Rhythmanalysis: The Lefebvre’s secret garden*

Guido Borelli

«So much goes on in a Harlem air shaft. 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. A wonderful thing is that smell. An air shaft has got every contrast. One guy is cooking dried fish with rice and another guy’s got a great big turkey. Guy-with-fish’s wife is a terrific cooker but the guy’s wife with the turkey is doing a sad job

You hear people praying, fighting, snoring. Jitterbugs are jumping up and down always over you, never below you. That’s a funny thing about jitterbugs. They’re always over you. I tried to put all that in Harlem Air Shaft» Duke Ellington, 1944 (Tucker, 1993, p. 235).

1. Closing the circle on the critique of everyday life

During his long and eventful life, Henri Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books on the subjects of philosophy, everyday life, sociology (rural first and urban later), the state and – of course –Marxism. In addition to this, Lefebvre dealt with the thought of Nietzsche and the work of some French thinkers and writers of the past: Descartes, Rabelais, Musset, Pignon and Diderot. He went on to publish three short plays, a volume on the painting of Édouard Pignon, a novel entitled Le mauvais temps (written under the name of Henriette Valet, his first wife), and a geographictourist book on his beloved Germany (edited by the photographer Martin Hurlimann). Amidst all this, he also found time to deal with Hitler’s rise to power, sexology, the Paris Commune of 1871, the May 1968 movements and the critique of Le Corbusier’s urbanism in Pessac. This variety of interests can be found in an endless number of essays in journals spanning more than sixty years.

The first essay written by Lefebvre appeared in issue 5/6 of the Parisian surrealist-inspired magazine Philosophies in 1925 and was entitled: “Positions

* Paper presented at the conference: Henri Lefebvre's Critical Social Theory. Athens, 6-7 June 2022 d’attaque et de défense du nouveau mysticism”. In that essay, the 24-year-old Lefebvre, freshly graduated in philosophy from the Sorbonne, criticized the idealism, guilty of «keeping the world in check», argued that existence is a fact with which it is impossible not to be confronted, and asserted that life is an adventure that must be lived to the full. Élements de rythmanalyse – published sixty-seven years later and considered by many to be his fourth volume on the subject of everyday life – is, however, his last literary work. Significantly, Kofman and Lebas (1996, p. 30) observe that with Élements de rythmanalyse, Lefebvre «closes the circle» of his youthful preoccupations as a member of the Philosophies group by focusing on the phenomenological description of the relationship between the body, its rhythms and the surrounding space. This is a relationship that, throughout the intervening years, had remained latent (or at least unresolved). Only apparently, because in reality, as René Lourau writes in his beautiful introduction to the French edition of this book, rhythmanalysis was Lefebvre’s “secret garden”: «jardin cerrado para muchos» (Lorca, 1971)

The foundations of Élements de rythmanalyse were first outlined in the second volume of La critique de la vie quotidienne (Lefebvre, 1961). Here Lefebvre used the term rhythmology, announcing the need for a critical methodology on social time in capitalist industrial society through the study of the conflict between linear and cyclical forms of time. Despite the fact that the term rhythmology seemed more appropriate to name a scientific project based on empirical studies, Lefebvre later preferred to use the term rhythmanalysis, borrowing it from Gaston Bachelard. In the second volume of La critique de la vie quotidienne, Lefebvre defines his sociology as a radical critical theory: in his intentions, the critical knowledge of the growing alienation of everyday life must feed into a theory of praxis that can accompany (or, when possible, trigger) a revolution in everyday life. The analysis of rhythms thus becomes a constitutive part of this research programme that aims to «study the persistence of rhythmic times in linear time, that of modern society» (ibid.). A hint of rhythmic timing is then present in Vers une architecture de la jouissance (1973; 2014), the manuscript written for former student and Spanish friend Mario Gaviria. Lefebvre later returned to the concept of rhyhmanalysis in his magnum opus on space: La production de l’espace (1974; 1991). In that volume he imagined that rhythmanalysis, by virtue of its greater concreteness, effectiveness and proximity to the pedagogy of appropriation (understood as appropriation of the body as spatial practice), could complement or even replace psychoanalysis. In the third volume of La critique de la vie quotidienne (2005, p. 129), one finds the famous sentence: «when Marxists have dealt with rhythms, they have solely on the basis of labour» followed by the limits that Lefebvre notes from this observation:

«from the very beginning of industrial organization, there is a sudden mutual interference between rhythmical vital processes and linear operations. This foreshadows complex processes and does not support the thesis of a direct transition from practical work rhythms to aesthetic rhythms in music, dance, architecture and so on. The general problem here is the spatialization of temporal processes» (ibid.)

It was only in 1985, in an essay entitled: “Le project rythmanalitique”, that Lefebvre explicitly anticipated the contents of his own research project. This posed some problems for the publishers, who – concerned about publishing a treatise that announced its intention to bring together rhythms, times, spaces, poetry, music, philosophy, everyday life and the city – were hesitant to take on the manuscript, fearing that the contents would not be up to Lefebvre’s standards. It was thanks to the intercession of René Lourau, that Élements de rythmanalyse was published posthumously by Éditions Syllepse in 1992. The book bore the joint signature of Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier (his late wife), after the two authors had published essays on the same subject entitled: “Le projet rythmanalitique”, published in 1985 in issue 41 (pp. 191-199) of the journal Communications and “Essai de rythmanalyse des villes Méditerranéennes”, published in 1986 in issue 37 of the journal Peuples Méditerranéens (pp. 5-16).

Élements de rythmanalyse is a contribution to the understanding of the links between time, space and everyday life through the analysis of biological, psychological and social rhythms. The interest in Lefebvre’s theses on rhythms is based on the fact that they are expounded through a relatively clear language –even if some scholars complain about the stringency of the contents, bordering on the lapidary (Revol, 2015) – and useful references for a wide range of scholars: architects, urban planners, sociologists, designers, geographers, psychologists, anthropologists. In this respect, Élements de rythmanalyse is a book that aims to go beyond the existing disciplines. The author himself, on the opening page, does nothing to disguise its otherness: «this little book does not conceal its ambition. It proposes nothing less than to found a science, a new field of knowledge: the analysis of rhythms; with practical consequences» (2004, p. 3)

2. The genealogy of rhyhmanalysis: duration, social time, moments and le soleil crucifié

If for Lefebvre the intention to analyze rhythms is the result of a long maturation, then some conceptual references are necessary to establish its genealogy.

The first source of inspiration was undoubtedly the work of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Indeed, the term rythmanalyse was not invented by Lefebvre. But neither was it invented by Bachelard. The first to use it was the Portuguese experimental psychologist Lúcio Alberto Piñheiro dos Santos, who fled to Brazil in 1927 to escape the dictatorship of General Carmona. In 1931, Pinheiro dos Santos wrote the essay entitled: “A ritmanalise”, for a non-existent journal published by the equally imaginary Sociedade de Psicologia e Filosofia in Rio de Janeiro. The essay would surely have fallen into oblivion, had the author not sent it to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who was enthusiastic about it and decided to use it extensively in the concluding chapter of his book La dialectique de la durée (1950, ed. or., 1936). However, as Baptista (2010) reports, Piñheiro dos Santos’ manuscript has never been found, so what we are left with is Bachelard’s use of the concept of rhyhmanalysis. In La dialectique de la durée, Bachelard aims to understand the complexity of life through a critique of the Bergsonian concept of duration. For Bachelard, life is composed of a plurality of durations, each of which has its own rhythm, connections and relations with the other durations. Since each of these pluralities owes its stability to complicated forms of agreement (or sometimes discordance) between an individual’s material, biological or psychological rhythms, rhythmanalysis is proposed as a (new) component of the psychological sciences, on a par with psychoanalysis. The aim of rhythmanalysis is thus: «to heal the suffering soul - especially the soul that suffers from time, from spleen» (Bachelard, 1950). For Bachelard, through a rhythmic life, it is possible to free the soul from false permanence, from ill-made durations, reorganizing it in time in space. Rhythmicity «looks for opportunities for rhythm everywhere. It is convinced that natural rhythms correspond or can easily overlap one another. In this way, it warns us of the danger of living in the wrong moment, pointing the fundamental need for temporal dialectics» (ibid.). The rhythmanalysis proposed by Bachelard focuses on analyzing the ‘most appropriate’ rhythms to achieve a mentalemotional state capable of animating life through the lightness of intellectual freedom. It is reassuring, often poetic: rest as the ‘right of thought’ can be enlightened, spiritualized, poetized, experiencing well-regulated temporal diversities.

