Revuelta. Photo credit Inger Flem Soto.
This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.
Introduction: (Rhy)pistemologies–Thinking Through Rhythm
Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal
“It is the philosophy of [Black] music that is most important.”
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Music
“You listen to it, the concept might break you.”
Eric B. and Rakim, “I Know You Got Soul”
An experiment: what would happen if a group of academics from fields as varied as, say, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, musicology, and dance–many of whom are professional or amateur practitioners of rhythmic artistic forms themselves–thought collectively about the problem of conceptual and theoretical work and its relation to rhythm? How does rhythm—and its attendant art forms—allow us to produce philosophical or conceptual thought? What concepts (ethical, political, aesthetic, or otherwise) emerge from music, dance, sound, motion, and vibration? What began as a series of questions, a collective conceptual and methodological risk, yielded results that could not have been anticipated: an ensemble of theories and insights, in and out of sync, harmonious and discordant.
As a category, rhythm names a sensory interface with the world, an entry point into temporal unfolding across scales: the rapid revolutions of electrons around nuclei, the immeasurably slow deaths of distant galaxies, the ebb and flow of human breathing, the seasonal migrations of birds, the steady build of a tropical storm. Rhythm implies cyclicalities, departures and returns, dramatic interconnections of bodies and systems. Artists who focus attention on rhythm—musicians, dancers, poets, filmmakers—do so in ways that can draw receivers’ attention back to their own bodies, their own senses, their own perceptions of movements, changes, event boundaries.
To think and make through rhythm is to unsettle many of the philosophical inheritances of the imperial West—the atomized, liberal thinking subject divorced from dependency or human relation; the epistemology of the zero point, a thinking that emerges miraculously, without geographic or embodied context; even, and especially, conceptions of “the human” that presume a universal subject devoid of locational or experiential specificity; or, more accurately, implicitly demand accordance to a colonialist hierarchy that measures humanness by way of proximity to an imposed ideal.[1] With that in mind, the concepts that can emerge from a focus on rhythm promise engagements with people, environments, and their attendant histories, promise concepts that can defamiliarize and unsettle knowledge presupposing of a totalizing universal subject, if for no other reason than that they openly emerge from sensory experience, from bodies in and of motion. Rooted in and expressive of the particular—sensoria, situation, movement—such concepts reach for the kinds of integrative and provisional knowledge perhaps only available through relation: what Glissant once called an “open totality.”[2]
Inspired by multidisciplinary tap dance artist and scholar Michael J. Love’s concept of “(rhy)pistemology,” which he understands as “the wealth of cultural knowledge stored in Black American forms of movement and music,” this special issue aims to expand the labor of critical theory and philosophical thought to include embodied forms of knowledge across intellectual, artistic, and cultural traditions. Rather than taking rhythm, music, or dance as an object of theory or thought, we emphasize theory and thought that emerges from or through rhythm. Fumi Okiji’s work on “jazz as critique,” Alexander Weheliye’s commitment to “thinking sound,” Jonathan Leal’s “thought-forms,” and Maya Kronfeld’s notion of spontaneity as political concept are only a few examples of the transdisciplinary and trans-sensory lines of inquiry that inspired this collective conversation.[3]
Drawing together artist practitioners and theorists from a range of disciplinary positions and critical traditions—comparative literature and media, critical theory, philosophy, global Black thought, anthropology, Latinx and Latin American studies, dance, music and sound studies—this special issue pursues the promise of (rhy)pistemological inquiry. Whether through the temporal elasticities of beat tapes, or in-the-moment creative improvisations, or the slow arcs of dancing bodies in midair, or the linearities exploded by language artists, or the interplay of narrative storytelling and shot intercutting in film, and much more, we asked these scholars to consider what happens to extant concepts when stress tested against rhythms across scales, as well as in what concepts can emerge when we attune ourselves more fully to our contexts and, fundamentally, foreground that we always think from our bodies, one breath at a time.
