Review | Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern
Reviewed by Tamlyn Avery, Adelaide University
Conventionally understood as “pertaining to a sequence of events which can be perceived as a pattern, with an interplay between repetition and variation groups” (315), rhythm and its significance have been subjected to much debate over the past two centuries. It rose to salience in twentieth-century Western culture to become among the most privileged signifiers—even measures—of the modern era. This is the premise of Laura Marcus’s Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern (2023), a capacious account of rhythm’s historical significance for conceptualizing the modern subject. While ranging widely in its applied definitions, wherever ‘rhythm’ arose as a conceptual or empirical subject of study, it has been convincingly revealed to be, in John Dewey’s phrasing, “the tie” binding scientific and aesthetic discourses of modernity.
Tracing a genealogy of rhythm at the intersection of science and aesthetics from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Marcus sets out to historicize how and why countless “writers, artists, and theorists…drew on concepts of rhythm” (1). Covering dozens of interdisciplinary examples over six chapters, the book’s ambitious, densely woven narrative finds an expedient focal point in the figure Marcus identifies as the “rhythmical subject.” Steven Connor aptly notes in the afterword, if Marcus’s general “subject is rhythm,” broadly defined, her work also trains us to attend to “the idea of a self” that is both “capable of responding to rhythm and is given its distinctive form through that responsiveness” (309). Modern notions of subjectivity are convincingly revealed to be mediated through ideas about, encounters with, and experiences of rhythm in its manifold meanings and expressions.
Commencing with Herbert Spencer’s wave metaphor, from his 1862 essay “The Rhythm of Motion,” as a dynamic signifier binding the movements of the natural sciences to their aesthetic counterparts in music, dance, and poetry, chapter one limns how the “experimental subject of psychology and the receptive subject of aesthetics became defined as a ‘rhythmical subject” (1). The chapter discusses how intellectuals including William James, Grant Allen, Havelock Ellis, and Gertrude Stein engaged with Spencerian concepts of a rhythmic universe as they studied and experimented with the “physiological aesthetics” of repetition, meter, and flow. Marcus thus traces how an emergent, interdisciplinary field of rhythm studies was set into motion, offering a powerful new means of articulating modernity’s contradictory processes, institutions, and models of being. Drawing on Michael Golston’s recent scholarship on modernism and rhythm as these pertain to race (8–9), Marcus establishes how the contingencies of modernity’s rhythmical subject were formulated by scientists and aestheticians in ways that were from the outset speciously modelled on not only racialized but also nationalized and gendered assumptions. Marcus expands on these political undercurrents of rhythm theory in the chapter’s concluding discussion of why the “rhythmical subject” became especially associated with women, as reflected in the pioneering studies Marie Stopes conducted into the “sexual periodicity” of women’s menstrual cycles and sexual desire (35).
Chapter two turns to kinaesthesia—how individuals experience beauty in art as rhythmic bodily responsiveness—in the writings of Ethel Puffer, Vernon Lee, and John Dewey. Understood as the “intertwining” of aesthetic “sympathy” with new psychological understandings of “rhythmic consciousness,” kinaesthesis was conceived by these individuals among others “as the connection between ‘the inner life’ and ‘bodily movement’” (43). Building on Jamesian notions of how a rhythmic tension between distraction and attention informs acts of aesthetic appreciation, these aestheticians sought to theorize a correlation between the outer or ‘objective’ framework of rhythm within the artwork, as well as the inner ‘subjective’ responses rhythmic aesthetics arguably stimulate in the beholder. Chapter three turns to the “cult of rhythmicity” that arose out of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century German Lebensreform movement, which sought to restore the vitality in health, culture, and community that industrial modernity arguably depleted. European movements including German anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner’s “Eurythmy” and Swiss musicologist Émile Jacques-Dalcroze’s “Eurythmics” provided alternate community models for those seeking a bulwark against modernity’s malaise: “arrythmia.” Combining physical training (through gestural choreography, dance, and music) with rhythmic pedagogy and communal living, these movements inspired new rhythmic possibilities for creative being, influencing dancer Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, socialist novelist Upton Sinclair, and others.