Lefebvre read Bachelard as a romantic who becomes a scientist or sociologist to interpret the forms of alienation that erode the poetics of ordinary people. This interpretation of poetic experience in the everyday brings Lefebvre very close to Bachelard’s thought. What distinguishes him is the maintenance of a critical focus that links poetic questions to the scientific questions of critical theory (Revol, 2015, pp. 214-215).

The second source of inspiration Lefebvre borrowed from his mentor, the RussianFrench sociologist Georges Gurvitch. For Gurvitch, society as a temporal reality is both an object and a subject in continuous becoming: it is the product of all the combined consciousnesses and memories that emerge from the infinite intersection of instances to be remembered and anticipated. On this basis, he founded a ‘dynamic’ sociology that opposed ‘static’ sociology, which was guilty of too often mystifying sociological consciousness, ignoring the totality of progress and forgetting the ‘Promethean community’ (Farruggia, 1999). For Gurvitch, time is always at work in social life, but in various ways and following different rhythms: the times of life and death, of knowledge and ignorance, of recognition and denial, of celebration and oblivion. From Gurvitch Lefebvre borrowed the definition of ‘social time’, which stood in open rupture with the classical idea of a single, homogeneous time, thought of as an a priori of collective life. This was useful for him to further specify both the conviction that time is not only mental time, but also social, biological, physical, cosmic, linear and cyclical time, and the dialectical relationship between linear time and cyclical time.

The third source of inspiration Lefebvre derived from the theory of moments, which he began to elaborate from the early 1920s. For Lefebvre, moments are those states of intense experience in everyday life that offer the possibility of a critique of everyday life itself: these are experiences relating to strong feelings of disgust, intense pleasure, madness, joy, etc. Moments generate the preconditions for a different everyday life and, at the same time, a different kind of life. The moments generate the premises for a different everyday life and, at the same time, break the continuum of the present. This is how Lefebvre describes them in his autobiography La somme et le reste (1959; 2009, p. 246): «a moment relates to the whole of life; it includes all the times lived (... but) nevertheless, it is a partial fragment of it. It is a slow journey that leads to a luminosity, a shock, a semi-understanding after which what was hitherto merely perceived or understood becomes a theme for reflection, without however exhausting its own fruitfulness. The moment has its own memory, its own formation and maturation; it condenses around a central image that exists, but disappears in spontaneous life [...] This event retrospectively sheds light on a large part of reality, and [at the same time] on the time leading up to it. It surpasses it. It is prolonged indefinitely. This takes time, a lot of time: time [for] the whole cannot be kept».

Lefebvre traces his own awareness of the existence of moments back to a movement of revolt and horror against the bigoted religion that haunted Navarrenx, the village of his maternal family, where the young Henri spent his summer holidays cultivating a deep disgust and contempt for «a village of charmless merchants and artisans» (Lefebvre, 1958; 2009, p. 243). Around 1919-20 he came to represent the inescapable need for this revolutionary drive, Lefebvre used a mythological image: le soleil crucifié. During his long summer walks in the Vallée du Gave d’Oloron, he had been intrigued by the singular crucifixes located at the crossroads of the walkways. These crucifixes bore a disc at the intersection of the arms: Lefebvre had noticed the singularity of these crosses, but without giving them any particular importance. In fact, the young philosopher remembered having absent-mindedly heard or read somewhere that these discs represented the instruments of Christ’s Passion: the crown of thorns or the spears of Roman soldiers, inscribed in those circles. One day, he had a kind of vu jàdé:

«That day, as I sat on the base of a cross, an idea that I had no doubt been maturing for a long time seized me. I stood up abruptly and looked at the cross above my head: "They crucified the sun! They crucified the sun!" I turned away in horror from that place, from that object. But the image that had first clearly appeared to me after I had walked that path so many times, had to continue on its way [...] The sun nailed to the cross of agony was the youth, my very youth [...] I swore to myself to uproot the mortal nails, to free the solar prince, to burn the cross of death. But, at the same time, a new curiosity seized me. So who were these men – my ancestors –who carried out this action, who made this grandiose and tragic symbol and placed it – they, obscure peasants – at the crossroads of the paths? Why? When?» (ibid., p. 245, my translation from French)

For Lefebvre, moments – understood as differential experiences in everyday life –enlighten us in understanding the states of alienation into which capitalist society has plunged us. With regard to states of alienation, he did not even omit religion (in this case: the Catholic religion that he perceived as bigoted and retrograde within his maternal family). Chapter five of the first volume of the Critique of Everyday Life (1947; 1991) is entitled: “Notes written on a Sunday in the French Countryside” and is a veritable diary of daily life in a small village in the Béarn (the region where Lefebvre was originally from) in the immediate postWorld War II period. This chapter is much quoted by scholars, due to Lefebvre’s fierce redde rationem against the Catholic Church, guilty – like economic fetishism – of producing alienation in the lives of humble believers:

«its power comes from the fact that it penetrates daily life. On the one hand it has created a dehumanizes ceremonial […] an abstract theory; on the other it has produced an extremely subtle and precise psychological and moral technique» (1991; p. 225, original emphasis).

Since Lefebvre assumes from Marx’s Economic Philosophical Manuscripts (1848) the concept of alienation as central to the critique of everyday life, we can assume that if the theory of moments represents for Lefebvre the metaphysical foundation for the critique of everyday life, the theory of rhythms completes it by proposing itself as its scientific-methodological foundation.

3. The body, time and space

Rhythmanalysis makes its way into Lefebvre’s thinking as a necessary concept for resolving the entanglement between linear and cyclical rhythms generated by the capitalist mode of production. Linear time has become hegemonic in capitalism because – in Lefebvre’s opinion – it has been transformed into an abstract entity, necessary only to measure the exchange value inherent in the production process: «time is money» (Moore, 2013, p. 73). The linear time of capitalism promises innovation and progress, but offers only monotony and boredom in return. On this point, Lefebvre maintains a crucial distinction between rhythm and repetition. Rhythms preserve differences within their recurring cycles: a sunrise or sunset is always unique, even though it repeats itself every day. Rhythms do not cancel out the possibility of desire and discovery: hunger and thirst appear with ever-changing nuances. Repetitions, on the other hand, cancel out all differences in an attempt to make time homogenous, equivalent and interchangeable: the formal and material identity of a work cycle is precisely recognizable repetitive and identical to itself and equally generative of exhaustion and acedia. The task of rhythmanalysis in modern capitalist society is to equip a critical tool – a methodology – for analyzing the dominance of linear time over cyclical time. For Lefebvre, despite the hegemony of linear time, there are always forces – more or less residual – that oppose capital’s ability to completely colonize everyday life. If the qualitative has virtually disappeared in favor of the quantitative, Lefebvre insists that it is precisely from this virtuality that we must start: from establishing a dialectical relationship between linear and cyclical, between power and resistance.

