A paper with an interesting rhythm

McCormack, D.P. (2002) A paper with an interesting rhythm. Geoforum, 33 (4), 469-485. (doi:10.1016/S0016-7185(02)00031-3).

Abstract

This paper is a performative effort to move with and through the expressive and theoretical spaces of an interest in rhythm. This interest emerges initially from the middle of an encounter with the 5 Rhythms™, a contemporary somatic practice that uses rhythm to facilitate and catalyse expressive movement. Rather than seeking to excavate representational meaning from an encounter with the practice or using it to critically diagnose the corporeal politics of contemporary society, this paper apprehends the creative movement emerging from an encounter with/in the non-representational, performative potential of the 5 Rhythms™. By becoming a deliberately playful effort to hold onto the lines of movement emergent from the affective, kinaesthetic territories of this practice, the paper works to avoid either falling back upon a representational ethics that stops this movement dead in its tracks or becoming seduced by an aesthetics of weightless escape. This effort draws particular support from Deleuze and Guattari's writing on the refrain, a concept that provides a vehicle through which the lines of an interest in rhythm gain expressive and theoretical consistency. Because the territories of the refrain open onto lines of movement that are as much figural as discursive, the paper works to animate the lines of movement emerging from an encounter with the 5 Rhythms™ through a series of non-representational diagrammatic interventions. Finally, in drawing the diagrammatic lines of this movement in-between, the paper becomes not so much a series of lines about moving, but a series of lines moving about.

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