reduce them to the count- ing of beats: “One-two-three-one-two-three.” Historians and economists speak of rhythms: of the rapidity or slowness of periods, of eras, of cycles; they tend only to see the effects of impersonal laws, without coherent relations with actors, ideas, realities. Those who teach gymnastics see in rhythms only successions of movements setting in motion certain muscles, certain physiological energies, etc. (5–6)

Syncopation is the implicit point of departure for Lefebvre’s so-called “rhythmanalysis”: a science dedicated to rhythm and its entanglement with everyday life. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he considers the repetition of regular patterns as meter rather than rhythm. The word “meter” has to be taken literally here. It enables the quantifi- cation and subsequent commodification of space and time. Meter coincides with a repeating movement that divides and sequentializes, like metronomes, mechanical clocks, or machines in a factory. As a result of this repetition, space and/or time are transformed into a series of equal units. Since artificially regular intervals can only be produced by mechanical devices, Lefebvre identifies meter with technology. Lefebvre dismisses meter as the disciplining, commoditizing, and homogenizing principle of modern capitalism. Rhythm, on the other hand, is its organic antidote. For him, its typical manifestation is not music—since it is still connected to instruments— but the human body, which Lefebvre conceives as a bundle of rhythms. Each organ has its own rhythm, while it can only exist in relation to those of the other organs, establishing a bodily polyrhythmia. Eurhythmia is the term that Lefebvre introduces for a healthy bundle of rhythms. Arrhythmia is a state of crisis in which the synchronization between the organs fails to occur. There is either harmony or crisis, but nothing in between. According to Lefebvre, rhythm can never be single; it is always a multiplicity. Apart from the observation that the human body offers the best example of rhythm, Lefebvre also connects rhythm to the organic through the concept of cyclicality. He argues that the cycles of nature counter and compensate for the rigid, disciplining meter of work, politics, and technology. Nature versus culture: Lefebvre reformulates an all-too-familiar conflict and does not make much of an effort to hide his own preference:

The study of everyday life has already demonstrated this banal and yet little- known difference between the cyclical and the linear, between rhythmed times and the times of brutal repetitions. The repetition is tiring, exhausting and tedious, while the return of a cycle has the appearance of an event and an advent. Its beginning, which after all is only a recommencement, always has the freshness of a discovery and an invention. (Lefebvre and Régulier 73)

While the constant repetitions of linearity are exhausting, the periodic return of cyclicality is revitalizing. Despite the normative language that Lefebvre uses to describe these two concepts, he nevertheless maintains that they should not be understood as binary opposites. Linearity and cyclicality are inextricably linked: they are two

182 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196 perspectives on one and the same process. While the moment of return produces the effect of cyclicality, the periodic repetition of the same moment produces a series. Linearity and cyclicality are not opposites, but come together in a third concept: rhythm. Rhythmanalysis dissolves this age-old dichotomy, and, according to Lefebvre, all other binary oppositions as well. Coming from a Hegelian/Marxist background, it is no surprise that Lefebvre incor- porates rhythm into a dialectic schema. In this schema, rhythm is always positioned in-between opposites, such as melody and harmony, difference and repetition, internal and external measure, space and time. Although Lefebvre does not mention change and return explicitly, the two aspects of a cyclical movement easily fit in this series of oppositions. In all cases, rhythm is seen as a third and equal element that forms a triadic constellation with the other two:

Triadic analysis distinguishes itself from dual analysis just as much as from banal analysis. It does not lead to a synthesis in accordance with the Hegelian schema. Thus the triad “time-space-energy” links three terms that it leaves distinct, without fusing them in a synthesis. (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 12)

Lefebvre criticizes Hegel’s emphasis of synthesis over thesis and antithesis, and tries to overthrow the hierarchy between the three terms.5 As a modification of dialectics, his rhythmanalysis, is not dual but triadic. In rhythmanalysis, the first two terms of the triad are variables. Every binary opposition can take their place. The third term, however, is a constant: rhythm. Despite its multiple manifestations—secret rhythms, public rhythms, fictional rhythms, dominat- ing-dominated rhythms, to mention a few—this constant is primarily defined negatively. Rhythm is determined in relation to the other two terms. This triad schema of dialectics not only equalizes, it homogenizes as well. For, all the different forms of rhythm eventually have to fit in this straightjacket. They are restricted by their medi- ating function, and therefore they do not appear all that different from one another. In every manifestation thinkable, this “concrete universal” (45) has to oscillate peri- odically, but not necessarily regularly, between two polar opposites. In Lefebvre’s modification of Hegel’s dialectics, rhythm replaces matter—which is actually spirit— as the dividing and connecting force behind the appearances.6 Lefebvre writes: “Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm” (Rhythmanalysis 15). For Lefebvre, rhythm is more than a musical or aesthetic phenomenon; it is a universal organizing principle. Given that totalizing scheme, however, it is easy to see that rhythmanalysis ends up erasing its point of departure of syncopation. Whereas Lefebvre starts from the irreducibility of rhythm to a regular pattern, he here actually transforms it into a universal constant. Rhythmanalysis cannot deal with syncopation. The (triadic) structure fully annihilates the (possibility of an) event. Rhythm ends up as meter.

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 183 Rhythmanalysis proves incapable of solving the question that ignited it: what makes rhythm different from meter? The solution that Lefebvre proposes, is . . . rhythm. But of course that amounts to begging the question. To be fair, the vicious circle does not bother Lefebvre. In his view, cyclicality and rhythm are inextricably linked anyway. Moreover, rhythmanalysis seems more concerned with the problems of time, space, and everyday life than with rhythm itself. In Lefebvre’s philosophy, rhythm is more a concept that explains, and less a principle that needs to be explained. Nonetheless, Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis falls short of constituting a science that explains rhythm. I contend that it suffers from the following two flaws:

1. Lefebvre makes rhythm into a universal principle. Rhythm loses all its specificity and cannot be further explained. Rhythmanalysis can analyze everything but rhythm itself. 2. Lefebvre accepts continuity as the desirable state of rhythm. Consequently, all elements that presuppose an element of discontinuity, novelty, innovation, disruption, displacement, are treated as unwanted dangers. Yet precisely those elements distinguish rhythm from meter. By avoiding interruptions, rhythmanalysis transforms rhythm into meter.

