Rhythmanalysis: Volume 17

The work of Henri Lefebvre Rhythmanalysis, Space, Time and Everyday Life (2004) is generally known as the original proposer of rhythmanalysis, inspired by the last chapter of Gaston Bachelard's book La dialectique de la durée (1963), entitled ‘Rhythmanalysis’. Nevertheless, it was the Portuguese philosopher Lúcio Pinheiro dos Santos who developed the notion of rhythmanalysis. In this chapter I address this episode of the genealogy of rhythmanalysis aiming to contribute to a broader understanding of its context of origin. I also present fragments of a rhythmanalysis exercise developed in Caminito, Buenos Aires, as part of my research in the field of art studies. Following a pre-Platonic notion of rhythm (Benveniste, 1966), I draw on those fragments as much as on the reflexive confrontation of rhythmanalysis with feminist and ch'ixi epistemologies (e.g., Haraway, 1988; Rivera, 2018) in order to propose what I come to call rhuthmanalysis.

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between gender performativity and rhythm, taking the City of London (often known by its metonym the Square Mile) as the focus for the empirical research and extending a Lefebvrian understanding of urban space and time via the practice of rhythmanalysis. It is concerned with how the City of London is imagined, constructed and experienced in and through gender performativity which can be expressed rhythmically (Reid-Musson, 2018). The research is based on fieldwork including photographic and interview data, as well as an embodied, immersive methodology used to analyse rhythms, showing how this can help to both sense and make sense of organisational place, particularly in terms of how such places can compel feelings of belonging or non-belonging. The chapter looks beyond the spatial configuration of a single organisation to encompass the wider geographical location of multiple organisations, in this case the City.

The findings show that the relationship between the socio-cultural and material aspects of the City can be understood through the rhythms of place. Using a methodological approach based on Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis (2004), the chapter foregrounds a subjective, embodied and experiential way of researching the places and spaces of organising, and shows how gendered inclusion and exclusion can be expressed spatially and rhythmically.

This chapter develops Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis to investigate the ways super-diversity comes to life in the everyday city through the intersection of the spatial and temporal. The chapter explores the multicultural intimacies of streets in a London neighbourhood through a close ethnographic focus on rhythms and atmospheres using slow-motion video. The research contributes to an emerging field of visual ethnographic scholarship by presenting slow-motion video as a method to explore the ‘presence’ (Lefebvre, 2004) of super-diversity and conviviality on the street.

I argue that in slowing down the encounters of the street, slow-motion video shows the often overlooked sensible and affective elements of super-diverse urban space, the mundane interactions between bodies, materials and technologies that create a form of ‘convivial affect’. I argue that these everyday encounters are shaped by a situated politics of difference and yet are also mediated by wider rhythms and atmospheres, contributing to a sense of ‘social time’. I draw attention to both the human and non-human elements of the streets. These material and technological elements can uncover the wider discourses and circulatory regimes of atmospheres in urban super-diverse neighbourhoods, focussing on their relation to broader flows of capital, forms of postcolonial culture and translocality.

This research has implications for how we understand super-diversity and its manifestations in urban space. It encourages policymakers and academics to recognise the affective human and non-human encounters that are a crucial aspect of conviviality, the everyday ways we live together with difference.

In rhythmanalysis, energy is positioned centre stage in defining what rhythm is and how it manifests: everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy there is rhythm (Lefebvre, 1992/2004, p. 15). However, there is no further explication and little engagement in subsequent scholarship. I discuss this absence and propose a thermodynamic, materialist understanding of the energy in rhythm, linking to Lefebvre's interest in physics-thinking, and to his and Régulier's commitment to a multi-disciplinary rhythmanalytic project. I consider the polyrhythmic interweaving of energy flows in everyday life and the relationship between the techno-energy of energy systems, and the ‘natural’ energetic exchanges of planetary movements, ecological processes and organism functioning, including human bodies. I outline how an energetically oriented, multi-disciplinary rhythmanalysis can be applied to the climate crisis, to its arrhythmic consequences as well as to its making and mitigation in the rhythms of society and economy. I then focus on the rhythm energies of urban life and the challenges of transitioning urban mobility away from the domination of hydrocarbon-powered automobility systems. The polyrhythmic structure of urban automobility is characterised, encompassing rhythms of fuel supply, fuelling, vehicle movement and pollution generation. The rhythm-energetic shifts involved in moving to shared public transport, electric rather than hydrocarbon powered vehicles and to the corporeal, calorie-fuelled rhythms of walking and cycling are laid out, considering what they change, what they retain and what they add to the polyrhythmia of urban mobility.