The present collection of work is one result of a series of collaborations and conversations in which a broad, porous community of thinkers and artists have participated. Since 2023, the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab “Thinking Through Rhythm” study group–which includes graduate students and faculty from Comparative Literature, Latin American and Iberian Cultures, French and Italian, English, American Studies and Ethnicity, Roski School of Art and Design, Kaufman School of Dance, Thornton School of Music, School of Cinematic Arts, and Annenberg School of Communication–has met monthly to read and discuss scholarship on music and rhythm, eat and drink, and to listen to music together. We then convened a seminar at the March 2024 American Comparative Literature Association meeting in Montreal with colleagues from across the country. Yet another variation of the group met at Art Share L.A. in May 2024, where rhythmic performances met academic presentations. Each of these experimental encounters felt both subversive and joyful: presenters and members of the public remarked on the liberating experience of thinking with one’s senses, pushing back against the compartmentalization we often impose on our “professional” selves.
Indeed, each of the participants in this ensemble of thinkers has a unique, eccentric relationship with the conceptual work that often goes by the name “philosophy” or “critical theory” as well as dance, music, and experimental sound. Theorists and practitioners, writers, dancers, music-makers, and listeners, we share a frustration with the way that rhythmic art forms remain objects of study rather than being considered sources of knowledge or sites of conceptual work in themselves. In addition to those whose writing is included here, Natalie Belisle, Gabrielle Civil, Arne De Boever, Jonathan Gómez, d. sabela grimes, Stathis Gourgouris, Edwin Hill, Jane Kassavin, Kara Keeling, Leah King, Josh Kun, Fumi Okiji, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Mlondi Zondi and others have participated in prior and subsequent conversations and gatherings. At the Art Share L.A. event, we were fortunate to count on the participation of artivista Quetzal Flores and composer/pianist Paris Nicole Strother, who accompanied Alex Chávez, Maya Kronfeld, and Michael J. Love in their music-making. The interventions are both conceptual and methodological; indeed, the conceptual underpinnings of artistic practice and expression are laid bare through the troubling of the boundary between what is often categorized as “theory” and “practice.” Thinking through rhythm is necessarily performative, embodied, and transmedial, sonic, visual, and verbal, some of which will be captured through images and links to sound and video in what follows.
The first trio of interventions detail concepts mined from Black American improvisational and rhythmic music and dance: (rhy)pistemologies. In the lead essay, Michael J. Love introduces us to the term he coined to evoke and name the knowledge conveyed through material practices in the Black American vernacular tradition: call and response, active listening, and producing rhythms in real time (what often goes by the name “improvisation”). For Love, (rhy)pistemology—knowing through the rhythm—is inseparable from these traditions. It is also a practice of liberation: similar to Nina Simone’s recollection of brief instances of freedom while making music, Love theorizes the rhythmic, percussive-corporeal practice of tap as a mode of “getting caught up,” accessing a Black queer “elsewhere” (Nadia Ellis)—a utopian future that (as Kara Keeling reminded us in Los Angeles, citing the late José Esteban Muñoz) just might always already exist. Love’s duet with Maya Kronfeld—which they created for the May 2024 meeting—incorporates sampling and looping, improvisational rhythms and theoretical arguments.
Kronfeld’s “Rhythmic Concepts and New Knowledge” argues that rhythmic form produces concepts that are “inchoative knowledge,” drawing upon the work of Immanuel Kant, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis. This not-yet-knowledge does not drive rhythmic practices, but rather emerges from forms-in-motion. She takes Thelonious Monk’s polyrhythmic vernacular in “Straight No Chaser” as an instance of Black experimental rhythmic practice that is “about to be knowledge.” Such insights do not necessarily negate concepts in the Western philosophical tradition, but rather shed crucial light on that for which this tradition fails to account, as well as that which it has violently eclipsed or suppressed. Kronfeld “puts it together” (Elvin Jones’s term for spontaneous composition) in her transmedial theorization: logical argument supplemented, displaced, and oxygenated by her own engagement on keys with the questions posited.
