Practising Rhythmanalysis: Theories and Methodologies
208
Practising Rhythmanalysis: Theories and Methodologies
208eBook
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Overview
Engaging with the notion of 'conjunctural shift', which for Stuart Hall captures the ruptured social landscape of Britain in the 1970s, the book then puts the method of rhythmanalysis to work by testifying the changing cultural experiences in rhythmic terms. This particular rhythmanalytical project instantiates while opening up ways of using rhythmanalysis for exploring cultural historical experiences.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783487790 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Practising Rhythmanalysis
Theories and Methodologies
By Yi Chen
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2017 Yi ChenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-779-0
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Introducing Rhythmanalysis as a Field of Work
This book explores rhythmanalysis as a philosophy as well as a methodology that posits practical consequences for the study of cultural experiences. In his final book Rhythmanalysis, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre moves beyond the paradigm of a Marxist critique of capitalist societies. From painstakingly describing the ebb and flow of a street in Paris, to configuring Mediterranean cities as an exemplar of urban rhythms, to reflecting on metaphysical issues such as those addressed by materialist philosophy, he sets up somewhat loose and lyrical discussions on 'rhythm' and how rhythmanalysis work towards a heightening of lived experience (an essential step into exploring all possibilities of life). The concept of 'rhythm' characterises forms of experience in their temporal-spatial ordering. Lefebvre's theorisation of 'rhythm' draws upon the fields of the biological, sociological and psychological and he demonstrates the pervasive nature of rhythms as organising principles that underlie all spheres of experience. The focus on 'rhythm', or rather the enactment of rhythms which are materialised in the interactions of social agents – that is, to perceive rhythmic enactments as interrelating the world of things both in their cause and effect – is just as much the study of concrete phenomena (such as that of bodily rhythms, institutional rhythms, communication rhythms, intellectual rhythms and so on), as it is the development of 'rhythm' into a new field of knowledge: rhythmanalysis. Lefebvre set out to theorise the method through a wide range of discussions. One does get a strong impression that Lefebvre's thinking on rhythm and rhythmanalysis is far from closed, or finalised, and so this instinct of mine became the impetus for this book. Perhaps some sentences were stopped short because the philosopher chose not to explain, to announce or to judge, yet the book is laden with rich ideas and at times the style of writing served well to incite curiosities and receptiveness about social phenomena. It is a field of inquiry that reserves much space for imagination and expansion.
Inspired by Lefebvre, as well as other writers who do not elaborate on the theme to the same extent (or whose works are not stamped as 'rhythmanalytical') but who nevertheless share similar cultural attentions, this book seeks to extend existing theories of rhythmanalysis and to provide alternative angles for understanding its philosophical orientations. It also has the ambition to posit rhythmanalysis as a research methodology that roams across academic disciplines such as cultural studies, historiography and visual culture. As being part of an emergent field of work that is reflexive of the reciprocal configurations of 'problems' and 'methodology' (Lury and Wakeford 2012, Vannini 2015, Les and Purwar 2013), I side with their inklings on the uniformity of methodological applications. For instance, as Lury and Wakeford succinctly propose that 'the inventiveness of methods is to be found in the relation between two moments: the addressing of the method ... and the capacity of what emerges in the use of that method to change the problem' (Lury and Wakeford 2012). I address rhythmanalysis as a method (or 'methods' as it may operate differently for different problems) for it embodies styles and modalities of questioning and configuring problems. The ways in which rhythmanalysis may be put to work make it a unique prism for cultural analysis.
SENSING RHYTHMS, RHYTHMS AS 'META-SENSE'
The concept of rhythm is grasped at the level of the sensory. While there are conventional ways of categorising perceptual mechanisms, such as the visual, the auditory or the haptic, rhythm is a meta-sense which synthesises bodily and extra-bodily impressions. In other words, rhythm as a sensorium, suggests a synesthesia whereby sensations of identifiable and non-identifiable sources come into play. Analysis of such experience invites us to create new ways of enunciating the implicit and the contagious transmission of the sensory. It is a focus that complicates accounts of sensual experience; such that heat, humidity, light and other affective responses come to shape senses of rhythm. It is a mode of sensing which may register at the level of non-consciousness, that is to say, there are perhaps no immediately identifiable objects that correspond to senses of rhythms (unlike sight and sound that trigger visual and auditory response, for instance). Rhythm as a meta-sense or a mode of meta-sensing invites the construction of new vocabularies (words, terms and phraseology) that tap into those forms of feeling which are periphery but work in subtle ways. Current discussions on concepts such as mood, atmosphere and affect are akin to the rhythmanalytical mode of exploring the senses. Rhythmanalysis supplies nuanced descriptions of sensual experience which often go beyond identification. Examples of how senses are accounted for include attending to the degrees and intensities of sensing (a Deleuzian notion), to the iterative and transformative processes of sensing, and to the assemblages of materialities that have the capacity to generate senses of rhythms. Rhythmanalysis is foremost a materialist philosophy that creates certain dispositions of configuring subjects, the locus of action and social agents, in ways that radicalise debates of identity politics which takes the 'subject' as pregiven and autonomous. In the optic of rhythmanalysis, the method of identification is to find assemblages of rhythms that have the capacity to make vivid the sensing of rhythms through a process of materialising the sensory.
