Rhythms of Artwork and Beyond, The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, Nr 76, Kraków, 2026 — I thank Ineta Kivle and Maja Bjelica for their kind words in their introduction. I also wish to thank the contributors to this issue who have used and extended my work, adapting it to their own needs.
Rhythm and Rhuthmos : Introducing the Special Issue by Ineta Kivle & Maja Bjelica
The philosophical search for new forms of rhythm attends to the inner constitution of subjectivity and its entanglement with natural, cultural, and more-than-human worlds, thereby resisting limitation to measurable systems alone. Flow of rhythmic movements render the dynamic changes that shape societies, bodies, environments, and artistic practices. It articulates transitions rather than fixed states, allowing us to perceive how continuity persists within flow and how disruption itself may take on patterned, meaningful forms. In this sense, rhythm offers an alternative to linear or cyclical narratives, opening a conceptual space in which transformation can be understood as neither purely restorative nor deconstructive, but as an immeasurable and recurring flow of elements. For such a flow, as has been shown by the French philosopher and historian Pascal Michon, the concept of rhuthmos is more appropriate than that of rhythm. Michon’s rhythmanalysis, studies in rhythmology, and philosophical search for rhuthmos as an unmeasurable chain of recurring elements have an echo in a number of the contributed papers in this volume.
The seed for the idea for this special issue grew from the international interdisciplinary philosophical conference “Transformed Humanity in Search for Stability : Rhythms in Philosophy, Nature, Art”, held at the University of Latvia in Riga, in May 2024, to which both editors and some of the contributors participated. The conference was conceived as a space for philosophical dialogue in which rhythm was approached as a fundamental structure shaping contemporary transformations of human existence and art. Scholars were brought together by a shared concern : how rhythmic processes mediate human life under conditions of instability, acceleration, technological pressure, and ecological vulnerability. The guiding intuition shared by the conference participants that inspired this special issue is that rhythm reveals a field in which stability and transformation are not oppositional terms, but mutually implicated dimensions of lived existence.
As we stated in our call for papers for this issue :
The search for new philosophical and aesthetic theoretical approaches is driven by today’s fluid and transformative processes occurring not just in art and society but also impacting the inner constitution of each individual and our surrounding environments. A focus on rhythm offers a common dimension shared by art, humans, sociality, and nature.
[…]
The issue aims to explore profound questions surrounding the nature and implications of rhythm : What is the essence of rhythm itself ? How do the natural rhythms that govern human life differ from the rhythms found in art, constructed rationalities, and technologies ? What alternate conceptions challenge the currently dominant metric paradigm of rhythm ? How does the individual self exist amid the rhythms of technologies, reason, nature, and global processes ? How does disruption of natural rhythms deform and transform human experience and being ? How does our sense of individuality shift as human social positions change rhythmically ? In what ways does the power of nature’s rhythms impact the human world and artistic expression ? How can art contribute to maintaining a rhythmic, healthy existence ? How are humanity’s bodily and rational dimensions transformed through the effects of changing rhythms ? How does the revived analysis of rhythm concern the realms of aesthetics, ethics, politics, literature, and art ?
To this list of questions, we kept adding new ones, always interrelated and interlaced : What is rhythm beyond metric repetition and calculable recurrence ? How does individuality change as human beings are repositioned within shifting social and planetary rhythms ? And how might renewed approaches to rhythmanalysis illuminate various dimensions of contemporary existence ?
Many dominant philosophical diagnoses of the present—whether articulated through posthumanism, hypermodernity, liquid modernity, or the Capitalocene—tend to privilege technological acceleration, rational abstraction, and systemic disruption. In doing so, they often overlook the more silent yet pervasive rhythmic forces that organize perception, bodily experience, social relations, artworks, and modes of meaning-making.
The issue extends into a sustained scholarly inquiry, treating rhythm as a transversal category that links aesthetics, philosophy, and art. Within this context, rhythm functions as a shared dimension that transforms through rational reflection as well as rhythmic forces, and corporeal engagements. By foregrounding rhythm, the volume affirms the inherently interdisciplinary orientation of contemporary aesthetics and opens it to dialogue with wide spectrum of other humanities.