But a dialectical relation requires three terms, a dualism is not sufficient because two terms realize a contradiction, not a relation. For this reason, Lefebvre believes that the rhythmic analysis between the repetitions proper to linear time and the differences proper to cyclical time must be supplemented by introducing a third element: the body, so that the relation proceeds from the abstract to the concrete. The French philosopher returns once again to his favorite early Marx, and borrows from the Third Manuscript, Private Property and Communism of 1844 , the conviction that the body (through) the senses immediately became, in its praxis, a theorist and transfers it to everyday life. The study of the rhythms of the body and its subjection to training and rules (dressage) is indispensable not only for analyzing how capitalism forms classes, but above all for understanding how capitalism acts as a system that is built on the disregard of the body and its life-times. Then the hallmark of rhythmanalysis is the integration of the body as a material entity that allows the transition from the abstract to the concrete. At this point, since a body is not normally capable of grasping rhythms that lie outside its perceptual scale (an example borrowed from physics are ultrared and ultraviolet radiation or, ultrasound and infrasound), in order to undertake a successful analysis of rhythms, a method is required. In this respect, the succession of chapters in Élements de rythmanalyse is intended to guide the reader through the rhythmic praxis.

4. Trawling on Élements de rythmanalyse

Although Lefebvre arranged the contents of Élements de rythmanalyse in a fairly consistent and consequential manner, there is no question that the most read and most quoted chapter is the third, entitled: “Seen from the window”, followed by the author’s immediate clarification: «No! This title belongs to Colette. I wrote: “seen from my windows, on a Parisian crossroads, therefore on the street”». In this chapter, Lefebvre puts the analysis of rhythms into practice by making use of the skills described in the previous chapter, the second one, entitled: “The Rhythmanalyst. A Provisional Portrait”.

From the windows of his flat at 30 Rue Rambuteau, in Paris’ 4th arrondissement, Lefebvre observes the daily hustle and bustle and the rhythms that the then newly built Beaubourg/Centre Georges Pompidou produces. On the one hand, he retrieves the tradition of certain French Impressionist painters – including, in particular, Camille Pissarro and Gustave Caillebotte – who made very effective use of the near/far point of view offered by a window overlooking the street (fênetre sur la ville). On the other hand, he distances himself from it because «the window responds»: rhythmanalysis is not a contemplative or simply descriptive or allusive activity, it is a critical activity:

«No camera, no image or series of images can show these rhythms. It requires equally attentive eyes and ears, a head and a memory and a heart. A memory? Yes, in order to grasp this present otherwise than in an instantaneous moment, to restore it in its moments, in the movement of diverse rhythms» (2004, p. 36)

The window suggests various hypotheses to the rhythmanalyst: the crowd, its wandering, which Lefebvre uses to construct the dialectic of rhythms in time and space, but also the forms and gestures that power has inscribed in time and space:

«wouldn’t the bodies (human, living, plus those of a few dogs) that move about down there, in the car-wrecked swarming whole, impose a law? Which one? An order of grandeur. The windows, doors, streets and façades are measured in proportion to human size. The hands that move about, the limbs, do not amount to signs, even though they throw out multiple messages. But is there a relation between these physical flows of movements and gestures and the culture that shows itself (and yells) in the enormous murmur of the junction?

The little bistros on the rue R., the boutiques, are on a human scale, like the passers-by. Opposite, the constructions wanted to transcend this scale, to leave known dimensions and also all models past and possible behind; leading to the exhibition of metal and frozen guts, in the form of solidified piping, and the harshest reflections. And it’s a meteorite fallen from another planet, where technocracy reigns untrammelled» (ibid., pp. 33-34).

The window onto Rue Rambuteau is not a mental place from which the gaze can get lost in the production of abstract interpretations, but is, for Lefebvre, a ‘practical, private and concrete’ place that offers views beyond «spectacles or mentally prolonged perspectives». Consistent with the approach of this paragraph, we point out that in the first chapter of Élements de rythmanalyse Lefebvre focuses on the socio-economic organisation of urban-mercantile society, to reiterate that –in a Marxist perspective – the commodity takes everything and – in a Lefebvrian perspective – (social) space and (social) time become the space and time of markets and exchange. In this way, extending Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, space and time become things that – this is the point that interests us – contain rhythms within them. Below, in chapter one, Lefebvre explains in detail the characteristics of these rhythms while maintaining the focus on reified space and time.

