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Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

How can we think of novelty without attributing ontological prominence and metaphysical distinction between discreteness and continuity, or between the actual and the virtual, the analog and the digital, or the spatial and the temporal? Can a concept of ‘rhythm’ understood as a vibratory movement detached from substance, structure, metric property, and lived experience, become a method with which to account for how the new comes to be? Certainly, on the one hand, Bergson and, following him, Deleuze allow room for the coexistence of these concepts
away from opposition. On the other hand, Bachelard and, following him, Lefebvre, have attempted to construct a rhythmanalysis of newness, while Badiou’s theory of the event signals an interruption in the spatiotemporal order. But perhaps there are yet other connections to be made between (what is absent in) these thinkers and towards conceiving ‘a rhythmics of the event’. For example, for theorists such as Kodwo Eshun and Steve Goodman rhythm points to a complex ecology of speeds, inciting mutations across the human-machine network to allow for the construction of a sonic futurity: a virtual coexistence of past and future in the present.
The purpose of this symposium is to elaborate a philosophy of rhythm as an appropriate mode of analysis of the event. Whether aesthetic, cultural, strategic, or other, we understand the event to be an instance of rhythmic time, summoning, expressing and animated by the abstract yet real (virtual) movements of matter. A rhythmic onto genetics of this kind necessarily departs from a binary split between, on the one hand, natural bodily rhythms (breath, heartbeat and so on) and,on the other, a mechanics of steady tempo or pulse presupposing the metric organisation of spacetime. Instead, this symposium seeks to explore rhythm as an interface between diverse elements (human, machine or other) and a somewhat non-sensory, irregular and amodal movement, lurking at the most potentially unknown or ‘unthought ’ dimensions of the event.

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PROGRAMME:
Introductory Music (Claudia Martinho)

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Performance Rhythmic Materialism: dynamic patterning through corporeal mediaWith:

• Julian Henriques (Goldsmiths)
• Claudia Martinho (Goldsmiths)
• Paola Crespi (University of Surrey)

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Welcome by Eleni Ikoniadou .

 

Plenary

Matthew Fuller & Andrew Goffey: Sort, Work and Recurse: the stratagematic rhythmns of grey media events
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 1
Chair: John Mullarkey

Olga Goriunova (London Metropolitan University): Software, Time and Avant-garde
[AUDIO HERE]

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Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths College): Two Diagrams of the Production of the Subject
[AUDIO HERE]

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Eleni Ikoniadou (Kingston University): Splice, Freeze, Stretch and Mutate: Digital rhythm as harbinger of the event
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 2
Chair: Jussi Parikka

Michael Goddard (Salford): Industrial Music for Post-Industrial People
[AUDIO HERE]

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Milla Tiainen (Anglia Ruskin): The voice as transversal rhythmics
[AUDIO HERE]

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Scott Wilson (Kingston University): Rhythm, a-rhythmia and the Revolutionary Drive
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 2 questions

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Plenary

Angus Carlyle (CRiSAP): Scales of Rhythm
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 3
Chair: Scott Wilson

John Mullarkey (Kingston University): Almost Nothing Happening: An Essay on Action and Event
[AUDIO HERE]

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Pasi Väliaho (Goldsmiths College): Rhythms of the Console Screen
[AUDIO HERE]

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Marcel Swiboda (University of Leeds): In Search of Lost Time-Images
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 4
Chair: Olga Goriunova

Stella Baraklianou (University of Portsmouth)
The photograph as pulsating event
[AUDIO HERE]

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Iain Campbell (Kingston University): Rhythmic Bodies, Rhythmic Relations
[AUDIO HERE]

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Judith Wambacq (Ghent University): What kind of structure defines a rhythm?
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 5
Chair: Pasi Väliaho

James Lavender (University of Leeds): Bodies of Sound
[AUDIO HERE]

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Chiara Alfano (University of Sussex): Caesura: The Rhythmed Event
[AUDIO HERE]