The methodological potentials of conceptualising rhythm as a meta-sense not only lie in the gestalt of perceiving, but also in the attempt to foreground the role of the senses in the formation of temporal-spatial consciousness (not an internal state of subjects). In other words, analysis of the senses is not conducted in a temporal-spatial vacuum, sense perceptions provide crucial cues in the recognition and construction of temporal-spatial relationships (our recognition of days and places for example). For instance, how do we describe the atmosphere of homeliness in terms of evoking a rhythm, a meta-sense which captures the temporal-spatial sensing of comfort, familiarity and reverie? The method of rhythmanalysis foregrounds forms of experience, for it addresses the sensing of rhythms, and, more importantly, it attempts to grasp various structures of experience through this meta-sense. We then have experiences as characterised by rhythms with which the intervals and interstices of the senses are being attended to. The proposition that rhythm as a 'meta-sense', as it draws out a topological approach for dealing with the senses, renders rhythmanalysis a unique position in the existing field of writing on the sensory, on bodies and perceptual relationships. Rhythmanalysis emphasises the differential relations of the senses: of how they recur and transform, and how they underlie perceptual relationships which are critical for exploring the interaction and interconnection of social agents. A sense of rhythm is the inception of sensing the social.
THE METHODOLOGICAL TOOLS LOR CULTURAL-HISTORICAL ANALYSIS: 'POLYRHYTHMIA', 'arrhythmia' and 'eurhythmia'
Lefebvre illustrates an understanding of rhythm with the phenomena of repetition. He claimed that linear and cyclical repetition characterise the ebb and flow of cultural, industrial and cosmological forces, and that these are crucial structural forces that give shape to and orchestrate lived experience. Recursive phenomena are at the heart of identifying rhythms. Bearing in mind that rhythm, which implies repetition, is a crucial trait of experience, I extend and expand this discussion by emphasising that the enactment of rhythms is achieved through a pattern of ordering materiality. The concept of 'rhythm' suggests the patterning of materialities which produce timingspacing practices, and that rhythms are the effects of these practices. Whether it is bodily rhythms which consist of a myriad of rhythmic coordinations – of breathing, blood circulation and so on – or the institutional rhythms set up by social agents which form alliances and refusals in their temporal-spatial relationships, the movements, circulations, transmissions and exchanges of materiality may not necessarily produce identical repetitions, yet they are timing-spacing practices that actively generate rhythmic phenomena.
These sites of rhythmic production (which are referred to as 'rhythmic assemblages' or 'rhythmic bundles' later in this book) are central to the work of the rhythmanalyst. He or she needs to identify those rhythmic assemblages through the ways in which social agents align, with particular observation and analysis of the ways that these associations generate temporal-spatial relationships. Rhythms, that is to say 'time-spaces', are produced by the effects of interrelating materiality. These temporal-spatial relationships characterise the forms of rhythms, and their formation and reformation are critical processes for rhythmanalysis. As opposed to a research agenda that identifies fixed and innate social agents as objects of analysis, the focus of rhythmanalysis marks out ways of identification that hinge on the effects of social processes. It is a non-essentialist method that poses radical implications for identifying and analysing the agents of social actions. In particular, the emphasis on the construction of rhythmic assemblages to foreground the materialisation of experiences in time-space (as opposed to the assumption that events are 'contained' by time and space), means that rhythmanalysis serves to be an instructive and operative (by no means definitive nor conclusive) tool for current fields of work that seek to capture cultural processes.
To go a step further with the notion of rhythmic assemblage, rhythmanalysis makes a crucial intervention into the kinds of research that intend to 'study units not in controlled isolation but rather the vital processes through which relations take place' (Vannini 2015, 8). It shares certain styles and modes of attention with bodies of work that embrace the relational view of the world (Ingold 2011b; Hassard and Law 1999; Thrift 2008). Rhythmanalysis as a method operates within the realm of discussions which promote the invention of methods to capture and animate the liveliness of social life. There are conceptual instruments which rhythmanalysis offers for exploring cultural-historical phenomena through the relationships of rhythmic assemblages. The prisms of 'polyrhythmia', 'eurhythmia' and 'arrhythmia' highlight attentions and modes of addressing the identification of rhythmic assemblages as being foremost a relational one, and reciprocally determined. A rhythmic assemblage is not to be singled out as an entity for analysis; instead, its measurement (not in the quantitative sense) and constitutive processes exist in a constellation of rhythmic entanglements. This is the concept of 'polyrhythmia' – a unity that encompasses a multiplicity.
