This introduction charts several of rhythm's various returns as a way of laying out the theoretical and methodological field in which the articles of this special issue find their place. While Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis is perhaps familiar to many, rhythm has appeared in a wide repertoire of guises, in many disciplines over the decades and indeed the centuries. This introduction attends to the particular roles of rhythm in the formation of modernity ranging from the processes of industrialization and the proliferation of new media technologies to film and literary aesthetics as well as conceptualizations of human psychology, social behaviour and physiology. These are some of the historical antecedents to the contemporary understandings of rhythm within body studies to which most of the contributions to this issue are devoted. In this respect, the introduction outlines recent approaches to rhythm as vibration, a force of the virtual, and an intensive excess outside consciousness.
Through the conceptual triptych of framing, following and middling, this article explores the composition and importance of materialities beyond their seemingly stable and measurable objectivity. Drawing on recent insights about concepts as generative of practice and as a practice in their own right, the article offers this triptych as potential new materialist ‘methodological metamodellings’ that acknowledge and render palpable the plural forces of formation in a research process. The article demonstrates this with the vibrant and relational materialities of Björk’s Biophilia Live (2014). This concert film intersperses the scientific with the affective, audiovisual performance with myriad forms of nature’s mediatised liveness, and the human with more-than-human scales of existence.
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