Lefebvre turns rhythm into a universal “perpetuum mobile.” Syncopation would be the logical solution to break this vicious circle. However, this is an answer that the philosopher cannot accept. For, in that case, he would need to introduce at least one extra term into his triads. Syncopation or dialectics: confronted with this dilemma, the philosopher unfortunately opts for the latter. As a result, rhythmanalysis can only define an abstract and general concept of rhythm. Making it plural and specific would mean the end of his triadic schema. Fully aware of this problem, Lefebvre tries to go around it as follows:

Is the origin of the procedure that starts with generalities found in abstractions? No! In the field of rhythm, certain very broad concepts nonetheless have specificity: let us immediately cite repetition. No rhythm without repetition in time and in space, without reprises, without returns, in short without measure. But there is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely. Whence the relation between repetition and difference. When it concerns the everyday, rites, ceremonies, fêtes, rules, and laws, there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference. (Rhythmanalysis 6)

While this explanation may seem plausible at first, it reproduces the same problem with different concepts. If absolute repetition does not exist and every cycle introduces something new, would not every occurrence of meter inevitably also be a rhythm? Lefebvre uses rhythm to gain access to the particularities of space, time, and everyday life, but he ends up losing the particularities of rhythm. Rhythm becomes everything, and everything becomes rhythm. Ironically, the science dedicated to

184 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196 rhythm cannot distinguish meter from rhythm, and a rhythm from rhythm. In the end, there is not much of a difference between Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and Rickey Vincent’s account of the One. Both the philosopher and the music critic transform rhythm into a cosmic unifier, and thus deprive it from the element that endows it with its critical potential: syncopation or, more precisely, an irreducible displacement.

Get Up for the Down Stroke In order to further clarify the significance of syncopation for rhythm, I must shift from Lefebvre’s abstract rhythmanalysis back to James Brown’s concrete rhythm production. Next to downbeat and the One, syncopation is a third innovation for which “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is often credited. The song is known to mark the beginning of more and more complex offbeat- and polyrhythms in James Brown’s songs and in popular music in general. In an earlier essay, “The Significance of the Relation Between Afro-American Music and West African Music” (1974), Olly Wilson argues that West-African polyrhythms are complex forms of syncopation. Following Don Knowlton (1926), Aaron Copland (1927), and Winthrop Sargeant (1938), Wilson distinguishes primary rag (or simple syncopation) and secondary rag (or complex syncopation). Whereas both of these modes emerge from an act of displacement, they differ in range and complexity. Primary rag is a momentary interruption of a particular rhythmic pattern, for instance by incidentally stressing the one and three instead of the two and four. Secondary rag, on the other hand, emerges from the contrast between many rhythmic patterns. These patterns, however, can only be recognized as different because they are displaced in relation to one another. Wilson therefore concludes that complex syncopation is in fact a synonym for polyrhythmia:

The application of newer analytical procedures to this question suggests that the distinction between syncopation and polyrhythm is a function of the rhythmic hier- archic level upon which the displacement occurs. Hence, if the foreground rhythm (i.e., basic metrical pulse) is not displaced or is displaced only momentarily, the result will be syncopation . . . but if the foreground rhythm is displaced . . . or a lesser rhythmic level is displaced over a long time span, the effect of polyrhythm will occur. (Wilson, “Significance” 9)

The distinction between simple and complex syncopation helps to clarify Brown’s interventions. Through an analysis of “Super Bad” (1970), Wilson shows that what is commonly referred to as downbeat, is actually an example of polyrhythm. Rather than emphasizing the one and three on all instruments, the stress is only shifted in the case of some of them. The rest of the band remains on the two and four, or vice versa. Thus, Brown’s downbeat has to be understood as a relative gesture rather than a fixed structure.

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 185 Wilson’s account of the origin of downbeat confirms the general concept of revolution I developed at the beginning of this essay. Brown’s innovation did not so much entail a radical, structural transformation, but rather started with a barely perceptible shift. The musicologist’s concept of complex syncopation explains why those looking for big changes in “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” will end up disappointed.7 The loud bangs and flashes of lightning simply do not occur. Only a microscopic analysis is capable of revealing the minuscule but major displacements that take place in the song. Anne Danielsen does exactly that. She moves back five years in time to locate Wilson’s complex syncopation in its commonly accepted origin, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” As to be expected, Danielsen once again concludes that the fabled revolution takes place in stories and anecdotes rather than in the song itself. She shows that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is neither a heavily syncopated nor a polyrhythmic song. However, the musicologist cannot fully banish the legendary narrative to the realm of fiction. A tiny and ambiguous example of syncopation manages to resist her scrutiny: “The only element that pulls in the direction of a pulse level above eights is the “undersized” phrasing in horns and guitar mentioned above: the downbeat in anticipation” (Danielsen 75). On “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” the “short toot” of the horns on the fourth beat are much shorter than expected, whereas the guitar’s “snappy phrasing” on the second beat is equally odd. The understated horns and guitar make way for a heavy beat on the one; in other words, they seem to anticipate a downbeat. That expectation, however, is not met. Closure is suspended. On “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” the stress never lies on the first beat of the measure. Danielsen therefore refers to the effect as downbeat in anticipation.8 The downbeat in anticipation should not be confused with a “normal” downbeat. If anything, the rhythmic pattern of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is a distorted backbeat, but that qualification does not do justice to its full complexity, either. Rhythmically, the song is marked by ambiguity. On the one hand, the short phrasing of the horns and guitar emphasize the absence of a downbeat. On the other hand, this act of negation works to bring the one and three to the fore. The phrase “downbeat in anticipation” refers to this ambiguous gesture rather than to the particular pattern that produces it. This aesthetic strategy is not limited to “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” or, for that matter, to the music of James Brown. Downbeat in anticipation should be understood a complex discursive operation, a play with expectation that is irreducible to downbeat, backbeat, or any other rhythmic pattern. As Danielsen concludes:

Put simply, the rhythm as a whole points to one location of the main basic pulse, while a certain part of the groove, the downbeat in anticipation, denies it. The

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groove as a whole refers the pulse to the beats, while the downbeat in anticipation hides them: what is anticipated never arrives; there is no orderly, unambigu- ous downbeat. The accurate beat is thereby suspended, because one has already passed the beat that was expected to come. The downbeat in anticipation is, in other words, not equal to a real downbeat that is played too early. The anticipation is played too late to form a syncopation—as such it never completes its own movement. The closing, which is as significant for its shaping as the beginning, never occurs: the anticipation never ends on an alternative strong beat. It only overshadows the beat that is supposed to be there—or, alternatively, it stretches the beat out in time. (85)

