Reanimating Places

A Geography of Rhythms

Tom Mels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351906371
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Geographie

Time-space relationships are central to human geography. This book seeks to reanimate time-space, by considering the links between lived experience, various temporalities and particular places in terms of compounded and contested rhythms. Time-space rhythms emphasize the practical, symbolic, everyday and embodied qualities in the experience and making of our geographical environment. Bringing together a team of renowned geographers who have been exploring such ideas over the past decades, this book provides a unique and varied set of geographical approximations to the reanimation of place, nature and landscape, revealing a complex, disputed world of politics, sensory experiences and representations of space-time. Including case studies from Europe and North America, the book addresses some important issues, ranging from the symbolic orchestrations of landscape to deeply personal memories of particular natural rhythms.

Part I
Introduction

Chapter 1
Lineages of a Geography of Rhythms

Tom Mels

Prologue

Repetitions, movements, cycles, intervals, serenity. 'Space melts like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds' (Perec 1997, 91). The fragmentation of space by memory. I still remember that bedroom window overlooking and overhearing Mellifont Avenue in Dun Laoghaire at rush hour. Its dense blend of maritime traffic and subterranean rumbling trains, scaffolds of gentrification, teenagers balancing on skateboards. Catholics on their way to church at Easter, and cars shifting gears. I remember suburbanites hurrying home from work through salty whipping rains, ignoring political campaigners during the general elections, and friends socializing at the pub just around the corner. I remember wondering what the politico-economic rhythm of the 'Celtic Tiger' might mean for those homeless addicts gathering near the pier. I remember the sculptural immobility of the Irish Sea at night-time. Seemingly motionless, but sandy and alive at dawn. Soon I got familiar with these spectacles and their multifarious visual, haptic, symphonic, natural, social, real-and-imagined rhythms around our temporary new home. At first sight, there was nothing hidden about the place and its habitual ebb and flow, its religious, economic, political, circadian (approximately 24-hour) and circaceptan (seven-day) cycles. Yet these rather trivial rhythms seemed impossible to register. How could I weave 'a net of words' sensitive enough to catch 'the rhythm of that sound-dance that bends and moves without ever destroying the penumbrae between external and internal, subject and object, body and soul?' (Olsson 1978, 114). No decimal notation of time, no geometrical commandment, no camera or tape-recorder could easily articulate the experience of this lifeworld. Obviously, seen as an object, cut off from the spectator behind the window, I could conjure up some admirable theoretical descriptions, and measures designed to enclose and master beings or objects, but not the enveloping open grounds of existence. Moreover, for all their noises, smells, openly visible qualities, I always suspected that these spectacles concealed as much as they revealed of the principles, practices, and powers at work in my rhythmic environment: those who had abandoned the site, and those waiting to enter it. The rhythmicity of everyday activities and occurrences may very well exist unnoticed or experienced without being understood. Whoever wants to define rhythms with dogmatic epistemology easily misses its object.

Whether or not we recognize the rhythmicity of the world, and whatever theoretical conclusions we draw from its complexity, human beings have always been rhythm-makers as much as place-makers. Past and present arhythmic conflicts and polyrhythmic dialogues are equally children of their historical time and place. In this pedestrian geography of rhythms, the theater set experienced from my window was not solely an immediate here-and-now, visual thing projected on my mind's eye. Woven into the cosmological time of nature's waves and cycles at Dun Laoghaire's coast were the different qualities and ordering powers associated with subjective experiences of duration and space, including the timeframes of workplace, school, dwelling, and homelessness. Indeed, the social construction of time-space rhythms comes forward as a braiding of domains, including human interaction with rhythms of the natural environment, the world of socialization, technological infrastructure and equipment, symbolic communication and the production of meaning.

Standard English language dictionaries suggest that rhythm is a rather complex term. The concept originates from the Greek rhythmos, meaning 'measure, rhythm, measured motion,' a word akin to the verb rhein, or 'to flow.' Rhythm occurs in a wide range of circumstances, and can be measured in various different ways. It 'is applicable to sound in poetry and music and also to any recurrent sound, movement, arrangement, or condition in virtually any sphere. Sometimes the word connotes little more than regular alternation,' while in other cases 'it suggests subtlety and variation in recurrence' or 'a recurrence pattern too varied to be easily grasped' (Merriam-Webster 1993: rhythm). In physical geography and geology, rhythm is sometimes used to describe 'regularity in the way something is repeated in space' (OED 1989: rhythm). While for obvious reasons rhythm is essential to musicians, poets, and dancers, how could rhythms be of any interest to human geographers? And if so, as this collection of essays concedes, how would we grasp those rhythms?