Several contributions foreground elemental and environmental rhythms, thereby challenging anthropocentric frameworks of aesthetic experience. Essays addressing honey-making, sound ecology, water cosmologies, salt-working and breathing show how rhythm operates as a mode of attunement to more-than-human temporalities. Through practices of listening, care, and embodied engagement, these studies articulate alternative epistemologies grounded in reciprocity rather than domination. Here, rhythm emerges as an ethical practice—one that resists acceleration and instrumentalization by cultivating attentiveness to slow, fragile, and often overlooked processes.
Other contributions focus on artistic practices—ranging from dance, performance art, and painting to cinema, literature, and AI-generated images— in order to examine how rhythm structures aesthetic experience and mediates transformations of perception. Analyses of Marina Abramović’s endurance-based performances, Edgar Degas’s dancers, James Benning’s minimalist cinema, audio art in the field of sound ecology, and contemporary AI imagery reveal rhythm as both a compositional principle and an experiential force. These studies show how artistic rhythms can interrupt dominant temporal regimes, expose concealed structures of power, and cultivate alternative modes of attention and care.
A recurring theoretical motif throughout the issue is the recovery of non-metric or pre-modern conceptions of rhythm (rhuthmos), understood not as fixed recurrence, but as a manner of flowing, a flow, a fluctuation, that with its reoccurence in various variations bring only temporary allusion to the stability of movement, which in reality is always ongoing. Drawing on thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Emile Benveniste, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, John Dewey, Pascal Michon, and others several authors conceptualize rhythm as a principle that resists reduction to calculable or measured time. Although rhythm reveals itself differently for each of them, even when they do not focus explicitly on the theme of rhythm itself—as is the case, for example, in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl—all of these diverse approaches nevertheless affirm the presence of rhythm, whether directly or indirectly, across a broad spectrum extending from subjectivity and the flow of inner time-consciousness to the pulsation of being itself. Within this framework, rhythm becomes a way of thinking stability without fixity, and order without repetition, in sense of continuity, constant movement.
Literary and poetic analyses further extend this inquiry by showing how rhythm destabilizes semantic certainty and fixed identities, while revealing rhythm as a sonic and temporal force that reconfigures place, memory, and belonging. Here, rhythm functions as an echoic structure, linking individual experience to geological, historical, and mythical temporalities that exceed the human scale.
Across these diverse contributions, rhythm emerges as a concept capable of bridging phenomenological descriptions of lived time with posthuman and ecological perspectives that decentre the human subject. Humanity appears not as a sovereign agent imposing order upon the world, but as a participant in complex rhythmic assemblages involving bodies, technologies, environments, and nonhuman agencies. In this sense, the issue responds directly to the question : what does it mean to be human amid the rhythms of art, nature, body, technology, and global processes ?
Importantly, this issue also opens space for non-traditional academic forms, including reflective texts, acknowledging that rhythm itself often resists rigid disciplinary boundaries and standardized scholarly tempos. This editorial decision reflects the conviction that philosophical engagement with rhythm must remain sensitive to form, style, and pacing, allowing thought itself to move rhythmically rather than merely thematizing rhythm as an object.
The structure of the volume is shaped by the themes explored in the individual contributions as well as by the diversity of their theoretical approaches. The articles span a wide spectrum, ranging from analyses of rhythm in specific artistic expressions to more essayistic and broadly philosophical reflections.
The volume opens with theoretical, philosophically grounded analyses of rhythm, in which Thérèse Gräff, Branko Klun, and Ineta Kivle relate rhythm to human existence, experience, the phenomenological time, and the fluid manifestations of rhythm in the contemporary world, thereby moving to-ward the rhythms of liminality and introducing the theme of performance.
This is followed by contributions from Valda Vidzemniece and Agata Sitko, who examine rhythm in contemporary dance and performance art. The volume also includes two articles that address the presence of rhythm in film and its impact on human experience : Pedro Florêncio writes on rhythm in cinema as a form of kinetic therapy, while Magdalena Vassileva analyses the philosophy of kata as a self-organizing rhythm in Japanese film.
Extending the territories shaped by rhythm, Jakub Zdebik explores rhythm and structures in relation to painting and artificial intelligence, while Lenka Lee observes the territories of interspecies art having honeybees as prime artistic actors. In addition, Artur Szarecki presents the rhythmic assemblage based on the life rhythms of bees and exposes its importance for developing an affective ecopolitics. To this field is connected also the contribution by Małgorzata Dancewicz-Pawlik who takes us on a path of the development of the phonocene as a conceptualization of sound art and sound ecology.
