Geographies of Rhythm

Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies

Tim Edensor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317129035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

In Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre put forward his ideas on the relationship between time and space, particularly how rhythms characterize space. Here, leading geographers advance and expand on Lefebvre's theories, examining how they intersect with current theoretical and political concerns within the social sciences. In terms of geography, rhythmanalysis highlights tensions between repetition and innovation, between the need for consistency and the need for disruption. These tensions reveal the ways in which social time is managed to ensure a measure of stability through the instantiation of temporal norms, whilst at the same time showing how this is often challenged. In looking at the rhythms of geographies, and drawing upon a wide range of geographical contexts, this book explores the ordering of different rhythms according to four main themes: rhythms of nature, rhythms of everyday life, rhythms of mobility, and the official and routine rhythms which superimpose themselves on the multiple rhythms of the body.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Thinking about Rhythm and Space

Tim Edensor

This edited collection aims to explore the fertile suggestions offered by Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis. First published in English in 2004, it has proved to be a stimulating resource for current thinking about timespace, place and everyday life. This volume features a diverse range of essays that have engaged with Lefebvre’s ideas, developing some of his insights and going beyond his analysis. Thus, while Rhythmanalysis looms large throughout the book as a touchstone and point of embarkation, the ideas here are not constrained by Lefebvre’s highly suggestive but brief volume. More specifically, the collection is concerned with investigating how rhythms shape human experience in timespace and pervade everyday life and place. In this introduction, through reviewing the critical and theoretical potential that rhythmanalysis offers and its intersection with current ideas in human geography and the social sciences, I introduce the chapters that follow.

Most obviously, rhythmanalysis, placed in the broader context of time-geography, can contribute to the development of the temporal understanding of place and space. Here, the cultural experience and social understandings of time must be conceived as dynamic, multiple and heterogeneous. Rather than ‘a singular or uniform social time stretching across a uniform social space’, May and Thrift contend that we need to be ‘aware of various (and uneven) networks of time stretching in different and divergent directions across an uneven social field’ (2001: 5) and Barbara Adam asserts that we need to explore the distinct formations of ‘tempo, timing, duration, sequence and rhythm as the mutually implicating structures of time’ (1998: 202). In this context, rhythmanalysis is particularly useful in investigating the patterning of a range of multiscalar temporalities – calendrical, diurnal and lunar, lifecycle, somatic and mechanical – whose rhythms provide an important constituent of the experience and organisation of social time.

The most obvious antecedent of rhythmanalyses is Hagerstrand’s time-geography. Mels points out the failings of its diagrammatic schemes which suggest that space is somewhat empty, minimise the scale and breadth of routines, and present individual rhythms as rather unsensual and disembodied. However, despite not telling us much about how time-space is construed or experienced, time-geography demonstrates that individuals ‘repeatedly couple and uncouple their paths with other people’s paths, institutions, technologies and physical surroundings’ (2004: 16) through which they become grounded in time-space and place. Rhythmanalysis can develop a fuller, richer analysis of these synchronic practices in space while also accounting for spatial qualities, sensations and intersubjective habits.

All chapters in this book implicitly or explicitly discuss the everyday, a realm within which regulatory processes pervade and are resisted or ignored. For rhythmanalysis is a useful tool with which to explore the everyday temporal structures and processes that (re)produce connections between individuals and the social. Lefebvre is explicit that there is no ‘rhythm without repetition in time and space, without reprises, without returns, in short, without measure’. However, he is also insistent that ‘there is no identical absolute repetition indefinitely … there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive’ (2004: 6). With this focus on multiple quotidian rhythms, we may identify how power is instantiated in unreflexive, normative practices but also side-stepped, resisted and supplemented by other dimensions of everyday experience. Barbara Adam also draws attention to how the ‘when, how often, how long, in what order and at what speed’ are governed by ‘norms, habits and conventions’ about temporality (1995: 66), a host of implicit, embedded and embodied forms of social knowing that regulate social life and space. In identifying the regulatory rhythmic conventions that shape the lives of individuals and groups, we can explore how some conform to dominant routines and timetables, while others reject such temporal structurings or become sidelined because they are thought to be out of time and step. The main focus of this introductory chapter, and a theme that resounds throughout this book, is the mix of social ordering and disordering through which spatio-temporal patterns are laid down. I explore the production of normative everyday rhythms and the ordering of timespace through state and capitalist processes shortly, and follow this with a discussion of how this is always only ever partial and susceptible to disordering by counter rhythms and arrhythmia. First, however, I briefly summarise the spatial, mobile, embodied and ‘non-human’ elements of rhythm which partly inform the organisation of the chapters in this book.