The Dun Laoghaire account suggests that even a spur-of-the-moment glance through a window shows how deeply various rhythms structure everyday life and experience of place (Lefebvre 1996; Parkes and Thrift 1979; Zerubavel 1981). Everyday life, our day-to-day events and actions, may indeed be seen as a spatial as much as a temporal term, permeated as it is by a multiplicity of rhythms. In a passage from her acclaimed essay, aptly entitled 'Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeword,' Anne Buttimer offered a more theoretical contribution to the understanding of time-space rhythms:

To record behavior in an isometric grid representing space and time is only an opening onto the horizons of lived space and time. Neither geodesic space nor clock/calendar time is appropriate for the measurement of experience. The notion of rhythm may offer a beginning step toward such a measure. Lifeworld experience could be described as the orchestration of various time-space rhythms: those of physiological and cultural dimensions of life, those of different work styles, and those of our physical and functional environments. On a macrolevel one is dealing with the synchronization of movements of various scales, taking a sounding, as it were, at the particular point where our own experience has prodded us to explore (Buttimer 1976, 289).

While one may, as I will below, quarrel about which way of representing time and space is appropriate for various aspects of everyday life experience, this remains a profound insight. Buttimer's passage questions at once the appropriateness of positivist method and brings out the material and mental complexity of experience. The idea of time-space rhythms reveals a complexly contested world of sensory experiences and representations of time-space. It prepares a central place for the understanding of spatiotemporal patterns, routines, repetitions, scales, and flows. The importance of assessing these rhythms lies in its ability to decipher the dynamic nature of lifeworlds – those busy and often unquestioned junctions connecting worlds of objective affairs and subjective experiences – and thereby of social space. For subjects and things are necessarily embedded in particular places, and it is only in those places that the rhythmic dialogues between nature and society, symbol and substance, body and culture are staged.

Buttimer's passage alludes to a rather expansive and scalarly complex notion of lifeworld as an orchestration of time-space rhythms. The influence of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology can be felt in her emphasis on how the deepest levels of human experience are as spatial as they are temporal and need to be explored as spatiotemporal configurations. Husserl also highlighted the extraordinary importance of the physical and lived body in his exploration of lifeworld (Zahavi 2003). In turn, Buttimer's idea of rhythms can be linked to the body and place, discourse, social space, and dwelling (all of which are, of course, interconnected).

First, rhythms are bound up with place and corporeality. An examination of individual bodies, with all their specificities of shapes, abilities, and sex/gender, is enough to unearth that they encompass a great physiological whole of rhythmic spatio-temporal orchestration (Adam 1990, 73-74; Bachelard 1994, 2000; Buttimer 1987; Longhurst 2001; Merleau-Ponty 2002; Rodaway 1994; Sartre 1949; Whitehead 1929). In a piece published some years after Buttimer's essay, Yi-Fu Tuan connects the measurement and experience of distance in time and space with bodily movement (cf. Tuan, this volume). Enshrined in this description of conscious and unconscious corporeal rhythms is a common inclination to temporalize space:

The rhythms we are conscious of are the longer cycles of bodily needs for food and rest; and in general, life is a succession of stresses and strains and their resolution. Repetitious or recurrent time is a common measure of distance. How far is it from one village to another? If the distance is short it can be given as so many paces. Walking is a rhythmic process the individual units of which can be added up. Giving distance as x paces is not an abstraction for the paces are intimately felt both as the pendulum-like swing of steps and as the sum of cumulative muscular efforts. Great distances are judged by rhythms in nature and particularly by the alternations of day and night. It is so many 'sleeps,' days, or moons from one place to another. The daily cycle has pre-eminence in distance estimations because it matches the human biological rhythm of wakefulness and sleep, and because the alternation of day and night is a highly visible drama. Nature's linear dimensions, other than the human body itself, such as the height of trees or the breadth of a stream, have rarely been used to designate distance: nature's periodicities rather than lengths provide the yardstick (Tuan 1978, 13-14).

We walk, talk, eat, sleep, work, think, and communicate in a rhythmic manner while 'our consciousness has a profoundly temporal gear with accumulated memories reaching backwards in time and imaginations reaching into the future. Impressions, imaginations and feelings follow upon each other in an unceasing series of before and after. Therefore, it is certainly not far-fetched to understand our interior as a movement in time, even when we remain completely motionless in space' (Hägerstrand 1991, 141). Corporeality is essential to place and lifeworld, because we experience objects, their place and our own place with our lived-living body. Place, in this respect, 'arises within the withness essential to the body's primitive prehensions and repetitions of its environing world. Just as we are always with a body, so, being bodily, we are always within a place as well. Thanks to our body, we are in that place and part of it'(Casey 1997, 214).