Strictly speaking, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is not syncopated because the horns and guitar do not break with the main rhythmic pattern. The backbeat is only temporarily displaced. The trick that James Brown repeatedly pulls off in this and later songs is fairly simple. The horns and guitar are played twice as fast as the rest of the instruments. Whereas the latter play half notes, the former play quarters. To put this differently, the song as a whole sounds slower than it is actually played. In effect, some of the notes that sound odd to the listener are not really syncopated (in the sense of the case of primary rag). This perceived syncopation is the result of the difference in tempo between the instruments rather than of any active displacement within the rhythmical pattern. In other words, in downbeat in anticipation the simple syncopation that the listener experiences is in fact an effect of polyrhythmic syncopation. Consequently, not each instance of secondary rag is an example of primary rag, and not every polyrhythm relies on downbeat in anticipation. These are in effect three different rhythmical operations that nonetheless share a most important quality: they all rely on an act of displacement. Danielsen discovers that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” only contains one instance of “false” syncopation. But the fact that this intervention is not capable of breaking the pattern does not make it flawed.9 On the contrary, I believe that the aim of James Brown’s interruptions is exactly the prolongation and heightening of such moments of suspense. In the decade following “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” the artist refined this strategy to perfection. At his peak, Brown’s rhythmical skills were comparable to those of a cowboy that punches out the profile of his target without actually hitting it. On songs like “Cold Sweat,” “The Payback,” and “Super Bad,” downbeat in anticipation is no longer a deviation from a rhythmical pattern, it has become the song’s very foundation. Danielsen continues:

Viewed this way, the downbeat in anticipation is something more than a local phenomenon tied to particular positions in the fabric of rhythm. It is rather a way of phrasing that eventually comes to characterize figures of rhythm in general and then spreads to whole layers of rhythm. (75)

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 187 Danielsen correctly shows that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” just hints at this strategy and, in a sense, only anticipates the downbeat in anticipation. Still, it is a mistake to dismiss this particular song as the immature precursor to Brown’s later work. Though the song’s intervention is minuscule, it is nonetheless a significant step toward more complex forms of syncopation. The downbeat in anticipation is simultaneously a precursor, a combination, and a distortion of Wilson’s two modes of syncopation. None of these three acts of displacement, however, is causally connected to the downbeat itself. Therefore, we should not assume an immediate connection between syncopation and downbeat, let alone conflate them. Nothing whatsoever makes a downbeat inherently syncopated. A beat that constantly stresses the one and three sounds equally mechanic as one that stays on the two and four. Syncopation is irreducible to the downbeat or to any other rhythmic pattern; instead, it coincides with an act of displacement. This shift can only be defined as a (temporary) break within a particular structure, even if—as is the case with complex syncopation and the downbeat in anticipation—the displacement is, or becomes, part of another pattern. Wilson and Danielsen’s analyses of Brown’s interventions provide a different angle to the question that Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis could not solve: what distinguishes rhythm from meter? While the musicologists agree with the philosopher that rhythm is relational and therefore a multiplicity, their concept of polyrhythm is different from Lefebvre’s. Polyrhythmia is not the result of harmony and synchronicity between different elements. On the contrary, the close analysis of Brown’s music reveals that it is the effect of multiple and specific acts of displacement. Arrhythmia, not eurhythmia, constitutes polyrhythmia. Lefebvre argues: “In arrhythmia, rhythms break apart, alter and bypass synchronization (the usual term for designating this phenomenon). A pathological situation agreed!—depending on the case; interventions are made, or should be made, through rhythms, without brutality” (Rhythmanalysis 67). Whereas this description of arrhythmia is accurate, I disagree strongly with Lefebvre’s diagnosis and treatment. It is actually eurhythmia without arrhythmia that leads to a pathological state. Wilson verbalizes an insight that Brown put into practice throughout his career—and for this very reason, he really was the hardest working man in show business—unexpected and occasionally brutal, interventions are necessary to either keep a rhythm going or to start a new one. Arrhythmia is not antirhythmia; it is neither the enemy of rhythm, nor an accidental state of exception. Syncopation, as well as other kinds of interruptions, are a necessary condition for the emergence, transformation, and continuation of rhythm. Again, it is an act of displacement that distinguishes meter from rhythm. Rhythm can only be constituted through interventions. Arrhythmia is not rhythm’s antidote, it is its antipode. You cannot walk on one foot, let alone dance.

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Feet Don’t Fail Me Now “Get On the Good Foot.” This deceivingly simple phrase Brown often shouts when he actually makes a shift—and, of course, the title of one of his biggest hits— captures the difference between rhythm and meter perfectly. For one, these five words mark the unpredictability of the interruption. It is impossible to know in advance, which of your two feet is the good one. It all depends on the moment in which the phrase is heard. As opposed to meter, rhythm is time-critical. Moreover, “Get On the Good Foot” implies that the subject of rhythm is dynamic rather than static. In fact, even the nature of his or her activity itself is already presumed in the phrase. Brown expects, better yet, demands that his audience is dancing, just like the performer himself. In most other pedal activities—walking, biking, running, or marching—there is no good foot, only another. Both feet are equal and the shift from the left to the right one is irrelevant. In dancing, however, the choice between the left and the right foot is highly significant, even though it cannot be determined in advance. The combination of rhythm and dance is very obvious. Nonetheless, it is necessary to repeat this cliché because Brown’s practice of rhythm has changed not just music but also dance beyond recognition. His interventions changed the latter to such an extent that it is almost impossible to recall how it was understood before. Like rhythm, dancing is now in tension with meter, regularity and predictability. It is at odds with predefined moves, steps, gestures, and patterns. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1880), Friedrich Nietzsche seems to anticipate this transformation, but displaces it to the distant past rather than the near future. Zarathustra, his proto-philosopher, introduces the distinction between dancing and meter as follows: “Ask my foot if it likes their melodies of praise and enticement! Truly, to such a measure and tick-tock beat it likes neither to dance nor to stand still” (188–89). A simpler or better definition of rhythm probably does not exist: rhythm is something that you have to dance to. The kind of dancing to which both Zarathustra and Brown refer is neither ballet nor ballroom. Their dance has no choreography. The dancer is, literally, slave to the rhythm. Feet follow beat, not the other way around. The beat, however, is not self-sufficient either. The groove is not a “perpetuum mobile.” Rhythm cannot exist without unexpected interruptions. The dancer, in turn, can therefore never fully get comfortable. The apparent regularity of the rhythmic patterns is most deceiving. Apart from the importance of timing and unpredictable breaks, “Get on the Good Foot” emphasizes that a third element is necessary to constitute a rhythm: displacement. While you might not know whether it is the left or the right foot, you can count on the fact that it will be the other. The good foot will always be the one that you are not currently standing on. The moment of the change—not the choice of feet— is inherently unpredictable. Shifts between the left and the right foot, the up- and