Placing rhythm: key themes

You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. You see your neighbor’s laundry. You hear the janitor’s dogs. The man upstairs’ aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee … An air shaft has got every contrast … You hear people praying, fighting, snoring … I tried to put all that in my Harlem Air Shaft. (Duke Ellington, quoted in Shapiro and Hentoff, 1955: 224-25)

This book starts from Lefebvre’s premise that ‘(E)verywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’ (2004: 15), identifying repetition of movements and action, the particular entanglements of linear and cyclical rhythms and phases of growth and decline. In identifying the spatio-temporal specificities of place, he further contends that ‘every rhythm implies the relation of a time with space, a localised time, or if one wishes, a temporalised place’ (1996: 230). We can identify the distinctive characteristics of place according to its ‘polyrhythmic ensemble’ (Crang, 2000), the particular ways in which changing rhythmic processes interweave to afford places a mixity of temporal events of varying regularity, as Duke Ellington captures both in his commentary and the rhythmically swinging composition of Harlem Airshaft. Such rhythms shape the diurnal, weekly and annual experience of place and influence the ongoing formation of its materiality. This perspective avoids the conception of place as static, for rhythms are essentially dynamic, part of the multiplicity of flows that emanate from, pass through and centre upon place, and contribute to its situated dynamics. Moreover, those rhythms that emerge from human practices are part of the continuous process ‘of emplaced engagement with the material, sensory, social and cultural contexts in which we dwell’ (Pink, 2007: 62).

Despite this fluidity and dynamism however, and the always immanent potential for disruption and destruction, many rhythms offer a consistency to place and landscape over time. For regardless of the ongoing becoming of life and place, regular routines and slower processes of change mesh with the relative brevity of the human lifespan to provide some sense of stability. Arjun Appadurai (1990) conceives globalisation as constituted by often disjunctive flows of people, commodities, information, ideas, technologies and finance. Consequently, we can conceive places as part of infinitely complex spatial networks (Massey, 1995) and not self-contained envelopes. Cities, for instance, are ceaselessly (re)constituted out of their connections, the ‘twists and fluxes of interrelation’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 30) through which ‘multiple networked mobilities of capital, persons, objects, signs and information’ (Urry, 2006: ix) are brought together to produce a particular, but ever-changing, complex mix of heterogeneous social interactions, materialities, mobilities, imaginaries and social effects. In fact, the ontological resilience of place ‘depends upon the continuous flow of goods, people and capital outside and underneath its premises’ (Kaika, 2005: 8) in consistent surges. For instance, the indefatigable maintenance of largely invisible key flows of water, electricity, gas and telephony is vital to secure the security and stability of the city. Rhythmanalysis can help explore notions that places are always in a process of becoming, seething with emergent properties, but usually stabilised by regular patterns of flow that possess particular rhythmic qualities whether steady, intermittent, volatile or surging. This implies that the spatial scale through which rhythms resound needs to be accounted for, for instance, how national and global rhythms increasingly pulse through place. In accounting for the constituent elements of rhythmic geographies which feature throughout this book, I now briefly discuss rhythms of people, bodies, mobilities and nature.

