Rhythmanalysis

Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life is a collection of essays by Marxist sociologist and urbanist philosopher Henri Lefebvre. The book outlines a method for analyzing the rhythms of urban spaces and the effects of those rhythms on the inhabitants of those spaces. It builds on his past work, with which he argued space is a production of social practices. Two concluding essays are co-authored by Catherine Régulier and had been previously published in the 1980's.

The book is considered to be the fourth volume in his Critique of Everyday Life. Published after his death in 1992, Rhythmanalysis is Lefebvre's last book. It was first translated into English by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore in 2004.

Origins of rhythmanalysis

The term "rhythmanalysis" was coined by Portuguese philosopher Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos in a lost 1931 manuscript which focused on the physiological dimensions of rhythms. His ideas on rhythmanalysis are explicated in and further developed by Gaston Bachelard in his 1936 book La dialectique de la durée (The Dialectic of Duration).^[1][2] Lefebvre had previously considered rhythms in the second and third volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne (1961, 1981) and Le production de l'espace (1974).^[3]

Other thinkers to consider rhythms before Lefebvre include sociologists/philosophers Emile Durkheim, Roger Caillois, Marcel Mauss, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Gabriel Tarde, dancer Rudolf Laban, as well as architects Alexander Klein and Le Corbusier. The writer Georges Perec and semiologist Roland Barthes were considering rhythms contemporaneously to Lefebvre, though less dichotomously.^[3]

General concept of rhythm

Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm concerns the repetition of a

Lefebvre describes presence as the “facts of both nature and culture, at the same time sensible, affective and moral rather than imaginary” (author’s emphasis, trans. Elden and Moore). Rhythmanalysis stresses that presence is of an innately temporal character and can never be represented by any simulacrum of the present (people walking down a street, the sun going down), but can only be grasped through the analysis of rhythms (people walking down a street through time, the sun’s movement through time).

Present

The present consists of one’s sensory perceptions. Lefebvre frequently warns of “the trap of the present” wherein the present is always trying to pass itself off as presence, the rhythmanalytical truth of a situation. “The trap of the present” relies on false representation. Lefebvre argues that the present engages in a commodification of reality when it successfully passes itself off as presence.

Characteristics of rhythms

Lefebvre describes four alignments of rhythms. They are:

• Arrhythmia, conflict or dissonance between or among two or more rhythms, such as might occur (biologically) in an ill person;
• Polyrhythmia,
  co-existence of two or more rhythms without the conflict or dissonance
  that suggests arrhythmia;
• Eurhythmia, constructive interaction between or among two or more rhythms, such as occurs in healthy creatures;
• Isorhythmia, the rarest association between rhythms, implies equivalence of repetition, measure and frequency.

Editions

• originally published in French as: Éléments de rythmanalyse. Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 1992.
• English translation published as: Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum, 2004.
  ISBN 9780826472991
  .