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 189 downbeat, change and return, and every other opposition can and will become “old bag” pretty quickly. In “Of the Refrain” (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari criticize, almost ridicule, Henri Lefrebvre’s rhythmanalysis and its triadic schema: “It is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence: there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march. The tom-tom is not 1–2, the waltz is not 1,2,3, music is not binary or ternary, but rather forty-seven basic meter as in Turkish music” (Deleuze and Guattari 313). Though Deleuze and Guattari agree with Lefebvre that two elements are not enough to distinguish rhythm from meter, they argue that neither is three, nor in fact forty-seven. According to them, rhythm is always in excess. Regular and even irregular oscillation between a fixed set of elements cannot constitute a rhythm, let alone a revolutionary one. At least one extra element is always needed: an irreducible act of displacement. Rhythm is revolutionary because it is excessive. This may sound nice in theory, but how does it work in practice? It leads to the same questions with which I began this essay. What does excess sound like? What kind of noise do revolutions make? The answer to those questions is now simple: none. Still, revolutions do occur in music. In fact, look no further than “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” It is not the downbeat that makes the music of James Brown sound syncopated. Even the downbeat in anticipation became a cheap trick after a while. No revolution can ever be explained from a pattern, no matter how complex that pattern might be. There is no rhythm without an unexpected shift. Deleuze and Guattari continue:

We always come back to this “moment”: the becoming-expressive of rhythm, the emergence of expressive proper qualities, the formation of matters of expression that develop into motifs and counterpoints. We therefore need a notion, even an apparently negative one, that can grasp this fictional or raw moment. (322)

Brown’s the One, I argue, signifies the same “moment” Deleuze and Guattari describe in this quote: the becoming-expressive of rhythm. As Vincent already argued, this enigmatic term cannot be reduced to the first beat of a measure, even though this might be its point of departure. His answer—that the One is a cosmic unifier— however, is not the only imaginable surplus value. In spite of its name, the One is actually a twofold operation. Brown’s shifts (1) produce and reveal a heterogeneity of rhythmic patterns and then (2) combine those different strands into a polyrhythm. In other words, the One pluralizes before it unifies. Even more important than the production of a plane of heterogeneity is the insight that not all rhythmic interventions are the same. Different shifts construct different soundscapes. The plurality of these cuts, however, cannot be exclusively explained from the pattern itself. From the perspective of the pattern, they always seem to be

190 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196 the same. Hence, the moment of displacement can only be defined negatively: as a break, cut, shift, difference. Wilson’s and Danielsen’s close analyses of James Brown’s interventions, however, have revealed that those creative acts come in many shapes and forms. Rather than solidifying one particular operation into the essence of James Brown’s music, I argue that it is exactly the ongoing chain of displacements that marks the revolutionary aspect of his practice of rhythm. Downbeat, syncopation, and even downbeat in anticipation are not goals in themselves but are all different tactics that serve the same purpose: to liberate rhythm. Through repetitive and strategic interruptions, Brown released rhythm from its secondary and instrumental role to melody and harmony. The fact, however, that rhythm occurs in-between—between notes, instruments, patterns—does not mean that it does not exist. Danielsen borrows a term from Gilles Deleuze to describe the virtual status of rhythm:

Even though the structures of reference at play in a rhythm are not actual sound, they should not be regarded as something abstract or external to the music. Rhythm happens, so to speak, in the midst of actual sound and non-sounding virtual structures of reference (which, moreover, might have to do with the perceptual processes generated in the listener), and the sounding event may play both with and against the virtual structure. (Danielsen 47)

Indeed, the fact that rhythm occurs in-between does not make it unreal but virtual. Nonetheless, Danielsen overlooks the fact that rhythm is not only virtual, but also the other way around. In other words, Deleuze’s “virtual” does not primarily consist of structures and relations but of acts of displacement. The so-called “virtual structures of reference,” I argue, are merely an effect of these unexpected interruptions, or as Danielsen calls them, “sounding events.” Rhythmic interventions, however, do only not occur in music and sound. Every spatio-temporal process can be suspended. Brown’s shifts thus not only emancipate rhythm from melody and harmony, but also release it from its confinement to the aural. In his autobiography, the artist recalls the recording sessions of “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag”:

I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm. I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums. I had found out how to make it happen. On playbacks, when I saw the speakers jumping, vibrating a certain way, I knew that was it: deliverance. I could tell from looking at the speakers that the rhythm was right. (Brown and Tucker 158)

It is striking that Brown recalls his discovery as a visual experience. Obviously, he does not imply that rhythm belongs to sight rather than sound. Rather, Brown points out that rhythm involves a plurality of senses. Rhythm is neither sonic, visual, olfactory, nor haptic. It takes place in-between the senses, in a practice of its own.

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 191 Nonetheless, Brown needed an accidental shift to discover the One. His words suggest that this change from sight to sound was unintentional. The artist never planned the intervention that became synonymous with his name. It was not James Brown that performed an irreducible act of displacement; instead, the One produced him. He is literally a subject of rhythm, or, as Deleuze and Guattari call it in “On the Refrain,” a rhythmic persona (318).10

Rhythmic Slip “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” is not a revolution because it caused cosmic alter- ations. It simply acted out a minuscule shift. A change that cannot be seen, touched, smelled, or heard but that is real nonetheless. Ironically, I believe that music history made a tiny slip of its own while determining James Brown’s place. In their attempt to make sense of the artist’s words, critics and musicologists commonly assume that the stress lies as follows:

I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat. Simple as that really (qtd. in Parales).

Obviously, the emphasis disappears in the transition from speech to writing, and the artist’s true intentions will remain unknown. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that the meaning of the quote changes completely if the stress is slightly changed:

I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat. Simple as that really.

Perhaps, Brown did not want to emphasize the downbeat but the change and its simplicity. In that case, one may argue that the following statement would have sufficed:

I changed. Simple as that really.

