[ecrea] CFP: Rhythm as Pattern and Variation: Political, Social and Artistic Inflections

CFP: Rhythm as Pattern and Variation: Political, Social and Artistic 
Inflections

Goldsmiths College, 23rd April 2016

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Pascal Michon

A current interest in rhythm prompted the publication of the special 
issue of the journal Body&Society ‘Rhythm Returns’ (2014), of interviews 
on the Theory, Culture&Society website (Crespi, 2015; Valiaho, 2015), of 
works exploring the relation of rhythm to war (Goodman, 2012) and the 
digital (Ikoniadou, 2014) and the ideation of the website Rhuthmos 
(www.rhuthmos.eu), an international and interdisciplinary platform with 
a focus on rhythm.

This brings rhythm again to the fore, highlighting the relevance and 
urgency of a reconsideration of it in relation to our methodologies and 
practices in the humanities and social sciences. Rhythm affords to speak 
of the dynamic between movement and rest, and in the tradition of 
critical and cultural studies it was famously explored by Gaston 
Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre in relation to Henri Bergson’s notion of 
duration, and notably by Georg Simmel in his discussion of the origins 
of modernity.

Rhythm lays at the hearth of our understanding of the shifting dynamics 
that rule neoliberal society in terms of life patterns, economic growth 
and decay, and our systems of mediation and communication. Our lives are 
shaped and partake of rhythmical fluctuations: the regular happening of 
events and its sudden variations, the negotiations between different 
degrees of speeds, as in the way we produce and consume food, think and 
practice art and the balance and alternation between our moods, affects, 
and desires. Rhythm is nevertheless difficult to grasp, point down, 
describe. It is more something we feel, sense and intuit

In this context, French historian and sociologist Pascal Michon proposes 
to ‘oppose the continuity and the dynamic of rhythm to the discontinuity 
and un-historicity of semiotics and metrics’. He further argues that

‘The rhythm concept is useful when observers are confronted with 
entities that are defined by the ways they are flowing. If rhythm is not 
conceived only as a numbered order of the movement made by an object, 
but as the organisation of the processes that produce what appears to us 
as an object, it becomes very effective. Especially in disciplines which 
try to get rid of the old models of structure and system and to take 
into account the radical historicity of their objects, without falling 
into the symmetric traps of extreme conceptions, which dissolve 
individual and subjectivity in difference and passing of time, and of 
more balanced conceptions, which maintain them but in still too formal a 
way’. (Michon, 2011. Available at http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article462).

The work of Pascal Michon, overlooked in English-speaking academia, has 
focussed on rhythm in relation to history, philosophy and sociology. 
Michon is the editor of the Rhuthmos website, and, among other 
publications, he is the author of Rythmes, Pouvoir, Mondialisation 
(Rhythm, Power, Globalisation, 2005).

In an effort to think of the different ways in which rhythm can be said 
to be an originator and organisational principle of reality, and in an 
attempt to take seriously rhythm’s potential in terms of methodology for 
the humanities and social sciences, this conference invites reflections 
on, but not limited to, the following themes:

-       rhythm and culture
-       rhythm and politics
-       rhythm and the event
-       rhythm and gender
-       rhythm and resistance
-       rhythm and power
-       rhythm and economics
-       rhythm and food
-       rhythm and the city
-       rhythm and mediation
-       rhythm and subjectivation
-       rhythm and cognition
-       rhythm, algorhythm and code
-       rhythm and the body
-       rhythm and the production of art
-       rhythm and dance
-       rhythm and painting
-       rhythm and music
-       rhythm and film
-       rhythm and war
-       rhythm as difference and repetition
-       rhythm as measure and flow


Proposals for 30 minutes presentations and workshops should be sent to 
(rhythmconference2016 /at/ gmail.com) by the 12th February 2016. Accepted 
speakers will be notified by the 4th March 2016.

Please send your proposal as an attachment including a title, an 
abstract (of no more than 300 words) and a brief biography. If relevant, 
proposals can include links to give an indication of your artistic practice.

For further information, please contact Paola Crespi: (p.crespi /at/ gold.ac.uk) .





Dr Paola Crespi
Associate Lecturer (Culture and Cultural Studies)
Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths College, University of London

https://golds.academia.edu/PaolaCrespi

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