The rhythms of people

Allen (in Amin and Thrift, 2002: 17) points to ‘the regular comings and goings of people about the city to the vast range of repetitive activities, sounds and even smells that punctuate life in the city and which give many of those who live there a sense of time and location’. Consider these routine, daily flows of people through space and place; the walking patterns of schoolchildren, the rush hour of commuters, the surge of shoppers, the throngs of evening clubbers, the rituals of housework, the lifestyles of students, the slow pace of unemployment, the timed compulsions of drug addicts and alcoholics, and the timetabled activities of tourists, to name but a few. Consider the ‘openings and closing of shops, the flows of postal deliveries, bank deposits and coffee breaks’ (Labelle, 2008: 192) as well as the schedules of public transport, pub hours and lighting up times, and the different rhythms of the day and night (see Sandhu, 2006), as well as seasonal and annual cycles, which bestow a temporal sense of place.

While regular, normative rhythms of place, often supported and promoted by officials and commercial enterprises, add to the knowing and feeling of place, they are frequently contested and disrupted by other inhabitants and passers-through. In this book, Tom Hall shows how the rhythms of the homeless clash with those desired by city managers and business, Craig Meadows reveals how insomniacs are out-of-synch with dominant diurnal beats, Justin Spinney and Richard Hornsey show how cyclists and pedestrians violate the rhythmic norms of vehicular traffic, and Deirdre Conlon shows how Nigerian asylum seekers lay down an offbeat to the rhythms of regeneration and consumerism. Place can thus be depicted, performed and sensed through its ensemble of normative and counter rhythms, as Lefebvre suggests. The obvious example of a train station reveals a very recognisable, though shifting polyrhythmy composed out of separate strands, with its periodic announcements, flows and surges of passengers, departing and arriving trains according (or not) to the timetable, the presence of newspaper sellers during rush hours, and the ongoing pulse of buying and selling in the retail outlets, as well as the interruptions, unexpected incidents and breakdowns. In this volume, Monica Degen highlights the regular but changing rhythms of an urban area undergoing regeneration, and Filipa Matos Wunderlich portrays the complex sensual, experiential, performative and everyday lineaments of the rhythms of a London square, focusing on the distinct sense of flow collectively produced and the particular soundscape produced by regular social activities and shared cultural practices.

Bodily rhythms

Lefebvre foregrounds the body, emphasising that the rhythmanalyst must draw on ‘his (sic) breathing, the circulation of his blood, the beatings of his heart and the delivery of his speech as landmarks’ (2004: 21), and recognise that rhythms are folded in and through the permeable body. The rhythmanalyst must take their own body – ‘its respirations, pulses, circulations, assimilations … durations and phases of durations’ – as the measure of other rhythms. A disembodied appreciation of rhythms is impossible, for ‘to listen to one’s own body is necessary to ‘appreciate external rhythms (ibid: 19). Yet as Simpson has pointed out, Lefebvre’s focus too frequently turns to epistemological considerations and social disciplining of the body rather than actual embodied experience, ‘the visceral, elusory nature’ of the body (2008: 824) and its capacity to affect and be affected by a multitude of other rhythms. Lefebvre identifies the regulation of embodied rhythms through the notion of ‘dressage’ as a means to train the body to perform and condition it to accede to particular rhythms. However, the body also produces place as well as fitting in with it, and it may not keep in step or synchronise with regular beats. And while dressage may produce conformist rhythmic performance, it also has the potential to produce identity and scope for improvisation, as Shannon Hensley (this volume) shows in her account about how Cuban places and people associated with the performance of rumba, absorb rhythm into their bodies through prolonged practice so that it becomes a ‘second nature’ that masquerades as a racialised ‘natural rhythm’.

This emphasis on the entangling rhythms that circulate in and outside the body also draws attention to the corporeal capacities to sense rhythm, sensations that organise the subjective and cultural experience of place. The usually unreflexive sensual and rhythmic attunement to place and familiar space may be confounded when the body is ‘out of place’, though spatio-temporal patterns may be quickly re-installed to reconfigure presence in a changed or unfamiliar space in order to regain ontological security.