Still, that would not be quite the same, since the specificity of the shift is lost in the process of the reduction. There is a fine line between simplification and oversimplifi- cation. Brown tried to stay on the right side of that border. As I have tried to show in this article, no shift is alike, and there is nothing more complex than simple change. The One is a complex, discursive operation that is marked by an inherent ambiguity, managing to emancipate rhythm by disrupting it. Paradoxically, arrhythmia not only disrupts a beat, it starts and/or sustains it as well. This ambiguity is easy to recognize in Brown’s music. The elements that guarantee the continuation of the groove are precisely those that interrupt it. James Brown’s simple change is in fact an ongoing series of cuts, shifts, and suspensions. Each of these operations is aimed at the reduction of rhythm to its core. The One reveals that, stripped down to its bare minimum, rhythm turns out to be

192 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196 arrhythmic. Brown’s repeated, revolutionary interventions transform static rhythmic patterns into an excessive practice of rhythm. Nonetheless, the One provides some sort of a foundation. Paradoxically, the ongoing acts of displacement continuously ground Brown’s unstable practice of rhythm. To perform such constitutive, rhythmic operations, however, knowledge of music is not enough. The One is irreducible to a determinable positive content: its interventions coincide with their meaning. Even though the terms “essence” and “common core Africanness” may suggest the opposite, Wilson makes the same argument in the following quote:

Therefore, the particular forms of black music which evolved in America are specific realizations of this shared conceptual framework which reflect the peculiari- ties of the American black experience. As such, the essence of their Africanness is not a static body of something which can be depleted but rather a conceptual approach, the manifestations of which are infinite. The common core of this Africanness consists of the way of doing something, not simply something that is done. (Wilson, “Significance” 20)

Brown’s innovations are his interventions, and it is in this sense that the artist fits in the tradition of African music. Colonialism made sure that this history cannot be marked by continuity. African music, however, compensates for the impossibility of an uninterrupted story. Its history consists of the cuts that it performs. Paradoxically, Brown (and many others) only belong to this lineage by breaking with it—until, that is, his innovations were re-appropriated by tradition. The fact that it is difficult to hear his revolution now, is not a flaw of the music. It is an inevitability. The groove can only be disrupted for a moment. Revolutions are not permanent breaks, but are suspended interruptions in a cyclical motion. On a conceptual level, the same problem repeats itself in different forms. In order to define a revolution, cyclicality, rhythm, or syncopation, an act of displacement is indispensable. On a analytical level, a similar series of displacements occurs: downbeat, the One, syncopation, downbeat in anticipation. None of those notions as such is able to explain why “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” was a revolution. Nonetheless, the recurring answer would not be: an act of displacement. It is a mistake to believe that I stumbled upon the exact same intervention over and over. On the contrary, to be irreducible every act must be unique. In other words, analysis should not be sat- isfied with repeating the same answer. It has to show how each of these precise and specific operations is constituted. Therefore, I propose to distort the temporality at stake. A revolution has no past and future; it produces a past and future. Rather than ending with the irreducibility of the act, it is necessary to start from the intervention itself. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is an excellent example of such a minor but major shift: a rhythmic slip.

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 193 Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. “On Jazz.” Trans. Jamie Owen Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Daniel. Discourse 12.1 (Fall-Winter 1989): Continuum, 2004. Print. 71–84. 45–69. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking, Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Print. 1977. Print.

Brown, James, and Bruce Tucker. James Brown: The Godfather of Soul. New York: MacMillan, Pareles, Jon. “James Brown, the ‘Godfather of 1986. Print. Soul,’ Dies at 73.” New York Times. The New York Times, 26 Dec. 2006. Web. 27 July 2012. Danielsen. Anne. Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament. Ronell, Avital. The Test Drive. Urbana: U of Illinois Middleton (CT): Wesleyan UP,2006. Print. P,2005. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “Of the Vincent, Rickey. Funk: The Music, The People, and Refrain.” A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian The Rhythm of the One. New York: St. Martin’s Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1980. Griffin, 1996. Print. Print.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Science of Logic. Wilson, Olly. “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in Trans. George Allan. London: Routledge, 2002. African-American Music.” Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’, Print. and Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. Ed. Gena Degal Caponi. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Amherst: U of Massachusetts, 1999. 157–71. Everyday Life. Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Print. Moore. London: Continuum, 2004. Print. ———. “The Significance of the Relation Lefebvre, Henri, and Catherine Régulier. “The between Afro-American Music and West African Rhythmanalytical Project.” Rhythmanalysis: Music.” Black Perspective in Music 2.1 (Spring Space, Time and Everyday Life. By Henri Lefebvre. 1974): 3–22. Print.

Endnotes

1. See Ronell for further analysis. move back in the exact opposite direction: Mother Earth. In my opinion, these two 2. This was the first book that considered funk movements are of equal importance. Compare, as a separate musical genre rather than an for instance, the lyrics to Funkadelic’s “Better By adjective (funky) to describe jazz, soul, or R&B The Pound” from the album Let’s Take It to the music. Stage (1975):

3. Vincent heavily relies on Parliament’s imagery Pleasure’s the motivation for the human race of gods, spaceships, and Egyptian mythology Everything starts and ends with sex and appeal when he defines his cosmology. He ignores, Feeling good is the bait, Satan uses to fish for however, that Parliament’s antipode, Funkadelic, you and me should be understood as the necessary Comfort is the poison when it’s the spirit he counterpart to this mysticism. Where wants to kill Parliament’s lyrics and imagery are commonly There’s a tidal wave of mysticism marked by a transversal movement to Outer Surging through our jet-aged generation Space and beyond, Funkadelic’s songs often It’s all designed to take us to the sky

