I remembered I'd seen this somewhere. A real weird issue of the Stanford
Review:
http://shr.stanford.edu/shreview/5-Sup/text/golston.html
The essay will establish a narrative of incubational links between
developments in the study of rhythm in the fields of psychology,
physiology, musicology, eugenics, genetics, the science of work, pedagogy,
aesthetics, and political propaganda, and will examine how these studies
intersect with one another to produce a complex equation involving rhythm,
pulse, blood, genetics, music, and the organized modern state and its
subjects: after becoming an object of inquiry in psychology, physiology,
and musicology early in the century, rhythm is "carried over" into studies
of genetics and eugenics, while at the same time playing an important role
in theories of work and child-rearing. Ultimately enlisted in Fascist
discourse, it is employed as a tool of propaganda for the construction of
genetically encoded subject-bodies, as well as the body of the state,
itself conceived as a complex array of interpenetrating personal,
physiological, biological, racial, industrial, psychological, and
historical rhythms. Thus by examining theories of rhythm as they were
gradually articulated and as they informed one another in the first half of
the twentieth century, we are able to trace an incubational topography, as
it were, in the making, and to come to an understanding of the mechanisms
by which scientific and theoretical discourses are appropriated for
ideological ends.
Several ambiguities inhering in the body of theory assembled here inform
the debates surrounding rhythm. In general, rhythm is conceived to be
locatable inside the personal as well as the social body, where it is
figured respectively as pulse and heartbeat (blood), and as the biological,
psychological, physiological, and social rhythms (personal tempo, work
rhythms, etc.) which make up the body politic. Rhythms may however also be
employed outside such bodies in the service of marking, inscribing,
organizing, and forming subjects, groups, crowds, and states. Rhythm acts
as the medium through which communication may be established between such
traditionally distinct categories as mind and body, or subject and state,
and in fact the effects of physiological, musical, and other exterior
rhythms on consciousness are central concerns of experiment and theory in
early studies of rhythm. Rhythm is ubiquitous as the unheard pulse or
unconscious tempo of a body, or (and) it can act as an agent of
incubation (colonization) upon or within that body. As Carl Seashore puts
it in his chapter on rhythm in Psychology of Music, rhythm both "stimulates
and lulls, contradictory as this seems": it paradoxically provokes
self-consciousness at the same time that it determines the subject as a
coded unit in a trans- personal array. In either case, it functions to
identify, code, map, and organize body and mind, subject and group.[3]
Phil