I have been reading Lefebvre’s little summative book on ‘rhythmanalysis’. I found it intriguing and irritating in equal measure. It was intriguing because I can see potential in using rhythms in understanding and explaining social phenomena, and it was irritating because there was a singular failure to illustrate just how and why this might be the case. As ever, the proof the pudding is in the eating. So this blog is intended to communicate both my (provisional, qualified) enthusiasm and my reservations.
Lefebvre is interested here, as elsewhere, in space and time and how these might be reconceptualised in the interests of the sociological-cum-interdisciplinary project of understanding society. He takes the idea of rhythm with a view to re-founding science and creating ‘a new field of knowledge’, namely, ‘the analysis of rhythms with practical consequences’.
The study of rhythm, Lefebvre asserts, can start in one of two ways. First, one can study and compare cases: ‘the rhythms of the body, living or not (respirations, pulses, circulations, assimilations – durations and phases of these durations etc). This remains close to practice; in confronting the results, the scientific and/or philosophical spirit should arrive at general conclusions.’ To opt for this way is to argue from the particular to the general.
The second way focuses on speculation rather than analysis, ‘the arbitrary subjective in the place of facts.’ This second way does not exclude the first but rather competes with it.
The first method might be characterised by the studies of doctors, physiologists, geologists and historians; the second method is more purely philosophical.
So dense is this text of Lefebvre’s that I will not, cannot, attempt to précis it here. It will have to be enough to catch something of the flavour of his fondness for rhythms and his commendation of rhythmanalysis.
His definition of rhythm is complex and elusive, which is bewitching and understandable, but also frustrating in an Anglo-Saxon kind of way. Everywhere, he writes, where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm. Therefore:
- Repetition (of movements, gestures, action, situations, differences);
- Interferences of linear processes and cyclical processes;
- Birth, growth, peak, then decline and end.
He goes on to write of polyrhythmia, eurhythmia and arrhythmia. Polyrhythmia? Consider your body: ‘thus the everyday reveals itself to be a polyrhythmia from first listening.’ Eurhythmia? ‘Rhythms unite with one another in the state of health, in normal (which is to say normed!) everydayness; when they are discordant, there is suffering, a pathological state (of which aarhythmia is generally, at the same time, symptom, cause and effect.’ He continues: ‘the discordance of rhythms brings previously eurhythmic organisations towards fatal disorder.’
‘Polyrhthmia analyses itself. A fundamental forecast: sooner or later the analysis succeeds in isolating from within the organised whole a particular movement and its rhythm. Often coupled empirically with speculations (see, for example, doctors in the field of auscultation etc), the analytic operation simultaneously discovers the multiplicity of rhythms and the uniqueness of particular rhythms (the heart, the kidneys etc). The rhythmanalysis here defined as a method and a theory pursues this time-honoured labour in a systematic and theoretical manner, by bringing together very diverse practices and very different types of knowledge: medicine, history, climatology, cosmology, poetry (‘the poetic’), etc. Not forgetting, of course, sociology and psychology, which occupy the front line and supply the essentials.’
Lefebvre says much more of course, but this will have to do: it may or may not whet appetites.
In a paper co-authored with Regulier towards the end of his book, Lefebvre tries to apply his rhythmanalysis to the growth and nature of Mediterranean cities. It is highly speculative, replete with injunctions to – well, I almost wrote free associate here; but suffice to say that it is an account that is partial and suggestive, even provocative, rather than comprehensive. Interesting references are made to the salience of rhythms of the climate, the sun and the light and the seas (the tidal ‘lunar’ ports alongside oceans are compared and contrasted with the largely non-tidal ‘solar’ ports of the Mediterranean). They attempt to build on such observations:
If it is true that Mediterranean towns are solar towns, one can expect from them a more intense urban life than in lunar towns., but also one richer in contrasts at the very heart of the town. While in Nordic and oceanic towns one can expect to find more regulated times, linked simultaneously to more restrictive, more disembodied and more abstract forms of (contractual rather than ritual) association.’
They go on to assert that Nordic towns tend to be founded on a contractual, or juridical, basis, while Mediterranean towns tend to be founded on tacit or explicit forms of alliance that extend to the formations of clans, mafias etc.
It is possible, I think, both to accept that they might have a point and that they are light years away from satisfying a sceptical historian, sociologist or general reader.
The point of this blog is to float the thesis that rhythm might be a conceptual lens of some use to the sociologist. It also strikes me that there is a potential overlap with critical realism’s interdisciplinary focus on simultaneously active – using my general shorthand – biological, psychological and social mechanisms. Might these mechanisms be usefully viewed as rhythms, at least in relation to some phenomena of scientific interest? I can see, for example, how body rhythms might interact with those of mental states and social situations. And then there are Lefebvre’s companion concepts of polyrhythmia, eurhythmia and aarhythmia. I should perhaps revisit some of Lefebvre’s major works to think some more about it all.