194 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 169–196

There’s such a need for us to feel nice and it’s abstract determination and is their substantial, getting better absolutely concrete unity. One need not therefore We got to have it more than we ought to look far for what is commonly called a matter; if The preacher keeps promisin’ satisfaction logic is supposed to lack a substantial content, The ladies keep giving up the gratifaction then the fault does not lie with its subject matter You know what? I’m feeling better by the pound but solely with the way in which this subject matter is grasped” (Hegel 48). There’s a tidal wave of mysticism Surging through our jet-aged generation 7. The feeling of disappointment is probably It’s all designed to take us to the sky also heightened by the fact that musical notation You know what? I’m feeling better by the pound often does not do justice to the rhythmical I’m feeling better by the pound complexity of James Brown’s songs. Wilson Joyful is the hocus pocus that’s haunting all claims, for instance, that on “Super Bad” the mankind drums and horns imply an alternating 3+3+2 Said he couldn’t be what he needs to be you see meter. The stress lies on the first beat of each He and only he is free chord, in other words: a downbeat. Notated in a Well, he who is truly free 4/4 schema, however, their patterns look like an Say, free from the need to be free upbeat. “Although the wind instruments (along with the snare drum) may be written in 4/4 There’s a tidal wave of mysticism meter for ease of reading, the pattern that they Surging through our jet-aged generation play is really one of alternating meters . . . The It’s all designed to take us to the sky second chord in the first measure is equal in stress to the first and therefore must be properly 4. This is a mistake I would like to baptize the conceived as a downbeat, not an upbeat (Wilson, “Adornian-fallacy,” which I will further develop in “Significance” 12). a future article. 8. Danielsen derives the term “downbeat in 5. There words that Hegel himself used only anticipation” from a comment that James Brown once, by the way. The triad is introduced by made in the introductory liner notes to his Immanuel Kant, and further developed by Johann greatest hits compilation Star Time (1991). Here, Gottlieb Fichte. the artist redefines his contribution to music history as follows. “Then I thought about the 6. “Moreover, the region of truth is not to be people around me. I wanted to come up with sought in that matter which is missing in logic, a something that would give us a place in the deficiency to which the unsatisfactoriness of the business. That’s when I hit on “Papa’s Got a science is usually attributed. The truth is rather Brand New Bag”. It was a slang that would relate that the insubstantial nature of logical forms to the man in the street, plus it had its own originates solely in the way in which they are sound: the music on one-and-three, the considered and dealt with. When they are taken downbeat in anticipation” (3). Danielsen as fixed determinations and consequently in convincingly argues that this quote does not just their separation from each other and not as held refer to the premature status of the effect. Even together in an organic unity, then they are dead though they are highly relevant, discussing the forms and the spirit which is their living, concrete political implications that Brown attributes to his unity does not dwell in them. As thus taken, they discursive operation exceeds the scope of this lack a substantial content — a matter which article. would be substantial in itself. The content that is missing in the logical forms is nothing else than 9. See Adorno’s essay “On Jazz.” a solid foundation and a concretion of these abstract determinations; and such a substantial 10. In this essay, “James Brown” is therefore being for them is usually sought outside them. not used as a proper name but as a conceptual But logical reason itself is the substantial or real persona. Whereas the former refers to being which holds together within itself every individuals, the latter coincide with assemblages

The Good Foot: James Brown’s Revolutionary Rhythmic Interventions | 195 of heterogeneous, interconnected elements. As identical. The One tactically and creatively opposed to the person, the persona James exploits the minimal differences and frictions Brown does not just signify an artist, but also between the persona and the practice. Precisely, includes (aspects of) his predecessors, the fact that they are almost-but-not-quite the contemporaries, and successors. The use of same allows for mutual interventions. Whereas Brown I develop in this essay mostly overlaps Deleuze and Guattari use this term, my usage of with the aforementioned practice of rhythm. Still, it, is slightly different from theirs. I develop my it is crucial to underline that these two notion of ‘conceptual personae’ and ‘rhythmical constellations are similar but not completely personae’ in my dissertation Time Tracks.

196 | Jan Hein Hoogstad Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 197–198

Contributors

Timothy Yaczo grew up in Ohio. He is Lena Hopsch, Dr. Senior Lecturer, is a currently a doctoral student at the researcher and teacher at Chalmers Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at University of Technology, Department of the University of Amsterdam, where much of Architecture in Theoretical and Applied his writing focuses on narrations, Aesthetics, Sweden. readership, and texts of neuroscience and the materialism of the brain. He also Eva Lilja, Professor em., Department of assisted copyediting the contributions in Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, this volume for publication. University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Dr. Tilman Baumgärtel teaches media at the Peter Groves was educated in the UK at the Royal University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. universities of Exeter and Cambridge, and now teaches poetry and Renaissance Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen is PhD literature in the School of English, and Associate Professor in the Section Communications and Performance Studies for Aesthetics and Culture, Department of at Monash University, Melbourne. His Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus publications on metre include a theoretical University, Denmark. Her research interests monograph (Strange Music: The Metre of the concern the relation between literature, English Heroic Line, Victoria, B.C.: University sound and music from a phenomenological of Victoria, 1998), and a series of articles perspective, that deals with the role of on poets from Chaucer to Philip Larkin; his voice, rhythm and gesture. Rhythm and Meaning in Shakespeare: A Guide for Actors and Readers is in the Dietmar Elflein (Dr. phil.), (ethno-) process of being published by Monash musicologist, lecturer on popular music at University E-press. He is currently working the Technical University Braunschweig on the theory of verse-movement. Germany, teaching assignments at the Hdpk Berlin, Popakademie Mannheim, HfMT Köln, Shintaro Miyazaki, Lic. phil in media theory, amongst others. PhD in 2009 on heavy musicology and philosophy of University metal music. Research concerning (national) of Basle (2007). Dr. phil in media theory popular music history, analysis and from Humboldt University Berlin (2012). performance. Resident fellow Akademie Schloss Solitude (2011–12), researcher in residency National Marie Gelang is PhD. in Rhetoric at Örebro University of Singapore (Sept, 2012). University, Sweden. Her interest is nonverbal Academic interests lie in the relationships communication in a rhetorical perspective between sound and operations of information with a specific interest for interaction in storage, transmission and processing, public settings. Her research involves especially with regard to knowledge mediation and negotiation in different production. He lives and works right now situations such as business meetings, video as an independent researcher in based teaching and international conflicts. Berlin. Publications concerns nonverbal communication in teaching as well as Dr. Jodi Brooks is a senior lecturer at the rhetorical strategy in the creation of public School of Arts and Media, The University of rooms with a focus on show-window displays New South Wales, Canberra, Sydney, and mannequin’s postures. Australia.

