ABSTRACT
Rhythm does not carry something out; it is the very quality of experience, of experiencing, of projecting experience. While French metre remains something given, its metricity survives; when French metre is subjected to vocal perception and expressive articulation, then it is superseded by rhythmic concerns. The rhythmic offers a completely different view of the text from the metrical, a view which flows from the crude proposition that the rhythmic is temporal and consecutive, while the metrical is spatial and juxtapositional. Incipient metre is diverted into a rhythm at once polyphonic and syncopated, something more like a jazz improvisation. Rhythm, aside from that centred 'Yes', which is the stress in every rhythmic phrase, is the force of utterance in the world, the force of utterance in mute things, as much affirming their intersubjectivity as their sharply enunciated selfhoods.
