Introduction

I

We live within layers and realms of rhythm. Rhythm is anthropologically foundational, as an essential dimension of our biological existence and of our sensory, physical, and verbal interactions with our environment and each other. It is a physiological given, starting with our heartbeat and—from the moment of birth—our breathing. This does not mean, of course, that breathing and heartbeats are everywhere the same; as we write in the middle of a pandemic that invades through the breath, an environmental catastrophe that chokes the air, and perpetual systemic violence that forces breath from the bodies and stops the hearts of those deemed Other, it is all too clear that those rhythms are subject to external forces that reach into the physiological processes themselves.

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 (), 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...