Rhythmanalysis

Research Methods

Dawn Lyon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350188907
• eBook ISBN: 9781350188914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published Open Access under a Creative Commons license as What is Rhythmanalysis?, this title is now also available as part of the Bloomsbury Research Methods series. In recent years, there has been growing interest in Henri Lefebvre's posthumously published volume, Rhythmanalysis. For Lefebvre and subsequent scholars, rhythmanalysis is a research strategy which offers a means of thinking space and time together in the study of everyday life, and this remains its strength and appeal. This book addresses the task of how to do rhythmanalysis. It discusses the history and development of rhythmanalysis from Lefebvre to the present day in a range of fields including cultural history and studies of place, work and nature. For Lefebvre, it is necessary to be 'grasped by' a rhythm at a bodily level in order to grasp it. And yet we also need critical distance to fully understand it. Rhythmanalysis is therefore both corporeal and conceptual. This book considers how the body is directly deployed as a research tool in rhythmanalytical research as well as how audio-visual methods can get at rhythm beyond the capacity of the senses to perceive it. In particular, the book includes detailed discussion of research on different forms of mobility – from driving to dancing – and on the social life of markets – from finance to fish. Dawn Lyon highlights the gains, limitations and lively potential of rhythmanalysis for spatially, temporally and sensually attuned practices of research. This engaging text will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, criminology, socio-legal studies, geography, urban studies, architecture, anthropology, economics and cultural studies.

1 Introduction to rhythmanalysis

Introduction: Why rhythmanalysis and why now?

There’s a scene that has stayed with me from when I lived in Italy in the early 2000s. I would often pass a small grocery shop in the centre of Florence on my way to catch a bus to work early in the morning when the shop was first opening, or in the late afternoon when trade has resumed. State regulation stipulates the clock-time of operating hours¹ but this collective schedule also resonates with temporal norms of meal times and rest which leave room for the cyclical rhythms of the body, the household and the social life of the city. As I walked along the Via dell’Albero, I frequently saw a young man who was part of the family grocery business on the threshold of the shop talking to someone in the street – friends, fellow shopkeepers or customers it seemed – and I would also stop to say hello and exchange a few words when our paths and pace converged. The conversation had its own form and rhythm and shoppers were sometimes made to wait while it came to its conclusion. I can now see the constellations of rhythms that gave rise to these moments of coming together in time and space, on the street but not quite, the young man at work but sidestepping its totalizing hold, myself on the way to work but out of step with the day’s trajectory in this encounter. The patience and accommodation of the shoppers feels important too; a collective refusal perhaps of the imposition of the linear rhythms of exchange and a tactic to retain a quality of everyday life that encompasses pleasure and meaning.

This book is concerned with understanding social life through the lens of rhythm. It emerged from my long-standing interest in how time and space are lived, produced, remembered and imagined, and how they shape the experience of everyday life as in the scene recounted above. Rhythm, it now seems, stimulated my curiosity beneath the surface in a series of projects in recent years. In a study of construction work, I was spellbound by the working rhythms of a man laying screed on a floor which he literally smoothed into shape through a combination of visual judgement and the graceful movement and pressure of his hands and body (Lyon 2012). And I can still bring to mind the sounds of fishmongers at work in a south London market as their gestures in chopping and filleting fish produced their own rhythm which could be heard all around – ‘bang, bang, slice, pause’ (Lyon and Back 2012). In these studies, I was interested in the reach and coordination of work across practices, people and things in time and space at different scales, such as the timing of laying screed in the refurbishment project or the sourcing of Caribbean fish to suit the tastes of the market’s local customers. Rhythm finally came to the fore in my visual ethnography of Billingsgate fish market as I sought – and struggled – to identify the different coexisting spatial and temporal relations of market life. It was this project with all its surprising turns which prompted me to use and reflect on the potential of rhythmanalysis as a research strategy and a set of practices in the field (Lyon 2016 and see Chapter 3 for a discussion of this study). In this book, I explore what it means to undertake empirical research when attention to the ‘flow and form’ of rhythm comes into view (Benveniste 1966).

The intellectual starting point of the book is the work of the French ‘philosopher cum sociologist, sociologist cum literary critic, literary critic cum urbanist, urbanist cum geographer’ (Merrifield 2006: xxiv) Henri Lefebvre, and in particular his Éléments de rythmanalyse: introduction à la connaissance des rythmes, published in French in 1992, one year after his death and in English as Rhythmanalysis, Space, Time & Every day Life in 2004. For Lefebvre, rhythm is always spatial and temporal and offers a means of grasping space and time together (Elden 2006: 186) and this remains its strength and appeal. There are many other scholars whose writings address rhythm in one way or another² but as far as I am aware, there is none whose influence is felt so strongly in empirical research across the social sciences at the present time.

