The Rhythm of Emergence: Fragments in the Works of Yoshimasu, Mekas, and Tone
Introduction
Artistic creation often arises not from continuity or coherence but from fracture, interruption, and incompletion. This essay explores the generative role of fragmentation in the practices of three avant-garde figures: Gozo Yoshimasu (poetry and performance), Jonas Mekas (diary cinema and staccato editing), and Yasunao Tone (experimental music and Fluxus actions). Though their media differ—language, film, and sound—their works converge in demonstrating how fragments, interruptions, and discontinuities form the very rhythm of emergence.
Fragment as a Creative Principle
Gozo Yoshimasu’s poetry resists syntactic closure. His lines scatter across the page, breaking grammatical flow, and often incorporate non-verbal marks. This disjunction produces a field where rhythm precedes meaning, and the voice becomes a material element of the poem.
Jonas Mekas’s films, particularly Walden (1969), employ staccato editing: rapid cuts, short shots, and abrupt transitions. These cinematic fragments are not subordinated to narrative unity but instead capture the pulsation of lived time. The diary form preserves fragments as they are, granting each moment its singular rhythm.
Yasunao Tone, emerging from Fluxus circles in the 1960s, created scores and performances that dismantled musical conventions. His works—such as Anagram for Strings (1961) or his later digital experiments—embrace accident, noise, and discontinuity. Here, fragments of sound or action are not errors but events: elemental pulses that generate new listening experiences.
Rhythm as Emergence
Across poetry, film, and sound, these artists demonstrate that fragments produce rhythm, and rhythm produces emergence.
For Yoshimasu, the fragmentary word becomes a voice-event, multiplying resonance beyond semantic sense.
For Mekas, the fragmentary shot becomes a time-event, preserving the immediacy of memory.
For Tone, the fragmentary sound-event destabilizes musical expectation and opens a space of indeterminacy.
In each case, rhythm arises not from continuity but from interruption. The gap, the cut, the interval—these become sites of creative force.
Toward a Theory of Fragmentary Emergence
From their practices, we can propose a general framework:
The fragment is not incomplete but possesses its own potentiality.
Rhythm arises through relations among fragments, where disjunction itself forms the connective tissue.
Emergence occurs in assemblage, where fragments never resolve into unity but continually generate new constellations.
This aligns with Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of the fragmentary image and resonates with Deleuze’s notion of difference as productive.
Conclusion
The works of Yoshimasu, Mekas, and Tone reveal a shared aesthetic of fragmentary emergence. Each transforms discontinuity into rhythm, and rhythm into creation. In their practices, the fragment ceases to be a mark of incompletion; instead, it becomes the pulse of life itself, a rhythm through which art continuously generates itself.
