Rhythming Rhythm: The Observer’s Role in Analysing Interaction

This essay engages with Alessi’s cognitive-semiotic proposal on autistic experience, which places rhythm at the core of both an explanatory model and a normative project. After reconstructing the conceptual trajectory of rhythm in infant research the essay focuses on a methodological tension internal to Alessi’s framework. If rhythm is defined as an emergent property of attunement distributed across bodily, interactional, and sociomaterial dimensions, then its explanatory use risks collapsing into the observer’s situated criteria of evaluation. In the absence of an objective parameter, the identification of “rhythmic misalignment” can easily become a re-description of divergence from neurotypical norms rather than an explanation of autistic interaction.