The rhythmic patterns of urban mobilities, and their fluctuations and modifications across the day, give the streets their perceived and experienced atmosphere and character. This paper examines such street atmospheres and focusses on the role of embodied mobility rhythms in the (re)making of the atmospheres throughout the day. Utilising a rhythmanalytical framework and research data comprising videoed site observations and on-site fieldnotes, the study analyses ‘crepuscular’ (behaviour taking place during the twilight hours of the day, at dawn and dusk) mobility rhythms that reveal internal tensions and modalities of urban sites across a 24-hour period. The analysis highlights the connections between fluctuating pressures of motor traffic and mobile embodied appropriations of the space in the making of the streetscape and its changing atmospheres between the ‘day-time city’ and the ‘night-time city’. The chapter demonstrates that an analytical focus on such ‘in-between’ temporalities of the twilight can help to map the complex and multifaceted urban polyrhythmia, which, in turn, might provide new insight for rhythm-based perspectives towards urban atmospheres and street spaces as sites of urban social life.

Just who is the ‘analyst’ who practices rhythmanalysis? The extension of the name ‘rhythmanalyst’ to other than scholarly practitioners makes possible an investigation of the relationship of rhythmanalysis to other rhythmanalytic forms of knowing and representing urban space and the ways in which these differing but related practices may challenge, undermine or inform each other. In this paper, drawing on years of ethnographic and autoethnographic research in three North American cities, I discuss the rhythmanalytical practice involved in cabdriving, as this is shaped by the technologies drivers use to sense the city and by the transformation of the taxicab into the ‘ridesharing’ or soft cab. First, I discuss the occupational knowledge and wayfinding practice of cabdrivers and the extent to which their work requires the development by means of a variety of tools and practices, of a sense of the city as composed of multiple interacting rhythmic movements or polyrhythmia, with which they must strategically converge and facilitate. Second, I discuss the redelegation of the role of rhythmanalyst to predictive algorithms and mobile interfaces, as part of the reinvention of the taxicab, and its associated micropolitics and power/knowledge relations, by smartphone-enabled hailing and dispatching services. Struggles over, and transformations of, these non-academic forms of rhythmanalysis may provide insight, in turn, into the contemporary politics of the production of social space.

This personal essay aims to make use of rhythmanalysis as a creative critical methodology to give an account of a visit to the French Riviera town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence. In so doing, it attends to the spatial, experiential and sensory dimensions of tourism, of individual physicality and of writing. The place of the rhythmanalyst as defined by Lefebvre is naturally aligned with that of the creative writer. The necessity of being at once immersed and at a remove, of attending to rhythms by ‘getting outside them, but not completely’, of taking the position of ‘the observer, simultaneously centre and periphery’; the ‘abandon[ment to] duration’; the transgression of limits (Lefebvre, 2004, pp. 17, 46, 37): this might describe the space and time of writing. As such, the experience of the act of writing is brought to the fore and considered as a subject in its own right; rhythm is central to the composition and form. This essay takes its cue from ‘Seen from the Window’, but moves through different thresholds and allows that motion to shape the text; and from ‘Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities’, in its concern with the intersection of public and private in the urban environment, but with a greater attention to the inhabited, present body, and particularly the sense of smell (Lefebvre, 2004). It seeks to work with and against Lefebvre's example by placing a feminine body at its centre, while recognising the particularity of that authorial body: a white woman and a tourist, at leisure (Lyon, 2019; Reid-Musson, 2018). As a work of creative writing, it privileges the subjective, narrative and impressionistic over the analytical and abstract.

This chapter embraces a rhythmanalytic approach to address the complexities of a city recovering from a disaster. Bridging Henri Lefebvre's work on everyday life with his later work on rhythms this chapter engages his theory to analyse the case of L'Aquila, a city in central Italy that was destroyed by an earthquake in 2009. To this day, the city's skyline is dominated by cranes, while life unfolds along with sounds of the ongoing reconstruction. While the city is still recovering from the earthquake, the landscape of ruins co-exists with a landscape of construction. More than 10 years after the earthquake stripped away life from its historical centre, the city continues to live in a temporal in-between the disaster and its future ‘rebirth’. While most of the current research on the city neglects the city's everyday experience, my research decentres the debate by analysing the everyday rhythms of L'Aquila's historical centre. Additionally, drawing from walking interviews this chapter highlights the perplexing aspects of everyday life in the city emphasising how the city is negotiated and learned from the locals. This chapter highlights the way different temporalities blur in the everyday practices of reconstruction, emphasising how the city is lived and created in the here-and-now.

