Aalborg Universitet Rhythms Now Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis

Aalborg Universitet Rhythms Now Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis Revisited Christiansen, Steen Ledet; Gebauer, Mirjam Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Publication date: 2019 Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication from Aalborg University Citation for published version (APA): Christiansen, S. L., & Gebauer, M. (Eds.) (2019). Rhythms Now: Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis Revisited. (Open Access ed.) Aalborg Universitetsforlag. Interdisciplinære kulturstudier General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. ? Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. ? You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain ? You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Downloaded from vbn.aau.dk on: October 05, 2021 Edited by Steen Ledet Christiansen & Mirjam Gebauer Edited by Steen Ledet Christiansen & Mirjam Gebauer RHYTHMS NOW Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis Revisited AALBORG UNIVERSITETSFORLAG RHYTHMS NOW Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis Revisited AALBORG UNIVERSITY PRESS Rhythms Now. Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis Revisited Edited by Steen Ledet Christiansen & Mirjam Gebauer 1. OA Edition © Aalborg University Press, 2019 Layout: Grethe Lassen / Toptryk Grafisk ApS Cover Art: Ernst-Ullrich Pinkert ISBN: 978-87-7210-022-7 Published by Aalborg University Press | forlag.aau.dk The book is published with support from The Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives LIST OF CONTENTS Lefebvre and Rhythms Today Steen Ledet Christiansen & Mirjam Gebauer 5 How Musical is Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis? Peter Dayan 17 Rhythms, Refrains and Regionality: Learning from Kathleen Stewart Neil Campbell 33 The Rhythm of Things in Lutz Seiler’s Prose Work Mirjam Gebauer 49 The Rhythms of Viral Communication and Lefebvre Jørgen Riber Christensen 71 Drone Rhythms: Edge of Tomorrow Steen Ledet Christiansen 95 Micro- and Macro-Rhythms in the Spools, Loops and Patches of Jack Kerouac and A.R. Ammons Bent Sørensen 111 Mapping Wild Rhythms: Robert Macfarlane as Rhythmanalyst Jens Kirk 127 The Pulse of Nature: Gary Snyder and The Shamanic Beat Camelia Elias 143 Rhythms at Sea: Lefebvre and Maritime Fiction Søren Frank 159 LEFEBVRE AND RHYTHMS TODAY Steen Ledet Christiansen & Mirjam Gebauer Rhythms abound today, in a time where all manner of rhythms intersect and amplify each other. We experience the everyday rhythms of work, relaxation, and their increasing overlap. The me- diated rhythms of news cycles, social media obligations, and the shows we follow take on an increasingly staccato pace, moving in smaller and smaller increments of time. Simultaneously, climate change and ecological collapse reveal time scales too long and too deep to be previously noted; the rhythms of deep time suddenly threaten to overtake our quotidian hum-drum life in ways that are unimaginable. Small surprise, then, that the rhythmanalysis presented by the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre has sprung into focus once more (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 2004, originally published 1992 as Éléments de rythmanalyse). The Neo-Marxist thinker had been widely known through his contributions on questions of space, place and urbanity, one of his main works being The Produc- tion of Space (1974, La Production de l’espace). His rhythmanalysis, however, grew out of another important project which followed him throughout his life resulting in the three-volume work Critique of Everyday Life (1947, 1961, 1981 Critique de la vie quotidienne). The earliest thoughts on rhythm appear in the second volume of the Critique. The small book which was solely dedicated to rhythms and the last book written by Lefebvre, was in part the result of a 5 collaboration with his wife Cathérine Regulier-Lefebvre and was published in 1992 posthumously. It seems as if Lefebvre was well aware of the high potential which the perspective on rhythm im- plies, as he contoured his project as a “new field of knowledge”. However, it took around two decades before the rhythmanalytical approach would make the impressive impact in different fields, as it has today. In this way Stuart Elden, one of the two translators of the English version of the Rhythmanalysis, proved to be quite foresighted when he in his introduction, in 2004, guessed that it was “probably too early to tell” (2004, xiii) whether Lefeb- vre had succeeded with his aim to found a new rhythmanalytical science. It was indeed only with the English translation around ten years after the publishing of the French original, that a broad- er dissemination of Lefebvre’s approach was launched.