Movement-Based Arts
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Chapter 3, pp 101-124 Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practice ed. Paola Crespi, Sunil Manghani Rhythm requires variation of matter – in a perfectly homogeneous experience of a perfectly homogeneous world there can be no... more
Chapter 3, pp 101-124
Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practice
ed. Paola Crespi, Sunil Manghani
Rhythm requires variation of matter – in a perfectly homogeneous experience of a perfectly homogeneous world there can be no rhythm. Furthermore, rhythm as a feature of experience (rather than an abstract pattern) arises from a body encountering variation in matter – in other words, movement. Running your finger across the ridges of the sea shell, you feel irregular pressure on your skin that you can interpret as a rhythm — a pattern of irregular variation of sensation correlate with your movement. Stopping your finger’s movement you would feel no variation. If the shell were perfectly smooth, you also would feel no variation. So corporeal movement and irregularities in matter are necessary to rhythmic experience. Notice that corporeal movement compounds the body as a necessary ingredient in having this experience. Feeling through the body, via embodied engagement is a deep component of the experience.
However, variation of matter and corporeal movement, while elemental as ingredients of a sense of rhythm, do not exhaustively capture its essence. Rhythm as a temporal pattern in experience lies beyond or in between sense perceptions. One gets to a sense of rhythmic pattern via perception, but rhythm itself is not sense data; to borrow phenomenological vocabulary, it is not perceived but apperceived.
The reader may find it completely obvious that rhythm is not to be found “out there,” to be represented by sense or sensor data, but rather is a feature of lived experience, and thus inextricably part of phenomena rather than data. But in the age of zombies, it’s useful to refer to much more extensive arguments such as Merleau-Ponty’s scientific meditations on temporal experience. He writes: “We are not saying that time is for someone, which would once more be a case of arraying it out, and immobilizing it. ...We must understand time as the subject and the subject as time.” [Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 491]
Departing from cognitivist and phenomenological projects, we keep in play various commitments to particular notions of subject, body or time. This methodological attitude draws from both pragmatism’s radically empirical approach (to borrow from William James) and Husserl’s injunction to attend to the phenomena themselves. This we start from neither theoretical abstractions like time or numbered metric nor imperceivable mechanism, but rather from lived experience. This suspension, or keeping in play, of abstractions like subject, body, or time lies at the heart of a pragmatist empiricist method.
This approach to rhythm that we describe also suspends commitment to a particular notion of the anthropic subject, whether phenomenological, psychological or cognitive. In this sense, it shares with pragmatists and process philosophy and some aspects of contemporary materialism after Deleuze the proposition of experience without a subject.
Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practice
ed. Paola Crespi, Sunil Manghani
Rhythm requires variation of matter – in a perfectly homogeneous experience of a perfectly homogeneous world there can be no rhythm. Furthermore, rhythm as a feature of experience (rather than an abstract pattern) arises from a body encountering variation in matter – in other words, movement. Running your finger across the ridges of the sea shell, you feel irregular pressure on your skin that you can interpret as a rhythm — a pattern of irregular variation of sensation correlate with your movement. Stopping your finger’s movement you would feel no variation. If the shell were perfectly smooth, you also would feel no variation. So corporeal movement and irregularities in matter are necessary to rhythmic experience. Notice that corporeal movement compounds the body as a necessary ingredient in having this experience. Feeling through the body, via embodied engagement is a deep component of the experience.
However, variation of matter and corporeal movement, while elemental as ingredients of a sense of rhythm, do not exhaustively capture its essence. Rhythm as a temporal pattern in experience lies beyond or in between sense perceptions. One gets to a sense of rhythmic pattern via perception, but rhythm itself is not sense data; to borrow phenomenological vocabulary, it is not perceived but apperceived.
The reader may find it completely obvious that rhythm is not to be found “out there,” to be represented by sense or sensor data, but rather is a feature of lived experience, and thus inextricably part of phenomena rather than data. But in the age of zombies, it’s useful to refer to much more extensive arguments such as Merleau-Ponty’s scientific meditations on temporal experience. He writes: “We are not saying that time is for someone, which would once more be a case of arraying it out, and immobilizing it. ...We must understand time as the subject and the subject as time.” [Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 491]
Departing from cognitivist and phenomenological projects, we keep in play various commitments to particular notions of subject, body or time. This methodological attitude draws from both pragmatism’s radically empirical approach (to borrow from William James) and Husserl’s injunction to attend to the phenomena themselves. This we start from neither theoretical abstractions like time or numbered metric nor imperceivable mechanism, but rather from lived experience. This suspension, or keeping in play, of abstractions like subject, body, or time lies at the heart of a pragmatist empiricist method.
This approach to rhythm that we describe also suspends commitment to a particular notion of the anthropic subject, whether phenomenological, psychological or cognitive. In this sense, it shares with pragmatists and process philosophy and some aspects of contemporary materialism after Deleuze the proposition of experience without a subject.