Introduction¹

Rhythm extends to past and future, in that it is dependent on recall of what went before and drives anticipation of what is yet to come. Governing space as well as time, the natural world as well as small- and large-scale social processes, the built environment (architecture) and abstract thought (mathematics), it can be measured in eons and milliseconds, in miles and millimeters. Not all rhythms—at the social, economic, political, or aesthetic level—are created deliberately, and many exceed human influence. Rhythm mediates between the individual and society in numerous ways, shaping our modes of inquiry and interaction and structuring human endeavors of all kinds, in work, leisure, and the arts, in all relationships from birth on. It taps into two of the most fundamental paired differences that guide human perception, cognition, and memory—of sameness and difference, presence and absence. Rhythm can be considered a universal phenomenon whose reach extends to many features of the natural and human world.

At the same time, rhythm is fundamental to our use of language.² The prosodic rhythms of spoken language(s) are a basic feature of human speech.

Human face-to-face communication (even if moved on-screen) would quickly founder without our preconscious but highly effective awareness of the multiplicity of rhythms that govern our exchanges. Much of the classical system of rhetoric and oratory is in effect a study of the rhythms of language. French philosopher Henri Meschonnic, whose work on rhythm as central to subjectivity and communal life is illuminated in the first article of this special issue, polemically rejects any analyses of rhythm outside language, but other theorists see music as the art form most suited to presenting rhythm without the interference of meaning or ‘content.’ Both angles of approach leave open what to make of media such as film or the radio play, investigated in two of the following articles, in which language and sound/music appear and interact.

Music and language, as the two primary systems in which manifestations of rhythm tend to be located, are more firmly anchored in time than in space; indeed, a number of critics limit rhythm to the temporal realm.³ Yet those two domains have competition from (or, we might prefer to say, are complemented by) spatial conceptions of rhythm—applicable to landscape and geography, of course, but also to the built environment and architectural design.⁴ In the realm of the arts, not only do the visual arts of painting (especially Op Art) and sculpture qualify as rhythmical phenomena; the literary arts feature classical traditions and modern genres such as carmina figurata, pattern poems, or Visuelle Poesie where visual/spatial arrangement is experienced as rhythm.

Still other thinkers attempt to abstract or differentiate rhythm as an ordering force from what it organizes. This distinction dates back at least to Aristoxenus of Tarentum in the 4^th century BCE, whose Elementa Rhythmica argues that rhythm is a pure organization of time separate from what he calls the rhythmizomenon (ῥνθμɩζóμεvov), that is, the material that can be shaped by rhythm, but can equally well exist without rhythm.⁵ The distinction between language and music as the primary routes to the study of rhythm persists, as demonstrated by the most recent edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, where Derek Attridge notes, “The disagreement between the metrici and the rhythmici in ancient Greece reflected two approaches to verse, one strictly quantitative, the other musical” (Attridge 1197).⁶ Where and to what media rhythm belongs remains open.

Given the ubiquity of rhythm, it is not surprising that attention to the phenomenon and attempts to define it go back to antiquity; nor should it surprise us that it seems to elude precise definition, not only between disci- plines—in the aesthetic realm, music vs. literary studies or philosophy—but even within each discipline. Vera Viehöver sees the term “rhythm” as part of a repertory of empty phrases (“Floskelrepertoire,” i) and continues: Doch in den meisten Fällen ist die Rede vom Rhythmus nicht mehr als eine Metapher, die besagen soll, dass es im jeweils in Rede stehenden Kunstwerk irgendein Phänomen der Repetition gibt, ein Auf und Ab, eine Wiederkehr des bereits Bekannten, einen planvollen Wechsel von intensiven und entspannten Momenten. Analytische Kraft hat der Begriff nur in seltenen Fällen [...]. (Vie-höver i)⁷

Viehöver finds such cases especially in verse language or in music. Wilhelm Seidel seconds her diagnosis, complaining: “Heute wird zwischen Rhythmus und Form kaum mehr unterschieden.” (“Today, hardly any distinction is made between rhythm and form.”Grundbegriffe 295) Existing definitions of the term vary widely, indeed dramatically, evidence of what Ben Glaser (2) describes as “the messiness and power of rhythm as it is called up by criticism.”⁸