…Today, we see Lefebvre’s concept being used in a wide variety of fields such as political theory, sociology, urbanism, environmental his- tory and media studies. Namely influential titles such as Yvette Bíro, Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design (2008) and Thomas Apperley, Gaming Rhythms (2009) were one of the main source of inspiration for the present undertaking. Not least, the in- ternet platform Rhuthmos which was established in 2010 and col- lects French, English and German contributions on rhythm from a wide range of fields bears witness to the awareness of the notion of rhythm in academia and the productivity of rhythmanalysis. In Rhythmanalysis Lefebvre provides a straightforward definition of rhythms: “Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm” (15, emphasis in original). Rhythmanalysis proceeds by refusing to “isolate an object, or a subject, or a relation” but instead “seeks to grasp a moving but determinate complexity” (12). This perspective on temporal patterns opens for a whole new field of investi- gation, a “new field of knowledge”, as Lefebvre calls it. Lefebvre has no patience for synthesis but instead wishes to link the triad of “time-space-energy” without fusing them (12). Consider how time feels slower in an airport while waiting for a connecting flight, be- cause we have no energy to spend. We cannot synthesize this triad 6 but we can easily see how time, space, and energy are linked here. In this way, the particular is allowed precedent over abstraction. Each rhythm works according to its own logic, yet escapes any logic we may try to enforce on it. To say that rhythms escape logic and deal with the particular is not to say that we cannot detail rhythms. Lefebvre outlines four forms of rhythms (Lefebvre 2004, 18): 1) secret rhythms, what he also calls physiological and psychological rhythms, that covers the rhythms we are unaware of, whether those of memory, breathing, or trees growing. 2) public rhythms, essentially the social rhythms of calendars and organized life, but also the shared rhythms of tiredness, digestion, and so on (the examples are Lefebvre’s). 3) fictional rhythms that cover everything from gestures, art, and other cultural endeavors. 4) dominating-dominated rhythms that Lefeb- vre points out are both completely made up but also potentially long-lasting. We should distinguish here between what feels arbitrary to the individual (why do I have to begin work at 8?) while being necessary for the social to function (everybody else begins at 8). If this sounds contradictory, we can think of social norms such as work and retirement age; both of which are arbitrary rhythms with long-lasting effects. Most importantly of all, all of these rhythms (and for that mat- ter, any rhythms that we would want to add to this typology) interact and impact each other. So, these rhythms link. And yet, while they link, they do not fuse and become one rhythm. While I might be tired from work, and while the interaction between work and (lack of) energy can impact my breathing, no one would ar- gue that my work rhythms, my sleep rhythms, and my breathing rhythms are the same. Although, indisputably, if my breathing rhythm stops my work rhythm becomes much more complicated. This is why Lefebvre rejects conventional thesis-antithesis-synthesis thinking. Different rhythms never become one rhythm, but they will amplify or decrease each other. The attractiveness of Lefebvre’s argument should be clear now; rhythmanalysis’ core idea of thinking distinct issues together reso- nates with a multitude of theoretical innovations since Lefebvre’s 7 work was published. At its most basic, rhythmanalysis allows for a move away from constructivist thought, ranging from critical theory, poststructuralism, and most other branches of cultural theory, without giving up the insights provided by constructivist theories. Rhythmanalysis simply insists on allowing discourses, texts, materialities, and sensations to move unhindered between each other. Different rhythms that never fuse but always link. Rhythmanalysis allows us to discuss lived experience, both in terms of the constraints of contemporary society, but also the af- fordances (social, technological, cultural) that we all have access to, in different ways. In this way, rhythms allow us to recognize how multiple, different forms inform both our experience but also culture and society as a whole. Rhythmanalysis allows for close attention to the particularities of each rhythm, while also recog- nizing the combined effect. Here we find the first point of contact with other recent theories, namely the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol, and others. Latour’s concept of translators as that which “may generate traceable associations” is clearly close to Lefebvre’s con- ception of linking over fusing (Latour 2005, 108).

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