RHYTHM is first attested in English in the mid-C16th, spelled variously as rithme, rythme and ryme – a ‘learned borrowing’ from the Latin rhythmus, itself a transliteration of the Ancient Greek ῥυθμός (rhŭthmós). As with many Latin words it arrived as a kind-of scholarly term – a field of study, or an object to be measured – true, in a way, to its original Ancient Greek form as a noun which contained senses of both ‘a repeating, regular motion, vibration’ (i.e. ‘a rhythm’) but also a measured motion, with more general ideas of proportion, symmetry, arrangement and order (i.e. ‘ars rhythmica’, the rhythmic arts).¹ In this wider sense, ‘rhythmos’ did not simply describe recurring movements; it offered a way of perceiving how things were organised through time – how change itself might take on specific formal qualities.

Despite this clear throughline however, its earliest uses in English were entangled with the pre-existing Middle English ‘rime’ (meaning ‘rhyme’) with which it was for a century practically interchangeable. It is to this confusion that rhyme owes its silent ‘h’ – as well as its obsolete (or at least rare) verb form ‘to rhythm’ which originally meant ‘to rhyme’ (first attested in 1655).

So ‘rhythm’ entered English via translations of treatises on rhetoric, prosody and music theory as a technical term of art. In the classical tradition from which it was imported, rhythmos was written by Ancient Romans such as Cicero and Quintilian as numerus: ‘number’. To speak rhythmically was to speak in numbers — and ‘numbers’ remained a standard English word for metrical verse into the C18th, as when poet and translator Alexander Pope, in his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735), accounts for his own vocation:

Why did I write? what sin to me unknown
Dipp'd me in ink, my parents', or my own?
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came.

Poetry, here, less a gift than an ‘affliction’ of arithmetic…! Rhythm, in short, arrived in English perceived as a kind of science – a mathematics of movement, a means of perceiving or subjecting ‘flow’ to ‘measure’. Rhythmics, for example, stood alongside ‘harmonics’ as a formal division of ancient musical science; and the term quickly (within around a century) diversified into other areas of scholarly life, such as physiology. If one requires further proof, I might add that it took less than 30 years from its introduction for debates to begin on the ‘abuse’ of the term (a surefire sign of its quality and importance within academic circles), as in literary critic George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie:

…as we in abusing this terme (ryme) be neuerthelesse excusable applying it to another point in Poesie no lesse curious then their rithme or numerositie which in deede passed the whole verse throughout…

And perhaps Puttenham has a point? What has happened since the term’s introduction is a kind-of double movement: on the one hand, ‘rhythm’ has drifted into a newly held ‘popular’ position, an everyday word for almost any kind of repetition: the rhythm of the seasons, the news cycle, of one’s commute, one’s heartbeat, one’s homework, reading, posting, dancing… Seemingly everything has rhythm, and so perhaps the old ‘science’ has softened – as with everything – into more of a ‘vibe’? And then, on the other hand, wherever rhythm has remained an ‘analytical’ object, it has done so only by fragmenting into specialist vocabularies: i.e. ‘prosody’ keeps its ‘metres’ and ‘scansion’; cardiology its sinus rhythms and arrhythmias; chronobiology – a discipline whose founder, Franz Halberg, coined the term circadian in 1959 – its ‘ultradian’ and ‘infradian’ cycles; physics and musicology share entrainment (a term whose founding image is Christiaan Huygens noticing, in 1665, two pendulum clocks on a common beam swinging into ‘sympathy’). To each field its own private rhythms – unintelligible to any other.

One might recognise here, in miniature, the oft-repeated complaints of C20th critical theorists: that of the separation of knowledge into specialised domains and its simultaneous absorption (or mediation) into everyday common sense. For scholars of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer, or Herbert Marcuse – the modern sciences had come to mirror the industrial division of labour: each discipline atomised with its own workshop, its own language, yet none left responsible for understanding (interpreting, communicating or changing) the ‘whole’. Under these circumstances, the problem is not simply that knowledge retreats into specialist enclaves; it is also that, once released into common circulation, its concepts risk becoming detached from the processes they name and appearing instead as self-evident features of the world itself.