In “So What: Kind of More or Less Than All Blue(s),” Michael Sawyer, for whom Kronfeld is a crucial interlocutor, takes up Toni Morrison’s ekphrastic challenge—“how can I say things that are pictures”—by asking, “how can I write things that are sounds?” Drawing upon the ancient Japanese art form Kintsugi, Sawyer develops a theory of reparative “rememory” (Morrison) in Black cultural expression. Bringing together jagged shards of a broken whole—namely, the generative disruption of the blues in Sonny Rollins’s The Saxophone Colossus and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, themselves fragments of other broken, beautiful objects—Sawyer’s close reading of sound is at once shattering and restorative.
We tend to think of rhythm primarily in sonic forms; yet what happens when we are to consider images as possessing their own rhythms? Presented initially at the 2024 American Comparative Literature Association convention in Montreal, the interventions by Jamal Batts, Seth Brodsky, and Eyal Peretz evaluate rhythms of the moving image. In “Black Queer Cadence: Hearing as Diasporic Seeing,” Jamal Batts advances a theory of sound in and as film, specifically, Black queer diasporic cinema in the final decades of the last century. Through close readings of Marlon Riggs’s short film/music video Anthem (1991), as well as the incorporation of poet Essex Hemphill’s voice in Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), Batts identifies Afro-diasporic, non-linear queer continuities in visual rhythm, sound, and voice. Drawing on Black experimental film theory (Michael B. Gillespie, Robeson Taj Frazier, Arthur Jafa), philosophy of Black music (Fumi Okiji), and others, he demonstrates the ways in which rhythms work to disrupt the violence of racialized representation, introducing gendered difference into the “unruly intramural sociality of blackness and queerness” which he understands as “entangled, relational, and stereophonic.”
Invoking Fred Moten’s fugitive, fleeting statement to Harmony Holiday about music’s genesis—“in the absence of time, we made rhythm”—Seth Brodsky’s “Losing and Finding Death Drive’s Beat” argues that Freud’s notion has been mischaracterized as a nihilistic death cult, suggesting that music points to a distinct dimension of the drive, beyond nihilism. Through a close reading of the music video to Britany Howard’s “Stay High,” Brodsky highlights Howard’s rhythmic syncopation, a rhythmic displacement that is untimely in its time travel to past “happy” rhythms (Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” rather than his “A Change is Gonna Come”) and future bleak horizons: in its visualization of the rhythm and repetition of the workday, the music video would serve as consolation to essential workers toiling long hours in the early months of the pandemic. Yet Brodsky wants to insist upon something more complicated at work. Although the eye can only perceive one rhythmic fact at a time, the ear can process multiple elements of sonic information simultaneously: music fabricates, dilates, and sutures gaps. Brodsky’s theory of music as “a foundational practice of driven beings” exposes the fallacy at the heart of contemporary misreadings of the death drive, inseparable from the pulse of life.
Eyal Peretz’s “Oppenheimer’s Arrhythmia – Between the Cinematic Image and the Atomic Bomb” explores the activation of a new form of time in Christopher Nolan’s film. Distinct from Batts’ analysis of “queer cadence” in experimental cinema, and Brodsky’s consideration of the folding of image into rhythm in Howard’s music video, Peretz’s intervention focuses upon the formal elements of the 2023 film, what he describes as “rhythmic editing.” Identifying the activation of a new temporality set in motion by the conception and detonation of the atomic bomb, he asks whether the rhythmic editing of the cinematic image represents, extends, or interrupts this new temporality. What constative or performative intervention is carried out by Nolan’s arrythmias?
Naomi Waltham-Smith joins Peretz in taking up the relation between rhythm and arrythmia in “Deconstruction’s Hemiolas.” Presented initially as part of the “(Rhy)pistemologies” seminar at ACLA, Waltham-Smith’s essay evaluates the role of rhythm in the work of deconstruction. A scholar of music and philosophy as well as a musician herself, Waltham-Smith demonstrates how the concept’s arrhythmia can be “most passionately moved by” the labor of deconstruction. Indeed, deconstruction’s arrhythmias expose the anarchic concepts as always already more than one: deconstructions. Owed to its syncopated remarking, deconstruction bears affinities with decolonial, Black-radical, anarchist, and queer thought. Incorporating a structure not unlike the 3-against-2 of musical hemiola, she advances a theory of deconstruction’s arrhythmia through close readings of five texts: Derrida’s Glas, Moten’s In the Break, Lacoue-Labarthe’s “L’echo du sujet,” Cixous’s “Le théâtre surpris par les marionettes,” and Bennington’s response to Nancy.
