Johanna Kirschbauer, « Rhuthmoi of Fluidity : Rethinking Stability in Liquid Modernity », The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, n° 76-1, 2026, pp. 307-318.
Abstract : In the face of contemporary cultural and social conditions marked by rapid change and uncertainty—often described as fluid or liquid—this paper proposes a rethinking of stability through the concept of rhuthmoi of fluidity. Departing from traditional Platonic and metric conceptions of rhythm as fixed recurrence, the study revives the pre-Platonic notion of rhuthmos as a manner or mode of flowing, foregrounding process, movement, and continuous transformation. Through a selective engagement with postmodern theory, the paper reconceptualizes stability through a rheological lens, understanding it as a dynamic and relational effect emerging within the conditions of liquid modernity. Bringing the work of philosophers and theorists such as Pascal Michon, Zygmunt Bauman, Tim Ingold, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari into conversation, the paper explores the interplay between difference and repetition, fixity and variability, highlighting the recursive and intra-active (Barad 2007) character of rhuthmic forms. It advocates for ethnographic, temporal-spatial, and pluralistic methodological approaches that attend to situatedness and emergent complexity. By reimagining rhuthmos as itineration rather than iteration (Ingold 2010), and stability as temporary and relational rather than absolute and constant, the paper contributes to ongoing debates in aesthetics, cultural theory, and the philosophy of rhuthmos, offering conceptual and theoretical impulses for under-standing the coexistence of order and flux in contemporary social life.
Keywords : Rhuthmos, Postmodern Theory, Critical Rheology, Fluidity, Stability
The twenty-first century is marked by the rapid dissolution of fixed social forms, a phenomenon variously described as “liquefaction” (Bauman 2000), “acceleration” (Rosa 2015), “singularization” (Reckwitz 2020), or “fragmentation” (Lyotard 1984). The everyday impression is that nothing holds, nothing endures—but this very condition characterizes a new kind of order : stability within flux.
As Pascal Michon observes, “[i]t is this new complexity and the surprisingly fluid, but no less jostling, aspect of the new world born from these mutations, which today call for the introduction of the notions of rhythm, and more particularly of rhuthmos” (Michon 2025 [1]).
This paper excavates the pre-Platonic notion of rhuthmos as a manner of flowing, contrasting it with the dominant Platonic conception of rhythm as fixed recurrence. Rather than developing a systematic theoretical frame-work, it proposes Rhuthmoi of Fluidity as a heuristic lens through which stability can be examined as an emergent process rather than a static structure. Drawing on a rheological perspective, as suggested by Marcel Finke and Kassandra Nakas (2022), the humanities stand to gain from analyzing the flow and deformation behavior of contemporary phenomena. This approach allows situated rhuthmoi1 of fluidity to be identified and described through rheological concepts such as viscosity, elasticity, or their combination—viscoelasticity. At this stage, the aim is conceptual clarification rather than fully developed methodological operationalization ; translating rheo-logical vocabulary into concrete research procedures therefore remains an open task for future work. [...]