Rhythms of mobility

A focus on the rhythms of mobility is sustained by the insistence that places are ceaselessly (re)constituted by flows and never reified or bounded. There are three senses in which the rhythms of mobility constitute place. Firstly, place is characterised by the mobilities that course through it, as in Lefebvre’s (2004) account of the view from his Paris window where he espies the stop-start rhythms of pedestrians and traffic, and their variations over the diurnal cycle. Patterns of mobile flow thus contribute to the spatio-temporal character of place, whether dynamic or placid, fast or slow, and this is best ascertained at a still point from which mobile flows of varying tempo, pace and regularity are apparent. There is a regulatory dimension through which the braiding of multiple mobile rhythms is organised, with traffic lights and other apparatus, speed limits, highway codes, laws, road layout, and the dissemination of good habits reproduce familiar disciplinary conventions. As with other habitual, everyday enactions, such rhythmic systems are rarely apparent except when they break down or are violated, or where they no longer pertain. For instance, I have written about the variegated rhythms of many Indian roads, where a host of vehicles – lorries, buses, cars, bullock carts, bicycles, rickshaws – along with animals and pedestrians, all moving at greatly different speeds and styles, compose a far less regular rhythmic pattern than that familiar to British road-users (Edensor, 2000).

Secondly, regular rhythms of mobility, such as commuting (Edensor, 2009), produces a sense of mobile place. The speed, pace and periodicity of a habitual journey produces a stretched out, linear apprehension of place shaped by the form of a railway or road, and the qualities of the vehicle. Through commuting, a distinct embodied, material and sociable ‘dwelling-in-motion’ emerges (Sheller and Urry, 2006) as place is experienced as the predictable passing of familiar fixtures under the same and different conditions of travel, as with the commuters on Santiago’s Metro system depicted by Paola Jiron (this volume), who gain pleasure from daily passage through familiar tube stations and scenic views. This stretched out, mobile belonging diverges from accounts that suggest that ‘places marked by an abundance of mobility become placeless’ realms of detachment (Cresswell, 2006: 31), for such assertions overlook ‘the complex habitations, practices of dwelling, embodied relations, material presences, placings and hybrid subjectivities associated with movement through such spaces’ (Merriman, 2004: 154). On the contrary, serial features install a sense of spatial belonging, including the road signage and roadside furniture that occur with rhythmic regularity, and the daily apprehension of routine features may provide a comforting reliability and mobile homeliness as consistent yet changing elements in a landscape. Journeys have a particular rhythmic shape. Particular phases reliably mark progress as traffic speeds up or slows and routinised elements such as the purchase of the daily newspaper or travel tickets enfold social relations into the daily ritual. Such sequential, rhythmic apprehensions also serve to highlight that which stands out from the norm: the sudden road accident, newly painted house or unusual bird; all stand out in sharp relief to the usual happenings. Paradoxically then, mobile experiences of place and belonging may be transient and fleeting as well as associated ‘with prolonged or repeated movements, fixities, relations and dwellings’ (Merriman, 2004: 146).

Thirdly, and enmeshed with the rhythms discussed above, the interior of a mobile vehicle or other form of transport is a different sort of place with its own rhythms. This is evident in the machinic pulses laid down by the engine and metronomic swish of windscreen wipers and indicators. Certain familiar and comfortable mobile environments lull drivers and passengers into a state of kinaesthetic and tactile relaxation – consider the beat of the train and the ticking over of the car engine at speed which together with a cushioned interior furniture facilitate a disposition to dream, listen to music or converse. Jiron also shows how daily travellers on the Santiago Metro impose their own rhythms of sociability, reverie, relaxation and independence inside the carriages, within a familiar spatial context enclosing fellow travellers, fixtures and signs.

A mobile sense of place is shaped by the mode and style of travel. For instance, Wunderlich compares ‘purposive walking’ at constant rhythmical and rapid pace’ with the more varied rhythm of spontaneous ‘discursive walking’, as well as with the ‘conceptual’, critical walking mobilised by situationists and psychogeographers (2007: 37-8). These approaches to walking can, moreover, be combined experientially in a single walk, highlighting how one facet of mobile practices is the flow of continuous attachment and detachment to place, as exemplified by Labelle, who argues that ‘walking may be a site for a radical placement and displacement of self, fixing and unfixing self to urban structures, locational politics and cultural form, locking down as well as opening up to the full view of potential horizons’ (2008: 198).