This chapter is an account of a rhythmanalysis of a representation of daily life in Venice in calle Rugagiuffa in a YouTube series. This series – named Rugagiuffa in reference to the calle in which was filmed – was self-produced by a group of young friends struggling with an everyday reality very different from the one presented by tour operators: a lack of rental property, unemployment or work that is demeaning and strictly off the books. In the first part of the chapter, I refer to the basic concepts of the rhythmanalytic methodology developed by Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier and use it to describe Venetian rhythms starting from the relations between the body and urban space. Then, I adapt Lefebvre's thought in order to show how the status of ‘city of art’ coincides, for Venice, on the one hand, with its commodification for exclusively tourist purposes and, on the other hand, with the trivialisation of Venetian daily life, reduced to a tourist spectacle. In the final part, I use Rugagiuffa as a bittersweet mise-en-scène of the ability of the tourist monoculture to take possession at various levels of daily life and its relationship with the residents. I argue that the daily life of the Venetian citizens is subsumed within the city's tourist-commercial spectacle to the point of imposing, in spite of themselves, a high degree of consensus, adherence, commitment and integration.

The purpose of this chapter is to showcase rhythmanalysis as methodology for the field of island studies. Islands maintain urban qualities that occur seasonally or intermittently with the mass arrival of tourists. On the Greek island of Lesvos, the focus of this chapter, the expansion of the tourist population brings with it the increase of events and activities such as concerts, art shows, sports and the multiplication of social venues including bars, cafes and restaurants that are typical of cities. Lesvos has become well-known as ground zero to the European Union (EU) refugee crisis. This chapter also considers how the influx of migrants contributes to the rhythm of intermittent urbanisation on the island. To ground my analysis, I relate these forms of visitations to the myth of Persephone. The application of rhythmanalysis for articulating the social conditions of Lesvos, and potentially islands, includes bringing together historical, geo-political and ideological cadences. In the case of Lesvos, Greece's historic peripheralisation socially and economically in Europe shapes northern European tourism and the EU's lack of accountability towards the immigration crisis on its eastern borders. The application of rhythmanalysis holds potential not only for island studies but also for evaluating regional geo-politics and for considering how some spaces oscillate between urbanness and rurality.

This paper explores the potential of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms – specifically those between embodied circadian and biological rhythms and the rhythms of working life. It takes as a case study a prototype performance research method investigating the methodological and practical potential of quantified self technologies to reconnect the body to its forms of abstraction in a digital age by means of the collection, interpretation and sonification of data using wearable tech, mobile apps, synthesised music and modes of visual communication. Quantitative data were selectively ‘sonified’ with synthesisers and drum machines to produce a 40-minute electronic symphony performed to a public audience. The paper theorises the project as an intervention reconnecting quantitative data with the qualitative experience it abstracts from, exploring the potential for these technologies to be used as tools of remediation that recover the embodied social subject from its abstraction in data for critical self-knowledge and understanding.

Outdoor arts festivals have been proposed as a means of rehearsing democratic practices and of placemaking interventions in the space time of contemporary capitalism. I consider whether they are really able to repurpose civic and pseudo public space and challenge the production and reproduction of that space as a colonial and neoliberal territory, or are they merely examples of the ‘pseudo-fête’ prolonging such structures by other means?

This chapter uses case studies of two outdoor arts festivals in the United Kingdom, at which I have performed rhythmanalyses, to explore festivalised spaces and the extent to which they might empower people. Empowerment here relates not only to individual agency, autonomy and self-determination but also to the development of shared, social identity within crowds. The role of festival management, the arrangement of festival space/times and the codification of behaviour are of particular relevance to these effects. I use time-lapse videography to capture data around flows and accretions of audiences, combined with my embodied presence in the lived space of the festival, sensing its rhythms and atmospheres.

Using the concept of polyrhythmia to comprehend and unpick complex durational patterns, I focus on how public spaces are transformed when animated by performances and how public space can redefine both performance and audience dynamics. The adaptation and application of rhythmanalysis in this project has revealed patterns of behaviour and evidenced characteristic qualities of outdoor arts which were previously ignored or only assumed.

This chapter extends Henri Lefebvre's writings on rhythm to explore how time, space, power and difference articulate themselves in the uneven social relations of intercultural space. Taking Lefebvre's ‘Seen From the Window’ chapter as a theme, I propose a variation of rhythmanalysis which interrogates the politics of copresence at a dance party in Munich, Germany. Plug in Beats is a participatory party – songs are selected by the crowd through a karaoke-like process. The monthly event was initiated in 2015 when a refugee camp was installed near an arts and cultural center. The party creates a space for dialogue between new migrants and established locals occupying a wide range of social positions. I look at the implications of rhythm for studying intercultural dance through a rhythmanalysis of one party in June 2018. The methodological approach is framed around the embodied multisensory participant observation advocated by Lefebvre; however, the analysis draws on additional ethnographic data from interviews, audio recordings, Shazam (a song identification app) and video footage. I propose a relational rhythmanalysis which engages the historical and geographic power dynamics at work in music, dancing and in the party space. Such an approach, I argue, reveals how participants negotiate and sometimes reconfigure social relations of difference through rhythm itself. While there are limits to the questions that rhythmanalysis allows the researcher to ask and answer, it is a valuable means to engage how power and difference work – and might be more equitably reworked – in migrant-receiving and otherwise heterogeneous spaces.