Variations of opinion frequently go back to two fundamental categories and their relationship: that of order and repetition to variation and deviation. For some philosophers and scholars, rhythm is defined by regularity and structure, while for others it is precisely the variation and divergence from regularity that makes rhythm distinctive. The proportion and relation of the two elements of sameness and difference has stimulated lively debate and diverging opinions since at least the eighteenth century. In the second edition (1794) of his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General Theory of the Fine Arts), Swiss-German critic Johann Georg Sulzer starts out with rhythm’s regularity (91), which he then qualifies through the terminology of variation. Following analyses of a number of examples, he arrives at a definition of rhythm as “eine periodische Eintheilung einer Reihe gleichartiger Dinge, wodurch das Einförmige derselben mit Mannichfaltigkeit verbunden wird.” (“a periodic arrangement of a series of similar things which combines their sameness with variation,” Sulzer 96) Some 150 years later, Emile Benveniste traces the history of the conceptual shift from continuous flow to fixed form, noting Plato as the transition point.⁹ In a recent and informative survey of “rhythm” in the humanities, linguist Isabel Zollna aims to circumvent the debate between scholars who view rhythms as quantifiable, “meßbare Wie- derholung eines Gleichen” (“measurable repetition of something identical,” 13) and those who consider it “Abweichung von einer Regel, individueller Ausdruck” (“deviation from a rule, individual expression,” 13), as something defined by quality more than quantity. Zollna opts for a broad definition of rhythm with a significant distinction at its core, as “Wiederholung eines Ähnlichen und nicht Gleichen” (“repetition of that which is similar, not identical,” 14).

In literary studies, rhythm in verse has received extensive attention, much more so than prose, in conjunction with questions of meter that exercised previous generations of scholars and centuries to a degree that is difficult to imagine in the 21^st century—a discussion that happily flowed alongside non-scholars using a variety of meters in song and poetry. In his account of the origin of poetry in “Gay Science” (II, 84), Nietzsche characterizes the introduction of rhythm into language as “jene Gewalt, die alle Atome des Satzes neu ordnet” (“that force which reorders all atoms of the sentence,” eKGWB/FW-84). Such re-ordering with a view towards similarity and parallel structures is part of what Roman Jakobson called the “poetic function” of language, whose workings he defined with admirable concision in his “Linguistics and Poetics”: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (71). In executing this projection, artists transform mere sequence into a pattern that highlights sounds or rhythm, introducing repetition and variation as active principles.

Where Jakobson’s emphasis might seem to be on regularity and repetition (although he certainly makes allowances for individual readings/ performances), others join the debate on the side of freedom from what is perceived as rigidity and constraint. Bertolt Brecht, for example, favors and defends “irregular rhythms,” opposing them to the regularity of meter as evident, for instance, in the “ölige Glätte des üblichen fünffüßigen Jambus” (“oily smoothness/slipperiness of the customary iambic pentameter,” 358). Reuven Tsur would disapprove, as he warns à propos the “archetypal iambic line”: “Deviation from versification patterns generates tension only if the versification pattern as well as its nearest superordinate are preserved in active memory. Otherwise it generates chaos” (412). How conspicuous must rhythm be to be acknowledged as rhythm? Not too conspicuous, apparently, if we follow Aristotle, who held that prose was characterized by rhythm as verse was by meter and decreed: “Wherefore prose must be rhythmical, but not metrical, otherwise it will be a poem. Nor must this rhythm be rigorously carried out, but only up to a certain point.” (Rhetoric III.8.3) The verse/prose distinction does not, however, resolve the issue, since different poets and theorists disagree vehemently about the degree of license within a given verse type, while authors of prose may use meter, repetition, rhyme, alliteration, and other rhythmical figures within sentences or paragraphs—and of course the boundaries between prose and verse are nearly as contested as those between meter and rhythm.

