Arrythmia: Capitalism's Destruction of Rhythm and Relation

This chapter charts the destruction of rhythm and remaking of relation in a series of interrupted, arrhythmic gestures, attempting—with the help of three “companion objects”: a film, a novel, and a wonderful book about the “war on sleep”—to uncover a horizon beyond collapse. Rhythm and movement bring worlds to life, a state in which everything exists in relation to everything else, forming complex patterns, such that the chaos of proliferation is only apparent. It takes the very different ways of knowing developed by human beings over millennia or centuries by indigenous cultures and by Western science to allow us to look, to listen, and to feel more deeply into this life. For Indigenous Australians, rhythm is everywhere implicit in life: at once a mode of being, a way of life, a series of practices, a conjuring, through which knowledge of “country” is both called up and recalled (encompassing generations of humans and their living environment, including all that Western conceptions of “landscape” treat as inanimate). Indigenous cultures more broadly tend to create relations of “sympathy” and “syntony” with the world, with rhythm serving as the essential element in this crucial synchronization of human life with the natural world....