5 - Elements of rhythmology

In 1980, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published what would become their most famous book: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Respectable in size and featuring a colorful array of new concepts, it was at times obscure and confusing, but things start to lighten up when one follows the rhythmic, or better yet, the rhuthmic thread and compare it with other contemporary works. As a matter of fact, in the previous volume of this series, we observed that a remarkable constellation of thinkers interested in rhythm had formed in the 1970s. Through a series of notable essays, Lefebvre, Foucault, Benveniste, Barthes, Serres and Morin had strongly called into question the metric perspective, which had spread widely in Western culture from the nineteenth century, and, at least for the last four of them, had suggested replacing it with entirely new rhuthmic worldviews. The objective of this volume is to analyze the particular contribution of Deleuze and Guattari to this new trend, but also the elements which ultimately hindered its further development.