Several contributions turn to rhythm in relation to elemental philosophy : Anne Sauka and Kārlis Lakševics write on the rhythms and temporalities of water ; Maja Bjelica examines salt-working in connection with elemental listening ; Petri Berndtson focuses on the elemental poetics ; Lenart Škof dedicates his philosophical insight to air and exposes breathing as a rhythmic, organic connection between the human and the cosmos.
The volume then turns to articles devoted to the rhythm of language and literature. Chiara Gianni, Raivis Bičevskis, and Elvīra Šimfa demonstrate how rhythm becomes a significant concept within modern (anti)reductionism, bringing together philology, poetics, philosophy, and literature. Pier Francesco Corvino analyses the echoes of the rhythms of life and death in detective fiction The Hollow by Agatha Christie.
The concluding articles move away, to some extent, from the philosophical analyses of specific manifestations of rhythm and turn toward more general reflections. Johanna Kirschbauer focuses on fluid rhythms and the search for new, alternative, even “unstable” forms of stability in contemporary life ; Māris Kūlis relates rhythm to the aesthetics of disruption and the notion of “ugly truth” ; and Maija Kūle considers rhythm in the con-text of her own original conceptualization of the Age of Will.
Taken together, the contributions to this special issue do not propose a single, unified theory of rhythm. Instead, they form a polyphonic field of inquiry in which multiple rhythms and rhuthmoi coexist, intersect, and at times clash. This plurality is not a weakness but a strength, as it reflects the relational and context-dependent nature of rhythm itself. By engaging rhythm across philosophy, art, nature, and social life, the issue contributes to ongoing debates as well as to the future orientations of the humanities, while also demonstrating through its individual articles that rhythm cannot be reduced to periodic recurrence or metric regularity alone. Rather, it appears as relational, processual, and often liminal, emerging at thresholds between stability and chaos, silence and sound, repetition and difference, as well as between human and more-than-human worlds.
Summary
Ineta Kivle and Maja Bjelica, Rhythm and Rhuthmos : Introducing the Special Issue
Thérèse Gräff, Deleuze, Phenomenology and the Rhythms of Experience
Branko Klun, Repetition and Stability within Human Temporality : An Existential-Phenomenological Approach
Ineta Kivle, Rhythms of Liminality : An Example from Performance
Valda Vidzemniece, Life Force and the Flow of Energy : Rhythm in Dance and Dance Performance
Agata Sitko, Rhythms of Marina Abramović
Pedro Florêncio, Kinetic Therapy in the Age of the Capitalocene : Finding a Horizon of Possibility in James Benning’s Pig Iron (2010)
Magdalena Vassileva, The Disrupted Rhythms of Life and the Philosophy of Kata in Japanese Film
Jakub Zdebik, Rhythm and Chaos : Deleuzean Aesthetic Structures in Painting and AI Generated Images
Lenka Lee, Territories of the Hive : Rhythm, Care, and Interspecies Art in Jan Karpíšek’s Practice
Artur Szarecki, Affective Ecopolitics in Rhythmic Assemblages : Wolfgang Buttress’s The Hive
Małgorzata Dancewicz-Pawlik, Phonocene : Moving Toward the Rhythms of Naturecultures
Anne Sauka, Kārlis Lakševics, Rhythms of Life and Death : Fluid Temporalities of Water in Latvian Folklore
Maja Bjelica, Rhythms and Silences of Salt-Working : An Essay on Elemental Listening
Petri Berndtson, The Reversible Enchantment of the Rhythmical Knot of the Elemental Poetics
Lenart Škof, Rhythms of Breath, Rhythms of Love
Chiara Gianni, Raivis Bičevskis, Elvīra Šimfa, Rhythm and Non-reductionist Thinking : Poetry, Literature, and the Overcoming of Nihilism
Pier Francesco Corvino, The Echoic Rhythm of Life and Death : A Philosophical Reading of The Hollow by Agatha Christie
Johanna Kirschbauer, Rhuthmoi of Fluidity : Rethinking Stability in Liquid Modernity
Māris Kūlis, Ugly Truths and the Aesthetics of Disruption
Maija Kūle, The Possibility of Social Rhythm in the Age of Will : A New Socio-Political Meditation