Contributors | 197 Jan Hein Hoogstad is assistant professor in Intellectual Image. Jan Hein has published Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis on Prince, Marvin Gaye, Gilles Deleuze, at the University of Amsterdam. In the fall of Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Friedrich 2008, he was a visiting professor at the Kittler, Ralph Ellison, Michel Foucault, and English Department, the University of the Ol’ Dirty Bastard. He is currently working Minnesota. In 2007 and 2008, Jan Hein on a research project called Medial was affiliated to the Jan van Eyck Academy Operations and a website with the same in Maastricht as a postdoctoral researcher, title. where he worked on a project called

198 | Contributors Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 199–204

Index

Abbas, Ackbar 158 Benjamin, Walter 26, 150–151, 167 Adé, King Sunny 33 Benveniste, Émile 57, 138 Adorno, Theodor 26, 167, 195 Berger, Harris M. 78 Allen, Woody 168 Bhabha, Homi 128 Andersen, Øivind 100 Bhanagar, O.P. 124 Anderson, Ian 33 Birkin, Jane 44 Arctic Monkeys, the 35 Bitzer, Lloyd F. 90 Arendt, Hannah 174–175 Bizet, Georges 37 Argyle, Michael 100 Bjørkvold, Jon Roar 58 Aristotle 57, 92, 100–101 Blachowitz, Jason 73 Armstrong, Louis 149 Black Sabbath 77–78 Arnheim, Rudolf 110 Blair, Sara 150 Ashcroft, Bill 132 Bloom, Harold 128 Assmann, Jan 73 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 136 Atkinson, Max 100 Bogart, Neil 44 Attridge, Derek 126, 134 Boggs, David 143 Auden, W. H. 123, 125–126 Bois, W. E. B. Du 154 Boland, Eavan 129 Bachelard, Gaston 26 Both, Bob 171 Baier, Gerold and Hermann, Brooks, B. G. 134 Thomas 148 Brooks, Jodi 25 Bakhtin, Mikhail 75 Brown, James 25, 49, 169–181, 185–193, Barret, Rob 73 195–196 Barry, Elaine 127 Browne, Nick 168 Barthes, Roland 68 Bruhn, Herbert 79 Bataille, George 26 Buchanan, Ian 27 Baumgärtel, Tilman 23 Buena Vista Social Club 23, 27–42 Beatles, the 30 Bukdahl, Lars 68–69 Beck 30 Bunting, Basil 125 Bellotte, Pete 45, 49 Butler, Mark J. 50 Benedikt, Amélie Frost 91–92 Byrd, Bobby 171 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio 29–30, 36–40 Byrne, David 33

Index | 199 Cannibal Corpse 73 Dutt, Toru 123–124 Cavell, Stanley 162–164 Dylan, Bob 30 Charles, Ray 171 Chaucer, Geoffrey 128 Eisenstein, Sergei 156 Chin, Brian 47 Elden, Stuart 57, 63 Christie, Ian 74 Elflein, Dietmar 24, 86 Cicero 101 Eliasson, Jan 96 Clinton, George 170–171, 179 Ellison, Ralph 25, 149–152, 154–156, 159, Coldplay 35 167 Collins, Bootsy 170–171 Elrosenfyr, Dorseynaph 127–128 Collins, Phelps “Catfish” 171 Elvis 107 Cooder, Ry 31, 34 Erlich, Reese 34 Cookson, William and Dale, Peter Ernst, Wolfgang 135, 137 125–127 Estefan, Gloria 37 Copland, Aaron 185 Euripides 90 Cornford, Francis MacDonald 136 Ezekiel, Nissim 124 Cowan, Michael 167–168 Culross, Dave 73 Fairchild, Charles 73 Cureton, Richard 116, 122 Feld, Steven and Keil, Charles 25, 157, 168 Ferrer, Ibrahim 28 Dale, Peter 125 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 195 Danielsen, Anne 55, 60–61, 66–67, 172, Fink, Robert 44 178–181, 186–188, 191, 195 Floyd, Samuel L. 58, 64, 67 Daryush, Elizabeth 125, 130 Foucault, Michel 41, 174 Das, Harihar 124 Fowler, Alastair 126 Das, Kamala 127–128, 131–132 Fraisse, Paul 139 Daston, Lorraine 148 Frith, Simon 29, 33–35, 39 Davis, Betty 170 Frost, Robert 127 Davis, Miles 171 Funkadelic 179–180, 194 Deleuze, Gilles 50–51, 156, 172, 191 Furious Five 67 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix 25, 167, 190, 192, 196 Gabo, Naum 24, 108–110, 114–115, 122 Derrida, Jacques 26 Gainsbourg, Serge 44 Diaz–Bone, Rainer 72–73, 78 Galbán, Manuel 28 Díaz, Anga 28 Gärdenfors, Peter 104, 122 Diddley, Bo 83 Gasparov, M. L. 104 Dimitriadis, Greg 66 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 63–64, 68 Doane, Mary Ann 159, 162–164, 168 Gelang, Marie 24, 93, 95, 101 Dulac, Germaine 156 Ghose, Aurobindo 127–132, 134 Dunn, Sam and McFayden, Scott 72 Ghose, Zulfikar 124, 126

200 | Index Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 199–204

Gillespie, Dizzy 37 Iron Maiden 71, 75, 78 Gilroy, Paul 152–155, 167 Isocrates 93, 100 Goffman, Erving 157 Gonzalez, Rubén 28, 36 Jackson 5, the 49 Gorgias 91–92 Jackson, D.D. 49 Gorillaz 30 Jacobs, Lea 168 Gracyk, Theodore 71, 73, 84–85 Jakobson, Roman 107 Grandmaster Flash 67 James, Rick 170 Gray, Thomas 126 Jameson, Frederic 29–31, 33, 35, 39, 41 Gronbeck, Bruce E. 93 Johnson, B.S. 126 Groves, Peter 24, 134 Johnson, Jack 35 Gunn, Thom 125 Johnson, Mark 103–107, 110, 115–116, 122 Jørgensen, Charlotte, Koch, Christian and Halford, Rob 88 Rørbech, Lone 100 Hall, Donald 128 Judas Priest 78, 80, 83, 88 Hamburger, Michael 125 Judy, Ronald A. T. 150, 167 Hansen, Miriam 167 Juvenal 127 Haq, Kaiser 123–124 Haraway, Donna 49 Kahn-Harris, Keith 75–76, 84 Hariman, Robert 90 Kanaganayakam, Chelva 132 Harper, Douglas 137 Kandinsky, Wassily 110, 114–116, 119 Harrison, Tony 123 Kant, Immanuel 195 Hasty, Christopher F. 55, 57–59 Kaplan, E. Ann 160, 168 Hatten, Robert S. 61 Karadjova, Nadka 33 Heath-Stubbs, John 125 Karuse, Steven D. 90 Hebdige, Dick 67 Kataklysm 72, 76–84 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 183, 195 Keats, John 123 Heidegger, Martin 26 Kendon, Adam 100 Helsley, Sheri L. 91 Kinder, Marsha 156 Henri, Adrian 125 King, Martin Luther 87 Hoffman, Brett 73 Kinneavy, James L. and Eskin, Catherine R. Holland, Sharon Patricia 151 92, 100 Homer 91, 100 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 140 Hoogstad, Jan Hein 25 Kittler, Friedrich 139–140 Hopsch, Lena 24, 103, 108–113, 122 Kjørup, Frank 70 Howard, Josiah 53 Knowlton, Don 185 Hrushovsky, Benjamin 116 Kracauer, Siegfried 150–151 Hughes, Walter 51 Kraftwerk 49 Huhtamo, Erkki and Parikka, Jussi 135 Krauss, Rosalind 52 Hunter, Meredith 87 Krims, Adam 38