Non-human rhythms

Recent ideas about the role of non-humans, ranging from objects, energies, flora and fauna within an expanded understanding of the social require us to account for the complex array of non-human rhythms that impose upon, exist separately and are entangled with human rhythms. Too often accounts have considered the non-human dimensions of place to be a passive backdrop upon which human activity unfolds. However, places are always becoming, and a human, whether stationary or travelling, is one element in a seething space pulsing with intersecting trajectories and temporalities. As Lefebvre says, ‘(There is) nothing inert in the world’, which he illustrates with the examples of the seemingly quiescent garden that is suffused with the polyrhythms of ‘trees, flowers, birds and insects’ (2004: 17) and the forest, which ‘moves in innumerable ways: the combined movements of the soil, the earth, the sun. Or the movements of the molecules and atoms that compose it’ (20). Certain natural processes are ‘only slow in relation to our time, to our body, the measure of rhythms’ (ibid.). By acknowledging the usually cyclical rhythms of nature: processes of growth and decay, the surgings of rivers, the changes in the weather and the activities of animals and birds which breed, nest and migrate, we can identify the ubiquitous presences of non-human entities and energies in and through place. And as Rhys Evans and Alex Franklin show in this volume, combinations of living things – in their example, the horse and human rider – combine to produce rhythms that neither could achieve independently. The cycles of the moon and sun, and the millennial changes associated with climatic, geological and geomorphological events, possess rhythmic patterns and irregularities that deeply impact on place and space. Owain Jones highlights how the shifting rhythms of tide deeply mark particular places and are entangled in complex human practice as illustrated by literary and artistic works. At a longer temporal scale, such transformative phases rarely map onto temporalities of the human lifespan, though the rapid acceleration of climate change may require a shift in thinking rhythmically; indeed, as James Evans suggests, there is an urgent imperative to develop new economic and social rhythms which are better attuned to the quickly mutating ecological rhythms that signal impending catastrophe.

Everyday rhythms

Zeruvabel asserts that (1985: 2) ‘through imposing a rhythmic “beat” on a vast array of major activities (including work, consumption and socialising), the week promotes the structuredness and orderliness of human life’. This also applies to the temporality of the day, for everyday life is constituted out of a multitude of habits, schedules and routines that lend to it an ontological predictability and security. Once learned and followed, these habitual procedures become unreflexive, are part of the way things are, though if the rhythm of the day should be disrupted and routines are thwarted, discomfort often ensues. The rhythmic structuring of the day is not merely individual but collective, and relies upon the synchronisation of practices that become part of how ‘we’ get things done.

Accordingly, the everyday greatly contributes to what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’, a sense that emerges out of ‘the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity’ (1961: 63), that generates a communal way of seeing the world in consistent terms, sharing a host of reference points which provide the basis for shared discursive and practical habits; as Stuart Hall puts it, ‘forms of common sense which have taken root in and helped to shape popular life’ (1996: 439). Clearly then, precisely because it is often beyond reflection and critique, the rhythmic lineaments of everyday life are weighted with power. According to (Carlson, 1996: 16), habits are ‘discrete concretisation of cultural assumptions’. Frykman and Löfgren concur, stating that ‘cultural community is often established by people together tackling the world around them with familiar manoeuvres’ (1996: 10-11). For friends and family tend to share habitual routines and these ‘familiar building blocks of body, family and kinship’ are the basis for a wider sense of belonging (Herzfeld, 1997: 5-6), part of shared forms of ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1986). I have written elsewhere of how these rhythms and habits may produce a sense of national identity, through the repetition of innumerable quotidian routines and habits, a cyclical ordering which organises, apportions, schedules and coordinates activities, p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Thinking about Rhythm and Space
• Part I Power and the Rhythms of Place
• Part II Resisting Rhythms
• Part III Mobile Rhythms
• Part IV Dressage and Bodies
• Part V Rhythms and Socio-Natures
• Bibliography
• Index