So we might understand the critical-theoretical concern not so much as vulgarisation (using the word ‘rhythm’ wrong) as reification (treating abstract concepts as real things). ‘Rhythm’ becomes something we recognise everywhere precisely because it has ceased to demand explanation. “The rhythm of life” can name – and allow us to perceive – certain forms of temporality, but it can also become a comfortable phrase that naturalises them: the rhythm of productivity, the rhythm of consumption, etc. The concept shifts from an instrument of analysis – of poetry, but perhaps also social organisation – to a description of experience after the fact. Perhaps ‘rhythm’, on this account, has suffered the fate of knowledge production in general – at once de- and hyper-professionalised?

*

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist; during his life he worked as a taxi driver, radio broadcaster, and – as professor at Nanterre – teacher to the students among whom the events of May '68 first broke out. Today, he is remembered most often as a theorist of ‘space’ and ‘the city’ and, increasingly, for the project that spanned his entire working life – a work published in three volumes across four decades (1947, 1961, 1981) titled the Critique of Everyday Life (Critique de la vie quotidienne). In this work, Lefebvre argues that the ‘everyday’ experience of the commuter, the worker, the homemaker, should not be understood simply as a residue (‘remainder’?) of the ‘official’ domains of social life – i.e. Politics, Economics, Art – but rather as a medium in which modern alienation is lived, reproduced and contested, itself.

And yet, despite this work's influence, what is less often remembered is the fourth and final volume of this project, simply titled ‘Rhythmanalysis’. Éléments de rythmanalyse, completed shortly before his death and published posthumously in 1992 (translated into English in 2004), was intended as the culmination of the critique of everyday life – its method, what he called ‘a new science’. For Lefebvre, rhythmanalysis is at once noun and verb, theory and practice – a means of capturing a ‘totality’ (or ‘whole’) through the bodies of the analysts themselves:

The rhythmanalyst calls on all his senses. [...] He thinks with his body, not in the abstract, but in lived temporality. [...] He must simultaneously catch a rhythm and perceive it within the whole.

The ‘rhythmanalyst’ is neither a specialist nor the casual ‘pro-sumer’ of vibes. Rhythmanalysis instead proposes to take the popular intuition – that everything has rhythm – as the starting point for an analysis of the whole: returning rhythm from a ‘thing’ we recognise to a relation we might interrogate, and therefore change. He writes:

While mechanical repetition works by reproducing the instant which precedes it, rhythm preserves both the measure that initiates the process and its repetition in an altered form, thus with its multiplicity and plurality. And without repeating precisely the 'same', but subjecting it to alterity, even alteration, that is, difference.

Rhythm is repetition that produces difference. And it is from here that Lefebvre draws a distinction between the cyclical (days, seasons, tides, sleep – rhythms of the cosmos, each return a renewal) and the linear (the metronome, the production line, the working day – rhythms of social practice, the reproduction of the identical instant). Modernity, for Lefebvre (contra Horkheimer or Marcuse), is the story of the linear laying itself over (dominating?) the cyclical – the shift-pattern over the solar day – he writes:

Relationships between the cyclic and the linear – interactions, interferences, domination of the one by the other or rebellion by the one against the other – are not simple; there is an antagonistic unity amongst them.

So if rhythmanalysis is a 'new science', where might its politics lie? Lefebvre ends his book by distinguishing 'the present' – that which is represented: the news cycle, the feed, the commodity's eternal ‘now’ – from 'presence': that which is lived, and which no representation can quite capture. And here, perhaps, our etymology comes full circle. Where the Frankfurt School diagnosed a knowledge atomised into workshops – with no discipline left responsible for the whole – rhythmanalysis proposes precisely such a responsibility, and does so by returning to something like the original sense of rhythmos: a way of perceiving how things are organised through time, a ‘measure’ not yet mathematised? Lefebvre asks:

Given that the cyclic and the linear are categories of time and rhythm with general characteristics (including measurement, of the one by the other, which makes each of them a measured measure), are there no other categories? Other characteristic features of time and rhythm? Other forms of time?

---

This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

---

Footnotes

1. Interestingly on this point, there is some debate among etymologists about whether the Ancient Greek ‘rhythmos’ is related to ‘arithmētikē’, the ‘art of counting’. ↩