Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life

1 Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday LifeHENRI LEFEBVREC ontinuumRhythmanalysisThis page intentionally left blank RhythmanalysisHENRI LEFEBVRET ranslated bySTUART ELDENandGERALD MOOREWith an Introduction bySTUART ELDENS pace, Time and Everyday LifeCONTINUUMThe Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX15 East 26th Street, New York NY translation Continuum 2004 Elements of Rhythmanalysisoriginally published as l ments de rythmanalyseby ditions Syllepse, Paris, 1992 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trans-mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system,without prior permission in writing from the Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British : HB: 0-8264-6993-0PB: 0-8264-7299-0 Typeset by Kenneth Burnley, Wirral, CheshirePrinted and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press,Trowbridge, WiltshireContentsAcknowledgementsviRhyth manalysis: An IntroductionviiSTUARTELDENE lements of Rhythmanalysis: An Introduction to the Understanding of Rhythms1 HENRILEFEBVREI ntroduction to Rhythmanalysis 31 The Critique of the Thing 52 The Rhythmanalyst.

2 A Previsionary Portrait193 Seen from the Window 274 Dressage 385 The Media Day 466 The Manipulations of Time 517 Music and Rhythms 578 Conclusions (R sum ) 67 The Rhythmanalytical Project 71 HENRILEFEBVRE ANDCATHERINER GULIERA ttempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities 85 HENRILEFEBVRE ANDCATHERINER GULIERN otes 101 Index111 AcknowledgementsWhile all translations here are new, in order to lend a consistencyto the volume as a whole, we gratefully acknowledge our debt toprevious translators of some of the pieces included here. ChapterThree of Elements of Rhythmanalysisand Rhythmanalysis ofMediterranean Cities appeared in Writings on Cities, edited andtranslated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, Oxford:Blackwell, 1996, pp. 219 27, 228 40; The RhythmanalyticalProject , translated by Imogen Forster, appeared in Key Writings,edited by Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas and Eleonore Kofman,London: Continuum, 2003, pp.

3 190 again. Where was I? Where am I? Mud road. Stopped is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brainripple, breathing , the drum in my temple these are our faithfultimekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat. Vladimir Nabokov,Ada,or Ardor: A Family Chronicle1 Elements of Rhythmanalysis was the last book Lefebvre wrote,although it only appeared after his death, published by his friendand colleague Ren is a work which shows whyLefebvre was one of the most important Marxist thinkers of thetwentieth century, but simultaneously illustrates how his work cri-tiqued and moved beyond that paradigm, incorporating insightsfrom elsewhere in an intoxicating mixture of ideas, illustrationsand analyses. In the analysis of rhythms biological, psycho-logical and social Lefebvre shows the interrelation ofunderstandings of space and time in the comprehension ofeveryday life. This issue of space and time is important, for here,perhaps above all, Lefebvre shows how these issues need to bethought together rather than separately.

4 For the English-speakingaudience of his works it equally shows how a non-linear concep-tion of time and history balanced his famous rethinking of thequestion of s study includes a wide range of discussions in orderto illustrate these points. Music, the commodity, measurement,the media, political discipline and the city are all deployed topowerful effect. It is at once a book about metaphysical issues andRhythmanalysis:An Introductionone concerned with the minutiae of Everyday life; a political bookand a contribution to cultural studies. Lefebvre had been workingon the themes explored in the book for a number of years, inwritings on Nietzsche and aesthetics particularly,3although it wasonly in the 1980s that he explicitly dealt with the notion of rhythm first in the third and final volume of his Critique of EverydayLife, published in 1981,4and then in two co-written shorter pieceswhich preceded the book Elements of Rhythmanalysis.

5 Theseessays, The Rhythmanalytical Project and Attempt at theRhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities , co-written with his lastwife, Catherine R gulier, are included in this volume, whichtherefore brings together all of Lefebvre s writings on this general terms, Lefebvre is concerned with taking theconcept of rhythm and turning it into a science, a new field ofknowledge: the analysis of rhythms; with practical conse-quences .5 Rhythm, for Lefebvre, is something inseparable fromunderstandings of time, in particular repetition. It is found in theworkings of our towns and cities, in urban life and movementthrough space. Equally, in the collision of natural biological andsocial timescales, the rhythms of our bodies and society, theanalysis of rhythms provides a privileged insight into the questionof Everyday life. Lefebvre takes a number of themes the thing,the object, life in the urban or rural environment, the role ofmedia, political discipline and the notion of dressage, and music,among others and rethinks them through the notion of question of the body, and in particular the body under capi-talism, is a recurrent and indeed central topic.