Second, there is more to rhythms (and place) than the body or individual experience. It extends into social space (see below). As Buttimer points out, corporeal rhythmic nodes are connected to daily labor, vocational meaning, and cultural context, i.e. the composite existential position or 'horizon' of knowledgeable and capable individuals. For those working nightshift, dinner might be routinely served at the break of dawn, noon might be bedtime, and evening the time for commuting to the factory. Individuals tend to build up habitual and pre-discursive movements or time-space routines, fusing and interacting with other individuals' routines in city streets, buildings or elsewhere as what David Seamon studied as a phenomenology of 'place ballets' (Seamon 1979, 56; cf. Clark, this volume). Not only are time-space rhythms of the body, meaning, and voluntary or enforced behavior connected, they are also thoroughly embedded in the cultural context of social space (Buttimer 1968, 142; 1969, 419; 1974, 24-25), and hence orchestrated by imperatives and constraints of situated knowledges and power inequalities (Foucault 1981; Pickles 1987; Pile and Thrift 1995). By implication, 'the whole of (social) space proceeds from the body, even though it so metamorphoses the body that it may forget it altogether – even though it may separate itself so radically from the body as to kill it ... The analysis of rhythms must serve the necessary and inevitable restoration of the total body' (Lefebvre 1991b, 405).

Third, rhythms are connected to particular discourses, geographical imaginations and modes of representation. The metamorphosis of the body through the deliberate creation of a public time-space is mediated through differences of gender, class, age, or vocation, from within overarching discourses such as those of nationality, ethnicity, religion, or tradition. These discourses are patterned by partial value propositions and more or less powerful modes of symbolic communication (Buttimer 1982). In artistic composition as much as in geographical discourse, rhythm is often orchestrated through the regular recurrence of metaphorical style. Repetitive rhythms involve such things as geographical association or dissociation and temporal imaginations of past, present, and future. For instance, nationalists usually treat their nation as an organic home, a garden with avowedly natural boundaries and roots in the past, thereby repetitively normalizing their own discourse. As consciously or unconsciously repeated, overt or covert modes of structuring and reproducing the world, symbols, maps, and metaphors also tend to encourage particular dominant rhythms and routine ways of organizing human spaces and actions, while excluding, controlling, or masking the rhythms of others (Buttimer 1978; 1980; 1989; 1993; Buttimer et al. 1999; cf. Godlewska 1995).

Fourth, rhythms are implicated in the issue of dwelling. Dwelling is not bound to a particular scale, but traverses scales from the domestic household to the globe. Place-bound social practices, coded gestures, metaphorical styles, technological applications, and experiences are at the same time constitutive of rhythms that operate over a variety of spatial and temporal scales. In a time when overcoming the ancient separation and dissociation between the 'local' lifeworld and 'global' totality has earned recognition in academic discourse and politics, this seems indeed more important than ever (Buttimer 1990). Ultimately, the theme of rhythm will bring us from the local scale to a more global liberation cry (cri de coeur) of humanity, a Poesis of emancipatory reflection on the relationships between humanity and the earth. For Anne Buttimer, this involves the challenge of developing sustainable modes of dwelling. To dwell is to reach beyond mere inhabiting and organizing space. It means to consider the earth as an abode, 'to see one's life as anchored in human history and directed toward the future, to build a home which is the everyday symbol of a dialogue with one's ecological and social milieu' (Buttimer 1976, 277; cf. Buttimer 2001, 10; Bachelard 1994, on home as a metaphor for humanness).

Unsurprisingly, dwelling is fraught with difficulties. While dwelling is centered on 'home,' care and affection, the hold of contemporary home-creation on the desire for domination remains strong. The environmental dialogue to which Buttimer alludes often ends up in calculating monologues, naturalizing themselves, but deaf to the social and environmental havoc they produce (Evernden 1985). Purified 'natural' rhythms have long been transposed into moral regimes commending 'normality' and what is considered 'healthy' or 'sane.' Sometimes this leads to nostalgic yearnings for a 'return' to nature and natural rhythms (Rifkin 1987; Young 1988). Yet Buttimer's emphasis on dialogue, dynamism, and orchestration suggests that these 'natural' rhythms cannot be divorced from 'social' ones. There is no such thing as a pre-given set of rhythms, independent of history and systems of valued reference (cf. Buttimer 1974; Lash et al. 1998). This is not to reduce natural rhythms to social meaning, to deny that nocturnal sleep follows diurnal exhaustion, that ebb follows flow, or that life processes of growth are followed by decay. It is rather to question the existence of a prehistoric 'natural' rhythm to which we can somehow return. Human existence has always involved a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: REANIMATING PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT
• PART III: REANIMATING URBAN LIFEWORLDS
• PART IV: REANIMATING EMBODIED LANDSCAPES
• PART V: REANIMATING GEOGRAPHIES
• Index