Attridge references the quarrel between rhythmici and metrici, as noted above, in his discussion of the vexed relation between rhythm and meter. Is meter in its regularity the prototype of rhythm, its sub-category, or its Other? Thomas Cable seems to oppose the two when he reaches for a metaphor to characterize a relationship in which “the steady progression of posts along the roadside gives us the meter; the uneven surface between the posts is what we can call rhythm.” (184; emphasis in orig.) Some authors equate rhythm with a steadiness of pattern, beat, or Takt, while for others it is the counterweight to pattern and meter, providing structure only as transformed into movement. Christiaan Hart Nibbrig waxes poetic when he states that rhythm “vollzieht ein anderes Wieder-Holen: als Verwandlung und Erneuerung” (“executes a different repeat/capture: as transformation and renewal,” 93), while Hans Lösener states categorically: “Der Rhythmus braucht kein Me- trum.” (“Rhythm does not need meter,”Rhythmus MLL 654) Brecht would likely agree. One may locate rhythm in the movement from written language (or musical score) to actual performance, or in the tension between metrical schema as a formal abstraction and rhythm as its concrete realization by poet and/or reader¹⁰—but there is no general agreement which of the two is the schema and which the realization.¹¹

While humans live within rhythm at the level of pre-conscious embodied experience, rhythm can also be or become an essential dimension of our deliberate and pleasure-seeking engagement with the literary, visual, and musical arts, in our enjoyment of artistic expression and its artifacts. This pleasure is not predicated on rational assessment or powers of analysis (as required, for instance, to conduct investigations of poetic meter). Jürgen Kühnel concludes with reference to rhythm in verse: “Die rhythmische Gestalt eines Verses entzieht sich uneingeschränkter rationaler Deutung und Analyse.” (“The rhythmical shape of a verse eludes unqualifiedly rational interpretation and analysis,” 392) Rhythms come alive in our ability and desire to experience them. This experience need not be confined to a single—visual or auditory— sense. Rhythm may be so challenging to analyze and define precisely because its perception and enjoyment potentially constitute a holistic, coenesthetic, multi-modal experience based on what Jost Trier, in an introduction to a 1949 special issue on the topic of rhythm, perceptively characterized as the human desire to join a harmony of vibrating or pulsing motion (a rather unsatisfactory attempt to translate his term “Einschwingungsstreben”).¹² In Trier’s definition: “Rhythmus ist die Ordnung im Verlauf gegliederter Gestalten, die durch regelmäßige Wiederkehr wesentlicher Züge ein Einschwingungsstreben er- weckt und befriedigt.” (“Rhythm is the processual organization of structured forms that awakens and satisfies a drive to join in a vibrating or pulsing motion,” 136)¹³ Musicologist Seidel similarly postulates an innate human enjoyment of rhythm when he considers the conception of the term since antiquity: “die Ordnung der Bewegung oder der Zeiten, die dem menschlichen Sinn unmittelbar und deutlich faßlich ist und die die Menschen deshalb mit Lust wahrnehmen.” (Seidel, Grundbegriffe 291)¹⁴ Whether rhythmical pleasure derives from order or its disruption, repetition or its variation, individuality or communality, it lays claim to an immediacy of experience.