This book asks: What can attention to rhythm do for empirical research in the social sciences? What does working with rhythm as a tool of analysis – rhythmanalysis – offer? First though, what do we mean by rhythm? The Oxford English Dictionary defines rhythm as ‘a regularly occurring sequence of events or processes’ such as the rhythm of the tides. Equally, rhythm refers to a ‘repeated pattern’ such as in music or in language where there is a ‘relation of long and short or stressed and unstressed syllables’.³ For Lefebvre, ‘Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’ (2004: 15). Rhythm requires repetition. But this is not enough on its own. Indeed, ‘absolute repetition’ is a ‘fiction of logical and mathematical thought’ (7). Instead, ‘there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference’ (6, emphasis added).

Curiosity about rhythm on the part of scholars and social commen­tators has come and gone since at least the late eighteenth century as ‘rhythm moves between disciplines’ (Henriques, Tianen and Väliaho 2014: 4) across the natural sciences and philosophy, psychology, physiology, performance studies, literary criticism, law, sociology, anthropology, economics, geography and urban studies. At the present time, there is something of a resurgence of interest in rhythm in the Anglo-American academy in the social sciences and humanities.⁴ This renewed awareness – or ‘return’ (ibid.: 3) – of rhythm can be seen in the context of concrete changes in the structures, processes, spaces and temporalities of everyday life and intellectual developments that lead to their perception anew.

There is some consensus that the pace of life in the Western world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has accelerated. Speed is the motif of the times and yet we have also seen the emergence of various slow movements for alternative ways of living – in cities, food production and scholarship. But there is more to this story. The experience of speed and slowness, motion and stillness, temporal autonomy and dependence is uneven and unequal between people and over time (Bissell and Fuller 2011; Hubbard and Lilley 2004; Sharma 2014; Virilio 1986; Wajcman and Dodd 2017). On the one hand, the time of professionals (lawyers and doctors for instance) is highly valued and rewarded, if also highly pressured. On the other, the delivery drivers of the gig economy barely have enough time in the day to get by financially while low-paid service workers on zero hours contracts find their needs for work and income out of synch with those of their employers. In addition, the temporal requirements of anticipation and presence – often 24/7 – in the work of the paid and unpaid care that keeps us all going are often at odds with rhythms that make for a good life.

While speed (and slowness) is often relevant for understanding the way we live in the world, it tends towards a linear spatialization of time and is too one dimensional to comprehend the temporal intricacies of lived experience. Thinking with rhythm offers a more multifaceted approach. It suggests a nuanced understanding of the articulations of tempo, movement, flow, stasis and repetition. And it advances a mode of analysis which recognizes different spatio-temporal relations and what they do in the world. In so doing, it illuminates the complex temporalities and territories of contemporary capitalism, it punctuates the lived embodied experience of the everyday, and it captures the imagination in making sense of the world across these scales.

Although interest in rhythm has gathered pace in recent years, the challenge of researching or analysing rhythm in the social sciences remains considerable.

Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis offers scholars a tantalizing grasp of rhythm but many readers have characterized it as an approach that stops short of being a method, arguing that he does not provide a systematic methodology for doing rhythmanalysis. Highmore describes it as an ‘orientation’ (2002: 175) for attending to the social world rather than as a technique for interrogating it; similarly for Hall, Lashua and Coffey, it is ‘more an investigative disposition’ than a ‘method for systematic enquiry’ (2008: 1028). Edensor thinks it is a ‘suggestive vein of temporal thinking rather than a definitive methodology’ (2011: 190), McCormack characterizes it as ‘a speculative invitation to think rhythmically’ (2013: 42), and Borch, Bondo Hansen and Lange consider that it ‘constitutes a rich reservoir of ideas for empirical work’ (2015: 1082). The intangibility of rhythm itself may be part of the problem here. ‘Rhythms. Rhythms.’ Lefebvre bemoans. ‘They reveal and they hide’ (2004: 36). Or as Mels puts it, rhythm ‘disappears’ (2004: 23) as we attempt to get a hold on it. That said, there have been a number of studies and edited collections which have developed the practice of rhythmanalysis which are discussed in the pages that follow (for instance Chen 2017; Edensor 2010a; Mels 2004; McCormack 2013; Smith and Hetherington 2013; Stratford 2015).

This book in the ‘What is?’ Research Methods series addresses the task of how to do rhythmanalysis. It presents rhythmanalysis as a ‘strategy of inquiry’ which sits between the theories that inform a particular study and the specific methods used to collect and analyse data (Denzin and Lincoln 2018). So rather than being a method per se, rhythmanalysis comprises a set of methods; and these will vary according to the project at hand and the questions it asks. In this sense, rhythmanalysis has much in common with ethnography and it shares some of the methods used in ethnographic research, especially observation. However, it can also take other forms, including the more quantitative approaches used in the study of economic cycles or digital interaction.