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Shintaro Miyazaki (Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart):
AlgoRhythmics. Microtemporal Transductions of Information, its Aesthetics, Production of Capital and Affects.
[AUDIO HERE]

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Panel 6
Chair: Eleni Ikoniadou

Corry Shores (Husserl Archives) & Scott Wollschleger (Manhattan School of Music):
Rhythm without Time
[AUDIO HERE]

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Frauke Behrendt (University of Brighton):
Rhythmanalysis. Lefebvre on a GPS Sound Walk
[AUDIO HERE]

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Tim Stephens (LSBU):
‘The End(s) of the Still’ – Releasing rhythm from photographic geometry
[AUDIO HERE]

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Plenary

Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art/ University of Southampton)
The Aesthetico-Technical Rhythm
[AUDIO HERE]

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LIVE PERFORMANCE   - Good luck Mr. Gorsky
[AUDIO HERE]

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photographs from the conference:

Event date: 29 October 2011 
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, 
Strand Campus, 
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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Iain Campbell (Kingston University):
Rhythmic Bodies, Rhythmic Relations: Renegotiating Deleuze & Guattari’s Hierarchy of Rhythms with Eshun and Goodman

In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the figure of rhythm as a means of explicating the event of a communicative and transformative relation between heterogeneous bodies. There are, however, in fact two forms of rhythm at work in these relations. The first, which in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms is rhythm properly speaking, is the rhythm which is involved in this event of deterritorializing transformation, and is presented as non-metrical, unfixed and unbounded by the structure and form imposed by regular pulsations. The second is that of metrical rhythm – pertaining to the individual territorial body considered in terms of  unified and self-identical enclosure, it allows the body a fixity and stability which protects it from its outside in non-communicating, non-relational isolation. In their philosophy of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari strive to escape the restrictive fixed form which metrical rhythm imbues on a body and emphasise the perpetual transformative flux of the non-metric – that is to say, a body defined in terms of metrical rhythm is presented only as something to be overcome. This coupling of a strong distinction and an assertion of a hierarchical relation between the terms, however, opens Deleuze and Guattari to the criticism that the creativity valorised in their philosophy amounts to a shapeless detachment from the actual world.

In this paper I will explore Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between these types of rhythm and consider its consequences, moving towards a rethinking the role of metrical rhythm in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought through reference to the influence of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts in sonic culture studies, particularly in Kodwo Eshun’s figure of the rhythmachine. I will begin by explicating the roles that the two types of rhythm play in processes of becoming for Deleuze and Guattari, highlighting how metrical rhythm is rendered only in terms of its overcoming by and subordination to non-metrical rhythm in the transformative relation between bodies. I will then briefly summarise how this relation between types of rhythm can be considered under the terms of critical assessments of Deleuze and Guattari, namely those of Peter Hallward and Steve Goodman, which suggest that theorising concrete activity and relations between actual bodies in the world becomes problematic in a Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy of pure creation.

To respond to these criticisms I will move to develop a more robust and productive definition of metrical rhythm through reference to the work in the field of sonic culture by Goodman and Eshun, who articulate a concept of metrical rhythm which positions it in a productive relationship with the forces it brings into stable consistency. In their work, I will argue, there emerges a conception of metrical rhythm as a tool for shaping intensive bodies, a process defined through the figure of the rhythmachine, which is applicable within a Deleuzo-Guattarian framework of rhythm. I will argue that this notion of the rhythmachine does much to marginalise the elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought which neglect bodies at the expense of the relations between them and in turn detach the creative event from activity in the actual world. Having developed a denser and more active notion of metrical rhythm, then, I will close by rearticulating what the relationship between metrical and non-metrical rhythm can be for Deleuze and Guattari, and consider how this redressing of the hierarchical imbalance between types of rhythm can provide a more powerful tool for thinking through the event of bodies in transformative relation and the creative emergences thereof.

Iain Campbell recently graduated from the University of Dundee with an MLitt in Continental Philosophy and has now started his PhD, looking at individuation, rhythm, and other musical themes in Deleuze, at the CRMEP in Kingston.

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talk:

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questions:

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