Index | 201 Kristeva, Julia 75 Merleau-Ponty Maurice 52, 103, 106, 122 KRS-One 64 Metallica 75, 78 Metcalfe, Robert 143 Lacanís, Jacques 140 Michelangelo 105 Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark 115 Mikkola, Peter 101 Lang, Fritz 49, 168 Miller, Carolyn R. 92–94, 96 Larkin, Philip 123 Milton, John 123, 127–128 Latour, Bruno 136 Mitry, Jean 153 Lawrence, D. H. 123 Miyazaki, Shintaro 24 Lear, Amanda 53 Moore, Allan F. 79 LeBaron, Curtis D. 101 Moore, Marianne 125, 129 Lefebvre, Henri 17, 25–26, 56, 59–63, 65, Moroder, Giorgio 23, 43–45, 47–50, 53 148, 171, 181–185, 188, 190 Moten, Fred 149, 167 Lefebvre, Henri and Régulier 182 Müller, Klaus E. Les Paul 30 Munch Machine 49 Levi, Peter 125 Mustaine, Dave 87 Levine, Art 42 Leyva, Pío 28 N’Dour, Youssou 33 Lickliderís, Joseph C. R. 139 Naidu, Sarojini 123 Lilja, Eva 24, 55, 60, 103–104, 108–109, Nietzsche, Friedrich 12–13, 15, 20–22, 182, 116, 122 189 Linnér, Sture 110 Little Richard 171 Obituary 76 Lonsdale, Steven H. 104 Ochoa, Eliades 34 López, Orlando 28 Olsen, Kasper Nefer and Stjernfelt, Frederik Lowell, Robert 123 61 Luciano, Dana 159 Olsson, Cecilia 104 Lucie-Smith, Edward 126 Onians, Richard B. 90–91, 100 Luhmann, Niklas 30 Orr, Peter 126 Oss, Roset van 36 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 123 Ovid 127 Malevolent Creation 73 Mapfumo, Thomas 33 Parales, Jon 28, 31, 174, 192 Marklund, Bror 110 Parliament 15, 17, 169, 180, 194 Marks, Laura 156 Pärt, Arvo 48 Marley, Bob 30 Pedersen, Birgitte Stougaard 23, 57 Martinez, Rubén 31–32 Perry, Imani 66–68 McLuhan, Marshall 13–16, 20, 26 Pfleiderer, Martin 83 McNeill, David 95 Phillips, Sam 47 Megadeth 78, 87 Piaget, Jean 122

202 | Index Thamyris/Intersecting No. 26 (2013) 199–204

Pindar 91 Schlegel, Friedrich 20, 22 Plath, Sylvia 24, 114–115, 122 Segundo, Compay 28 Plato 12, 14, 17, 19–21, 57, 71, 135–136 Sernhede, Ove 64, 68 Pope, Alexander 128 Shakespeare, William 123–124, 128, 131 Portuondo, Omara 31 Shamsie, Muneeza 130 Poyatos, Fernando 100 Shankar, Ravi 30 Preminger, Alex and Brogran, T.V.F. 11–13, Shapiro, Peter 48–49 57, 125 Sharp, H. 123 Prince 170–171 Shinder, Debra 140 Protagoras 92, 100 Simms, Gordon 73 Pudovkin 156 Simon, Paul 33 Puri, Rakshat 124 Sipiora, Phillip 90, 93 Slayer 78, 88 Quintilianus 101 Smith, Caspar Llewellyn 34 Smith, Craig R. 92 Radiohead 35 Sobchack, Vivian 156 Ramanujan, A.K. 124 Söderqvist-Spering, Åse 101 Ravel, Maurice 37 Stevens, Wallace 123 Reich, Steve 44, 47, 50 Stone, Sly 170–171 Reynolds, Simon 48 Streck, Jürgen 100 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg 139 Summer, Donna 23, 43–45, 47–50, Richmond, Virginia P. and McCroskey, James 52–53 C. 100 Summer, Donna and Eliot, Marc 53 Richter, Hans 156 Supermax 49 Riley, Terry 47 Sutton, Jane 90–91 Ringgaard, Dan 55, 59 Szabó, Gábor 37 Roads, Curtis 139 Roccor, Bettina 72 Tardy, Jon 76 Rolling Stones, the 87 Taylor, John Robert 140 Ronell, Avital 194 Tennyson, Alfred 123, 127 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 71 Tholen, Georg Christoph 136, 140 Rozario, Henry de 123 Thomas, Dylan 126 Rubalcaba, Gonzalo 37 Thornton, Sarah 52 Rubin, John 73 Tillich, Paul 92, 93, 100 Tin Pan Alley 37 Said, Edward 167 Tsur, Reuven 104 Saintsbury, George 129 Sandoval, Arturo 37 Valéry, Paul 135 Sargeant, Winthrop 185 Van McCoy 44 Schelling, Friedrich 17–22 Vidor, King 25, 160

Index | 203 Vincent, Rickey 171, 176, 178–181, 185, White, Patricia 160, 164, 168 190, 194 Whitney, Marv 171 Virgil 127 Williams, Linda 160–162, 168 Volmar, Axel 148 Williams, Patricia 154 Von Neumann, John 139 Wilson, Olly 171, 176–180, 185–186, 188, 191, 193, 195 Wahlberg, Malin 156–157 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 56, 63–64 Wallace-Crabbe, Chris 131–132 Woolf, Virginia 56, 59 Wallace, Robert 129 Wordsworth, William 123, 128 Walser, Robert 78 Wright, David 126 Weheliye, Alexander G. 167–168 Weinstein, Deena 72–74 Yaczo, Timothy 23 Wenders, Wim 28, 41 Yeats, W.B. 123, 128 Wesley, Fred 171 Young, La Monte 47 White, Barry 44

204 | Index