This brief sketch offers at least a glimpse of the anthropological and aesthetic ubiquity of rhythm, of a landscape within which the following articles are situated. Rhythm hovers at the outskirts or along the foundations of scholarly inquiry in many disciplines, even when it is not named explicitly: it is certainly possible to talk about rhythm without using the term or by substituting other terms.¹⁵ Despite the pervasive presence of a multitude of rhythms in human lived experience, one should be careful not to universalize or essen- tialize rhythm and the human desire for its manifestations. Positing such a view of rhythm would ignore the extent to which it is culturally conditioned as well as the political dimension that both rhythm and its disruptions (more on that below) may take on. Rolf Großmann references three dimensions of rhythm (in the domain of sound, but generalizable to an extent): its production, its active sensory appropriation on the basis of neurophysiological receptivity, and the degree to which this reception is shaped by cultural patterns and expectations (“kulturell etablierte Erwartungsmechanismen,” 72). Our approach to rhythm and that of the contributors to this issue locates it within a mainly German-language context in terms of sources and knowledge domains and of topics covered. The introductory article by Marko Pajević lays out the implications of French linguist, translator, and philosopher Henri Mes- chonnic’s work on rhythm, inviting others/Others into a dialogue and presenting rhythm via Meschonnic as a quality and practice that can potentially be shared among humans broadly. The four following articles address specific artistic media, language phenomena, and time periods ranging from the 9^th century AD to the early 21^st century. They offer case studies of rhythm: investigations of genres or texts that are newly illuminated as they are regarded through the lens of rhythm. And while all four stay firmly within the confines of European—largely German-speaking—high-cultural production, each highlights the political dimension or the counter-hegemonial potential for disruption inherent in specific uses of rhythm.¹⁶

Given the definitory challenges sketched above, it is not surprising that none of the essays in this issue begin with a conceptual definition; rather, rhythm emerges gradually through the movement of the arguments. This approach demonstrates the complexity and heterogeneity inherent in rhythm as a critical category. The essays span a broad historical range, illuminating elements of rhythmical theory and practice that resonate with and challenge one another. Marko Pajević’s essay, in considering Meschonnic’s work and its significance, references eras from the Biblical to the post-structural. Katerina Somers reveals that the rhythmic shape of two ninth-century German texts bespeaks their respective authors’ cultural positions and ambitions. David Kim teases out the political implications of rhythm in his discussion of Uwe Timm’s 2001 novel Red (Rot), elucidating the multiple uses Timm makes of rhythm. Britta Hermann’s and Sonja Boos’s articles move beyond the purely linguistic, directing our attention to specific media genres in the latter half of the 20^th century—analyses of the “Neues Hörspiel” and of feminist experimental film, respectively. While the first essay is broadest in scope (albeit by way of Meschonnic), the essays trace an expansion in terms of media or medium: after Pajević’s account of the vital work to be done in and through a theory of rhythm in language, the essays turn to verse with Somers’s analysis of meter, then to prose (Kim’s discussion of rhythm in novels), next to Hermann’s examination of radio plays (combining heard language with other sounds), and finally to film or video (in which all of music, words, images, and movement interact, as Boos highlights).

What rhythm is in each of these media, and how these media might interact or conflict with one another, the essays themselves reflect. All of the essays show that rhythm prevents the drawing of any clear distinction between form, meaning, medium, or material. They follow rhythm as a phenomenon that operates on all of these levels at once, in ways that sometimes converge and sometimes conflict. All of the contributors show that and how rhythm is political, undercutting the widespread idea that rhythm is somehow essential or natural, prior to cultural shaping. At the same time, all the essays emphasize the complicated ways rhythm is produced and experienced in the body or bodies.¹⁷ Thus Pajević demonstrates how Meschonnic’s account of rhythm as the emergence of meaning (sens) in a particular language through a particular subject at a particular time entails a political and ethical re-orientation, in which language emerges from and shapes a form of life. In her detailed analysis of how ninth-century German authors drew on either Latin or Saxon traditions of written and oral language, Somers likewise reveals that what we may think of as the neutral or objective patterning of syllables in metrical practices is anything but: rather, the metrical practices of each author emerge from their cultural-political (thus, in the ninth century, religious) commitments, and those commitments themselves affect not just their meters but the way authors count and perceive the phonological elements of their language.¹⁸

Kim, Herrmann, and Boos see the political potential of rhythm in a kind of disruption. Kim shows how Uwe Timm’s novel Rot (Red) uses thematic references to jazz and compositional strategies that mirror jazz’s improvisatory and polyphonic characteristics to disrupt the rhythms of teleological narratives of post-1968 German political life. In the “Neues Hörspiel,” as Herrmann explains, the rhythmical practices of repetitive but non-semantic sound disrupt expectations of plot and narrative established in earlier and more traditional radio plays. Rhythm helps listeners to expand the boundaries of the audible when the creators of radio plays take up traditional rhythmical- metrical organizations to play them off each other, producing distortions and disruptions that foreground the materiality of the aural-acoustic medium. The interactions between different media and their rhythmic possibilities likewise aid the experimental feminist film-makers that Boos considers in challenging the drive towards cohesion or totality that her examples take as paradigmatic of traditional and patriarchal filmic representation. As each film-maker creates mis-matches between image, sound, movement, and words, their works resist unity and wholeness.