Modernist print cultures provided central forums for Jacques-Dalcroze and other self-declared rhythmists to promote ideas and engage in debates about rhythm, subjectivity, and modernist art, as chapter four details. In little magazines including The New Age and Rhythm, editors Alfred Orage and John Middleton Murry and their contributors promoted concepts of rhythmicity and synaesthesia toward the creative revitalization of modernist literary and visual culture. Likewise, chapter five discusses how their Bloomsbury associates grappled with crumbling notions of postwar liberal individualism, by writing about the pressing “question of rhythmic identities” and its implications for aesthetics (197). Virginia Woolf (who avowedly wrote “to a rhythm and not to a plot”) alongside art critics Laurence Binyon and Roger Fry, contributed to a “‘synaesthetic’ model of associative and sensory response,” in which rhythm formed “both the voice and vehicle of feeling” (229). Chapter five shows how these figures furthered rhythmic models of creative being and intuition that infused the theories of Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson, which were widely applied to the discussion of W. B. Yeats, Paul Cézanne, T. S. Eliot, Wassily Kandinsky, and others. Importantly, Marcus again remarks how modernist critics’ seemingly objective rhythmic frameworks often questionably reinforced pseudoscientific social theories of rhythm in relation to cultural progress. For example, Binyon and Fry furthered modernism’s problematic appropriation of Far Eastern visual art, even while they promoted it as an ideal model of rhythmic vitality for modernist art. Woolf’s fictions also hinted at her ambivalent views regarding the rhythms of class and social difference, Marcus notes.
The book’s most innovative discussion is chapter six, “The American Rhythm,” focused on the United States’ Southwest. Here, Marcus probes why many writers sought to stabilize the vagaries of modern life by appropriating Indigenous culture, the rhythms of which were mediated by white writers hoping to recover a “primitive” vitality seemingly lost to modernity. Mary Austin, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Lawrence wrote about rhythm and the “primordial” vitality they witnessed in visiting the Pueblos of Taos and Sante Fe. As Marcus powerfully concludes, rhythm conveniently “bridge[d] the gap between the dominant culture and those it had disinherited” by “essentializing racial identity and securing the terms of racial difference,” even if such engagements were intended to foster “a dynamic that runs counter to history, time, and its depredations” (307). While this chapter might have benefited from engaging directly with Indigenous writers (for example, John Joseph Mathews), regardless, it substantially furthers our understanding of how American frontier struggles were conveyed through notions of race and/as rhythmic being.
While far-reaching in its coverage, Marcus’s argument is convincingly realized. Each section flows into the wider current of the book’s vast historical narrative, which is propelled through masterful close readings. Marcus powerfully reasserts the historical interdependence of scientific and literary-aesthetic theorization within the nucleus of two centuries of modern rhythm studies. Given the author’s sudden tragic passing, her vision for a revitalized New Rhythm Studies unfortunately remains unfinished. As Isobel Armstrong and Josephine McDonagh’s introduction outlines, a quarter of the planned book was incomplete (xxix). Notably absent from chapter four is a planned discussion of Katherine Mansfield’s contributions to Rhythm; in its place, Helen Small provides a composite sketch of ideas drawn from Marcus’s notes, publications, and lectures. Also missing are a proposed chapter, “Urban Rhythms and City Symphonies,” and another on “[s]yncopations and polyrhythmia in writing” and modernist music, including “jazz and also Stravinsky, Scriabin, Honegger” (xxix). These chapters might have facilitated deeper consideration of exigent themes not pursued here, including the notable absence of African American rhythmic developments. The omission of film might also surprise readers who are familiar with Marcus’s previous works. Regardless, the book’s editors rightly emphasize “the extraordinary richness of what is” (xxx), their meticulous curatorial care ensuring that despite the manuscript’s incompleteness, the undeniable rhythm of Marcus’s argument prevails. What remains is an original, timely, and remarkably comprehensive account of the rhythmical subject’s significance across a range of contexts and fields.
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