The book in which this chapter appears was developed from a series of conferences and seminars on rhythm and rhythmanalysis, during which repeated references were made to the works of Deleuze and Guattari and Lefebvre. The latter is not surprising given his writings on ‘rhythmanalysis’ (Lefebvre 2013) and a theory of ‘moments’ (2014: 634–52; 800–7). Deleuze and Guattari (2013; Deleuze 1994), while less immediately accessible, have also offered signifi-cant and evocative takes on rhythm and the ‘refrain’. This chapter, however, takes a somewhat different tack by referencing the work of Roland Barthes, or more specifically a brief commentary on rhythm that appears in his lecture course How to Live Together (2013). Of course, Barthes was a reader of Deleuze (as can be seen in his lecture notes) with a shared interest in intensities (rather than codes and ‘systems’ of codification etc.). And there is a more direct connection with Lefebvre. Both were members of the Marxist circle that published the influential journal Arguments; as part of which both ‘strove to develop a critical and reflexive Marxism … [that] sought to understand the sociocultural transformations occurring within France and other Western industrial societies in the postwar era’ (Gardiner 2000: 74). In this respect both were offering new theories of the everyday, of which Lefebvre's account of rhythm can be understood as an important component, enabling a blend of political and aesthetic analysis. While Barthes’ own account of rhythm is more peripheral, it can nonetheless help us consider the writing of rhythm in important ways, not least in allowing for a more writerly account of rhythmanalysis, which opens out to an ethics of rhythm: to question less what rhythm is and what it does, and instead to consider what kinds of rhythms we want and desire; to shift from ontological questions of rhythm to ethical ones.

Inventions of Rhythm

Rhythm might appear to be something we can intuitively relate to, as something that pervades, that we must fall in with.