These strategies—and, in fact, the disruptions of German phonology that Somers identifies in 9^th-century metrical practice as well as the challenges posed by rhythm to binary thinking that Pajević elaborates using Me- schonnic—raise the question of how rhythm and disruption interact. Is rhythm what gets disrupted, or what disrupts? Do rhythmical disruptions open the possibility of a different kind of non-totalizing cohesion—polyphonic, multi- medial, non-discursive—or do they forbid such cohesion? Does the relation between rhythm and disruption create a new kind of rhythm? Whether these interrelated rhythms and disruptions create some sort of more open cohesion or whether they reject cohesion altogether remains a productive tension.¹⁹

Several other tensions likewise emerge within and between the essays, once again foregrounding the conflicts and contradictions within the concept of rhythm. To begin with, the essays differ in the ways the authors and the works they consider approach the relation between rhythm and meaning.²⁰ As Pajević explains, for Meschonnic, rhythm is centrally and crucially a semantic and not a formal principle—as the organization of meaning in discourse, rhythm becomes a fundamental mode of sense-making.²¹ At the same time, “meaning” for Pajević hardly reduces to informational content; Meschonnic’s theory of rhythm contributes a view in which all the manifold elements of a written or spoken utterance participate in meaning in a broad sense, irreducible to the signification of the words as signs. This view of rhythm and/as meaning might, perhaps, be compatible with the disruptive functions that Herrmann and Boos draw out, in which rhythm disturbs and reshapes narrative teleologies with interpretable discursive messages. While Kim reveals a tension in Uwe Timm’s work between rhythm as part of the smooth narrative that is disrupted and also as a resource of language for that disruption, an understanding of rhythm as singular and emerging rather than repetitive and coordinating might be able to encompass both. And yet, as Somers shows, the meaning-making of rhythm can coalesce into a cultural-political agenda, in this case either elevating the cultural prestige of Franconian by shaping it like Latin or forming the Gospel in the rhythms of Old Saxon.

Like a number of other proponents of rhythm, Meschonnic polemicizes against meter (most directly in a section of his monumental Critique du rythme, “Metrics: Pure Metrics or Discourse Metrics”), but at the same time points to Homer’s revolutions in Greek meter to argue that “many examples show that a metrical scheme is not a linguistic emanation, but rather a relation between culture and language” (Bedetti/Meschonnic 93). Somers’s study of ninthcentury German texts demonstrates precisely that and how there can be multiple concurrent relations between cultures and languages that authors inherit and mobilize to make works effective for their audiences. Meter might seem less important in prose texts, and yet the improvisational jazz style Kim foregrounds in Uwe Timm’s novel relies to some extent on the consistency of meter to undergird the harmonic and polyvocal complexities, while Herrmann’s examples show Gerhard Rühm using metrical time signatures to organize non-linear temporal structures. And what kind of meters are present in one of Boos’s examples, in which an image moves increasingly out of sync with the music that plays a waltz in ¾ meter? All of the essays thus foreground that we can neither neatly separate rhythm as musical (or even multi-medial) and meter as linguistic, nor divide them into schema and realization.

In sum, then, the authors in this volume open a wide terrain and track some of its features, showing how questions of rhythm and meaning, rhythm and language, rhythm and music, and meter versus rhythm remain open. Indeed, taken as a collection, the essays demonstrate that to resolve these questions once and for all would not only oversimplify the phenomenon of rhythm, but elide one of its most central characteristics. The essays make a polyphonic and contrapuntal case that perhaps the conflicts and contradictions are themselves the source of rhythm’s powers and our own rhythmic experiences.