This book critically discusses what Lefebvre and subsequent scholars have made of rhythmanalysis as a set of ideas and a research practice. It highlights the methodological choices and possibilities that can be drawn from Lefebvre’s writings and subsequent studies through detailed discussion of examples. It explores the lively potential of rhythmanalysis for spatially, temporally and sensually attuned practices of research and for identifying and sensing different coexisting rhythms of everyday life at multiple scales. And it argues for rhythmanalysis as a promising, even ‘instructive and inspiring’ (Merrifield 2006), tool for empirical research into everyday life today. In so doing, it introduces rhythmanalysis to researchers who are new to it or who would like to reflect further on how to develop their own grasp of rhythm and make use of rhythmanalysis in their own work, especially in sociology, criminology, sociolegal studies, geography, urban studies, architecture, anthropology, economics and cultural studies. It also contributes to the de velopment of apposite social science methods for the investigation of social life in the twenty-first century.

The remainder of this introductory chapter discusses the appeal of rhythm in historical perspective and situates Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis in his broader thinking and politics of time, space and everyday life, before outlining the orientation and organization of this book. For readers who wish to jump ahead, the first part of Chapter 2 considers how Lefebvre conceptualized his rhythmanalytical project and sets out his key terms. This discussion is an important grounding for the rest of the book. It is followed by a review of examples of doing rhythmanalysis across different fields (in the second half of Chapter 2) and detailed discussion of three key approaches (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 offers a critical appraisal of what rhythmanalysis is good for in a discussion of its gains and limitations and Chapter 5 includes a worked example of thinking about a new project with rhythm in mind.

The appeal of rhythm in historical perspective

If ‘rhythm returns’ as Henriques, Tianen and Väliaho (2014: 3) put it, in what forms, times and places has it surfaced? There are many ways to tell a history of rhythm and its role in modernity in particular.⁵ Here I restrict my focus to strands of thinking and practice in the social sciences and humanities that were either present in or parallel to the development of Lefebvre’s ideas.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rhythm attracted considerable interest and even became a ‘fetishized keyword of modernism’ (Cowan 2012: 18–19 in Henriques, Tianen and Väliaho 2014: 7). This period was marked by significant shifts in the pace and reach of everyday life such as the development of mechanized transport and associated processes of industrialization, changes which gave rise to considerable anxiety and increased awareness of rhythm. The appeal of rhythm was in its capacity to capture the dynamism and fluidity of the times, and as a potential force for transformation. There are some interesting parallels between this earlier period and the global and fluid character of society and economy in the present day. Thinking with rhythm may have something to offer debates on the excessive pace of life and the attractions of slower living.

With a focus on developments in France, French philosopher Pascal Michon (e.g. 2005, 2011, 2016, 2017 and his Rhuthmos website⁶ ) offers an intellectual genealogy of rhythm through the work of Roland Barthes, Émile Benveniste, Michel Serres, Michel Foucault, Edgar Morin, Henri Meschonnic, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as well as Lefebvre himself. For instance, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish originally published in 1975 is precisely concerned with social and bodily rhythms – Michon argues – despite not making any explicit reference to rhythm. The modes of subjectivity produced through the new legal and political systems he discusses were most intensively rendered in institutions such as the prison but were equally present elsewhere. In Refrains for Moving Bodies, British cultural geographer Derek McCormack’s account of the philosophical and artistic underpinnings and influence of rhythmanalysis makes some different connections. For instance, the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) (who has since had his own revival) was drawn to rhythm ‘because it offers a way of thinking differentiation in process’ (a view also found in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead). Dewey and Lefebvre – despite his ambivalence towards pragmatism – embraced the ‘promise of rhythm as a corporeal and conceptual nexus through which to grasp the spacetimes in which bodies participate’. For both, rhythm is not just temporal but is something which ‘takes place’ as Dewey puts it. This makes aesthetic experience possible and carries an ethical imperative: to multiply possibilities for living individually and collectively ‘by making more of the expressive qualities generated by rhythmic spacetimes’ (McCormack 2013: 40–1, emphasis in original).

These philosophical ideas were linked to efforts to cultivate rhythmic thinking or awareness through movement as ‘a utopian vehicle’ towards more authentic ways of life ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Series foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1   Introduction to rhythmanalysis
• 2   The history and development of rhythmanalysis: From Lefebvre to the present day
• 3   Key methodological orientations in doing rhythmanalysis: The body as central, displaced or insufficient
• 4   What is rhythmanalysis good for? Some gains, limitations and future directions of the rhythmanalytical project
• 5   What is rhythmanalysis? Conclusions
• References
• Index
• Copyright