6 As he notes, thepush pull exchange between the general and the particular, theabstraction of concepts and the concrete analysis of the mundane,starting with the body, is at play throughout the work, althoughLefebvre follows the former, starting with full consciousness ofthe abstract in order to arrive at the concrete .6 Everyday Life, Time and SpaceAs Armand Ajzenberg has noted, Lefebvre considered this bookon rhythmanalysis to be the de facto fourth volume of hisoccasional series Critique of Everyday first volumeviiiRhythmanalysis: An Introductionappeared shortly after the liberation of France, in 1947, and wasrepublished with a lengthy preface in 1958. The second volumeappeared in 1961, the third twenty years covereda wide range of themes in these volumes, ranging from economicand political analyses to film and literary criticism. This work is noexception, with the range of issues already noted. Lefebvre swork on rhythms and repetition is useful in gaining insight intothe double sense of the notion of the Everyday a dual meaningfound in the English and the quotidianmeans themundane, the Everyday , but also the repetitive, what happensevery day.

7 Indeed in the second volume, thirty years in advance,Lefebvre had promised a future work on rhythmanalysis,9apromise which was partially delivered in the third volume, andthen finally in this, his fullest treatment of the the writings on rhythmanalysis are more than this. Mostexplicitly they are a contribution to another of his lifelongprojects, the attempt to get us both to think space and timedifferently, and to think them together. In the English-speakingworld, apart perhaps from Critique of Everyday Life, no otherbook of Lefebvre s has had as much impact as The Production ofSpace. Here Lefebvre poses questions about the role space playsin our lives, from the conceptualisation of the world to cities andrural environments, and to the homes we live in. Lefebvre sanalysis is both conceptual the threefold distinction betweenspatial practices, representations of space and spaces of represen-tation and historical, with discussion of abstract, absolute,relative and concrete historical dimension is oftenneglected in contemporary appropriations of Lefebvre s work,which is seriously to misread him.

8 And as he notes at the end ofthis book, an analysis of rhythms, a rhythmanalysis, wouldcomplete the exposition of the production of space .11 AlthoughLefebvre was concerned with correcting what he saw asMarxism s over-emphasis of the temporal dimension and con-comitant under-emphasis of the spatial he was also involved ina lifelong struggle both within and without orthodox Marxism topluralise its understanding of time and s very earliest writings in the mid-1920s were writteneither in collaboration or in close contact with a group of youngRhythmanalysis: An Introductionixphilosophy students in Paris. The group included such figures asNorbert Guterman, who went on to become a translator in NewYork, the philosopher and psychologist Georges Politzer, thenovelist Paul Nizan, and the sociologist Georges they edited various journals including PhilosophiesandL esprit, before discovering Marx and going on to found La revuemarxistein the late 1920s.

9 Lefebvre later recounted that theywere concerned with challenging the dominant philosophy claimed that it was at this time that hedeveloped what he called the theory of moments . For Lefebvre,moments are significant times when existing orthodoxies areopen to challenge, when things have the potential to be over-turned or radically altered, moments of crisis in the original senseof the term. Rather than the Bergsonian notion of dur e,duration, Lefebvre was privileging the importance of the moment has a long tradition in Western thought, mostrecently in the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. ForLefebvre it is above all Nietzsche s writings that are important. InNietzsche sThus Spoke Zarathustra, the moment, the Augenblick,the blink of an eye, is a gateway where past and future collide, andthe image of the eternal Lefebvre s own life it washis vision of a crucified sun, of the Christian cross imposed over asolar image, seen when he was walking in the Pyrenees, that hethought was a significant turning point.

10 Lefebvre suggested thatthe sight was one where the elemental forces of his adolescencewere held in check by the constraints of the Catholic question of rhythm and tempo is also important to Nie-tzsche s conception of style: to communicate a state, an inwardtension of pathos, by means of signs, including the tempo of thesesigns that is the meaning of every style .16 Lefebvre s understanding of time was also shaped by hisreading of Proust, with the issues of loss and memory, recollectionand repetition becoming particularly the timeLefebvre became a Marxist, in the late 1920s, he therefore had afairly worked-through understanding of questions of his analysis of the difference between linear and cyclical time,and the contrast between clock time and lived time, there is adifference between his understanding and that of Marxism. HisxRhythmanalysis: An Introductionunderstanding of history is not the linear, teleological progressionof Hegel or Marx, but closer to a Nietzschean sense of change andcycles.