The social is a polyrhythmia. For instance, if biological rhythms are being configured as an assemblage, the assemblage is also composed of those cosmological rhythms infiltrating those bodily rhythms (the metabolism of human bodies at the different hours of the day); and the rhythms of capitalistic production are tied to biological rhythms. Indeed, the process of bodily rhythms attuning to capitalistic rhythms is a recurrent concern for Lefebvre. As biological rhythms are also social, explorations of such allow for 'the push-pull exchange between the general and the particular, the abstraction of concepts and the concrete analysis of the mundane, starting with the body' (Elden 2004, viii). The body is at once singular and multiple as the philosopher states that 'the crowd is a body, the body is a crowd' (Lefebvre 2004, 42). Apart from these distinguished sites and centres of rhythmic assemblages (the bodily, the production and consumption of industrial rhythms etc.), there are also those numerous sites of rhythmic activities which are unnamed and it is the task of the rhythmanalyst to construct these sites of rhythmic assemblages, along with their constitutive materialities, to distinguish these assemblages as patterning social processes and the effects of these social processes.
The concepts of 'eurhythmia' and 'arrhythmia' indicate relationships to and the constitutive forms of 'polyrhythmia'. They posit ways of exploring the relationships of rhythmic assemblages. In contrast to structuralist explanations of systems and subjects as supposed by hierarchical forces at the outset, 'eurhythmia' and 'arrhythmia' describe the differential relationships of the multiplicity of rhythmic assemblages. These concepts direct us to explore the states of attunement within materialities, from which interpretations of 'power' are rendered with complexity. Eurhythmia describes a harmonious relationship between assemblages. For instance, when in a healthy state, bodily rhythms are attuned to the rhythms of work and rest. On the contrary, arrhythmia suggests a state of pathology, crisis and disorder. Arrhythmia orchestrates the refusal of rhythmic alliances as one makes the other impossible. According to Lefebvre, arrhythmia occurs when fatal desynchronisation causes morbidity. He designates those phenomena of arrhythmia as manifesting interruptions of social alliances which lead to contradictions of rhythms. At the core of his thinking, and that which presupposes theories of arrhythmia, is the idea that social relationships take place rhythmically and they can be portrayed by their rhythmic relations.
Once one discerns relations of force in social relations and relations of alliance, one perceives their link with rhythm. Alliances suppose harmony between different rhythms; conflict supposes arrhythmia: a divergence in time, in space, in the use of energies. (ibid., 68)
As a method for cultural-historical research, rhythmanalysis places the focus on mapping out the heterogeneous temporal-spatial conditions of experiences and phenomena. Its philosophical and methodological perspectives on polyrhythmia suggest alternative frameworks for conceptualising the 'problems' of research. For instance, the term 'scale of analysis', as lodged in the conventional rhetoric of research, deploys geographical parameters such as 'global', 'international' and 'local'. The procedures around research are then driven by presupposed scalar divisions; between the local/central and the national/global. The topological understanding assumed by rhythmanalysis, that rhythmic assemblages are constitutive rather than hierarchical, means that problems of research are formulated in alternative frameworks. There are two ways to proceed with a rhythmanalytical method, one of these weaves the multiplicity of rhythmic assemblages by entangling different sites of rhythmic production. Starting from a distinguished rhythm, the rhythmanalyst is instructed to map out a polyrhythmia of social processes by exploring how a singular rhythm is mutually presupposed by associating it with other sites of rhythms. Alternatively, one may start with a polyrhythmic assemblage. The following of the timing-spacing practices of certain materialities facilitates the recognition and construction of singular rhythms. The alignment, negotiation and realignment of rhythmic assemblages affect the units of rhythms within the polyrhythmic ensemble.
With the inherent focus on discovering relational forces and a network of materialities, rhythmanalysis provides unique optics and practical instruments for cultural-historical explorations. This book serves the purpose of offering theoretical arguments for the conceptual tools of polyrhythmia, eurhythmia and arrhythmia and this attempt is a crucial step towards working with historical archives. The unique conceptual and operational value of these concepts suggests that rhythmanalysis offers modalities of cultural analysis which aptly capture social processes as decentred, dispersed and dynamic. It foregrounds the underlying forms of experiences and phenomena, and this is achieved by exploring the iterative and transformative processes that render rhythmic forces. This kind of work may also uncover the microcurrents, contradictory trends and the intricate negotiation of power in the actualisation of social realities.
Rhythms are always constellations. Rhythmanalysis configures rhythmic assemblages by clustering social agents that generate timing-spacing experiences (or identifies the assemblages as orchestrations of time-space), and more importantly, of their mutual constitutions and reciprocal determinations. Attention is directed towards how social agents make rhythms when they circulate, cohere and form assemblages and configure temporal-spatial relations. Rhythmanalysis foregrounds the temporal-spatial ordering of dwelling, moving to places, learning, caring for each other and so on. The rhythmic entanglements of these experiences are given primary attention. Rhythmanalysis does not start from the 'cultural' or the 'political', rather it looks at the concrete social relations and exchanges exercised by the timing- spacing practices of social agents. This puts forward the nomadic nature of rhythmanalysis as a method, since there are no disciplinary boundaries which delimit the trajectories of materialities. The abstract demarcations of social fields are collapsed in the rhythmanalytical mode of exploring the connection of experiences. These specific modes of analysis indicate that rhythmanalysis is highly responsive to methodological discussion which calls for research that situates itself amidst as opposed to above social phenomena (Thrift [2007]).
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Excerpted from Practising Rhythmanalysis by Yi Chen. Copyright © 2017 Yi Chen. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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