Sonogrammar : Gertrude Stein and the pulse of writing

![CDATA[A material phenomenon that interrelates time with space by way of repetition, rhythm is ‘a patterning of energy simultaneously produced and perceived […], tending toward regularity but complicated by constant variations and local inflections’ (Attridge 1995, 3). French sociologist Henri Lefebvre held that the social world emerges out of rhythm: human bodies, as they circulate within a ‘collision of natural biological and social timescales’ (Elden 2004, xii), are circumscribed and intersected by the continuous and cadenced motion of the other bodies around them. Studying the articulation of bodies with other bodies via rhythmic motion constitutes for Lefebvre (2004 [1992]) a ‘rhythmanalysis’ – but for New Materialist scholars, such as physicist Karen Barad (2007), the communion of bodies at the level of particle is a coconstitution – or ‘intra-relation’ – that occurs not only among human but also non-human bodies; not only with organic matter but also its synthetic counterpart. According to physicists, all matter is structurally governed by ‘an anarchy of vibrations’ (Bachelard 2000 [1950], 137). ‘Matter,’ as Bachelard reminds, ‘is not just sensitive to rhythms but it exists, in the fullest sense of the term, on the level of rhythm’ (137). In a rhythmanalysis, the analyst, who is inextricable from the material conditions of her sociality, deploys her own embodied rhythms as a metronome, both producing and perceiving a measure of external beats. The texts that make up ‘Sonogrammar’ are responses to a New Materialist rhythmanalysis of my reading of Gertrude Stein’s object-portraits from the chapter ‘Objects’ in her Tender Buttons (1915). They extend Lefebvre’s analytic mode beyond social studies of human being; or rather, they dilate the concept ‘social’ so that taking measure of the constitution of vitality includes a negotiation with material phenomena of all kinds.]]