The two concluding pieces return us to the performative, rhythmic thinking tested in Los Angeles. Musician and anthropologist Alex Chávez opened the Art Share L.A. meeting with a performance and talk (“Sonorous Present”), the written component of which has been included in the present issue. During the live event, in conversation with Quetzal Flores and Jonathan Leal, Chávez explored the contemporary conditions of possibility for sonic mourning in a bordered world. Through multimedia performances of selections from his acclaimed 2024 album, Sonorous Present, Chávez elaborated on the rhythms of artistic and scholarly process, highlighting the necessary imbrication of (auto)ethnographic research and related music composition for the type of introspective and community-driven praxis he pursues. His written piece expands these ideas across its three sections—“break,” “qualia,” and “cómplices de luto (accomplices in mourning)”—using a poetics of grief to map contemporary logics of nationalist (American) containments, and in effect, to meditate on political and conceptual possibility. In doing so, Chávez’s work begets questions that resonate across Black studies, border studies, anthropology, and Latinx studies, as well as with the offerings across this special issue: what are the rhythms of our mourning? And how might focusing on them amid the repeating violences of nation-states lead to increased conceptual, political, and artistic freedom?
Finally, “Drone, Groove, and the Specificity of Musical Sound” documents a conversation held between Michael Gallope and Edwin Hill following Gallope’s drone performance, “Region.” Gallope’s electronic, multisensory presentation invited the public into a transformative experience of deep listening, a voyage through space and emptiness. Trained as a musicologist, Gallope has kept his scholarly and artistic lives largely separate until now. Yet the shift of focus from his first book to his second is significant: while the first (Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable), details philosophical reflections on music, the second (The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–1978) understands philosophy as emerging from music-making itself. After the performance, Gallope and Hill discussed what it meant for Gallope to perform for the first time in an academic setting, how disciplines and institutions allow for or foreclose the possibility of musical thinking, as well as taking up the central question of “(Rhy)pistemologies”: how are concepts fashioned through rhythmic practices?
Pursuing these questions—enacting this collective experiment across repertoires, methods, and disciplinary structures—has reminded us of the promise and urgency of humanistic inquiry at once artistically engaged and communally rooted. What if? What now, then? At each turn, the project has, in effect, foregrounded the conceptual possibilities of expressive forms that reach beyond insular, rarified knowledge circulation, centering instead those registers of criticism, theory, and multimedial expression that center bodies and minds in motion, alive to the sinew of experience. Our work together produced its own rhythms, its own cycles of affect and analogy, critique and convergence, and this, in its way, has been a reminder of what has long been the case in those increasingly necessary spaces where conscious relation is held in high esteem. Provisionally, then: to think through rhythm is to attend to relation and greet the world as it has been, is now, and hope it can be—at distance from those forms of thought that would deny the world.
Listen to it. The concept might break you.
[1] See Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Vijay Iyer, Fred Moten, among many others. For a recent example, see Iyer’s 2025 lecture at the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, “Musicalities: Scenes of Sonic Social Life.”
[2] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. (University of Michigan Press 1997), 171.
[3] In recent decades, scholarship in Black studies, cultural history, and music studies has expanded the conversation around these issues immensely. For a few immediate touchstones, see Fred Moten’s In the Break, Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies, Shana Redmond’s Anthem, Josh Kun’s Audiotopia, R.A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh, Brent Hayes Edwards’ Epistrophes, Emily J. Lordi’s The Meaning of Soul, and Nina Sun Eidsheim’s Sensing Sound.