The chapters following the third are devoted respectively: the fourth to ‘training (dressage)’; the fifth to ‘media day’; the sixth to ‘time manipulation’; the seventh to ‘music and rhythms’. These are chapters in which Lefebvre goes into greater detail on the contents of the first two. The chapter on training – borrowing the term dressage, derived from horse riding – intriguingly develops the ways in which human beings, like animals, can be trained, i.e.: «learn to conform themselves» Dressage has its own rhythms, resulting from a combination of innovation and repetition. The chapter on the media day retrieves Heidegger’s historicalontological dialogue with poets and focuses on the distinction between communication and dialogue. Here Lefebvre argues that communication devalues dialogue because in modernity, information accumulates forming a mediatised everyday that is both prey to the media [...] and ignored by these same media that are only interested in «forming apparatuses». In the chapter on the manipulation of time Lefebvre hypothesises a history of time that includes rhythms: a critical history capable of linking the rhythm of capital with the rhythm of production (anything) and destruction (speculation, wars, progress). Here Lefebvre clarifies the difference between the “rhythms of history” and the “history of rhythms”. While the former belongs to the mode of historiography, the history of rhythms should, on the other hand, stimulate special attention to the ways in which the heterogeneity of rhythms proves capable of marking the course of history. The chapter on Music and

Rhythms proposes a reflection on the relationship between music and society, arguing that this relationship changes according to epochs and societies themselves, This would depend, according to Lefebvre «on their relationship with the body, with nature, with physiological and psychological life». In this last chapter, Lefebvre develops a further dialectical relationship for rhythmanalysis: that between time, space and energy. Time and space, without energy are destined to remain inert: it is energy that puts them in mutual tension; for this reason, «the relationship between musical time and the rhythms of the body is necessary». Further on, Lefebvre specifies the way in which modern music is found in the body: «musical rhythm is not only part of the aesthetics and rules of art, it has an ethical function. In its relation to the body, to time, to the work, it illustrates real (everyday) life». With this observation he seems to indicate close links between music and (generally urban) musical subcultures and, in particular, a dialectical relationship between music, the times of everyday life and the construction of the body. Although the French philosopher did not go so far as to write about popular or Afro-American music, his rhythmic reflections are useful in making sense of the urban dynamics and conflicts that we can hear in much contemporary music, particularly in trap or hip hop music or, in earlier years, in the black music of “angry” African-American jazz musicians . It is no coincidence that African culture assigns a very important function to rhythms (e.g.: reinforcing social solidarity or inviting sharing and participation), because it considers them to be completely integrated with everyday life.

5. The rhythmanalyst appeals to all his senses

What did Lefebvre intend to leave us with these last «chords of his little night music?».

Certainly the French philosopher offers us a chance to analyse the complexity of space and time in the era of flexible capitalism, helping us to understand how the world is changing rapidly. However, some clarifications in this regard are necessary. In the case of rhythmanalysis, it would not be correct to speak of a “rigorous” methodology. But neither would it be correct to speak of a supremely subjective and abstract approach. The diatribe is well known. Marxist-inspired scholars have always succumbed to criticism – especially from positivist researchers – who openly accuse them of exchanging ideology for substance and abstraction for empiricism. Lefebvrian rhythmanalysis goes far beyond this dispute, so much so that it seems because it is precisely on abstraction and subjectivity that the French philosopher’s proposal bases its constituent principles. Everything that established research methodologies regard as fundamental requirements (the claim to objectivity in analysis, the non-partisanship of the researcher, and so forth) which the social sciences have drawn legitimacy over the last century and a half, for Lefebvre represents a fatal limitation that often leads the researcher (and his research) to face the famous Hegelian aphorism: «what is “familiarly known” is not properly known». With these premises, rhythmanalysis, instead of positioning itself comfortably within the theoretical and epistemological assumptions of the social sciences, is founded on a different project: that of the critique of everyday life. This project is radically different from any study of everyday life. Whereas in the established social sciences everyday life is an analytical descriptive concept - in any case “taken for granted” -, in Lefebvre’s project this conception is insufficient because it does not define the rhythmic essence of the desires and needs of everyday life as interacting rhythms. It does not capture the unconscious needs, desires, reflections and passions. For Lefebvre, the need to perceive the rhythms of the other necessarily passes through the perception of one’s own rhythms through one’s own body:

«the rhythmanalyst has nothing in common with a prophet or a sorcerer. Nor with a metaphysician or a theologian. His act, his deed [geste], relates to reason. He hopes to deploy it, to lead it further and higher by recovering the sensible. In short, he is not a mystic! Without going so far as to present himself as a positivist, for someone who observes: an empiricist. He changes that which he obverses: he sets it in motion, he recognises its power. In this sense, he seems close to the poet, or the man of the theatre» (ibid., p. 25).

It is only by considering this particular attitude of the researcher that we can approach chapter three of Élements de rythmanalyse, ‘Seen from the Window’. This must be read as the moment in which the rhythmanalyst encounters others and their rhythms. Unlike a phenomenological analysis, the rhythmanalyst does not merely consider that «there are rhythms», but that rhythms are produced within a given situation. Its aim is to qualify these rhythms, to illustrate the causes and effects of the interaction between time, space and the energy produced by the bodies of others in those times and spaces. For the rhythmanalyst, this interaction is dialectical and constitutes the starting point of the critical methodology of processes of reification. The political order that reigns in the Rue Rambuteau, the omnipresent state with its absolute technocracy «which cannot be seen from the window, but presents itself in this present», shows us how Lefebvre’s analysis shifts – it would be more appropriate to say “wanders” – between the observation of the rhythms of the street to the critique of society: the succession of these alternations, repetitions, differences, suggests to the analysis that this present is ordered by something that comes from elsewhere (which is not visible from the window). To capture this presence, the rhythmanalyst uses his own body as a metronome:

«in order to grasp this fleeting object, which is not exactly an object, it is therefore necessary to situate oneself simultaneously inside and outside. A balcony does the job admirably, in relation 3 Seen from the Window to the street, and it is to this putting into perspective (of the street) that we owe the marvellous invention of balconies, and that of the terrace from which one dominates the road and passers-by.» (ibid., pp. 27-28).

Below, Lefebvre proposes an observation that is fundamental to the practice of ritmanalysis as a research method:

«the implication in the spectacle entails the explication of this spectacle» (ibid., p. 33).

René Lourau, in his introduction, does not miss this passage from Lefebvre, noting how it introduces very important questions about the level of involvement of the observer. It is – according to Lourau – «an interminable, incomplete, uncertain work that cannot come to terms with the indeterminacy of the situation». The result is therefore not the “explanation” as in classical logic or sociology. The analysis of involvement more or less «explains our place within the spectacle of the world, and in doing so provides some illumination about the world - or its representation». For Lourau, to recognised these implications is to do most of the social and analytical work because the obstacles to such recognition form the main part of the field of analysis:

«I define implications as all the relationships that the intellectual refuses - consciously or unconsciously - to analyse in his practice, be they relationships with his objects of study, with the cultural institution, with his family or other milieu, with money, with power, with libido and in general with the society of which he is a part. The intellectual believes himself capable of analysing and objectifying what happens to others, sometimes even categories of intellectuals from which he, however, automatically excludes himself» (Lapassade, Lourau, 1971, p. 200, my translation from French).

The concept of implication is of some use in understanding the practice of rhythmanalysis because implications are not only “responses to”, but above all “relations to”. For Lourau (1981, p. 12), our bodies are likened to those of ventriloquists who speak «only because it is the institution that speaks through us, because we literally have it “under our skin”». Everyday life is entirely composed of an institutional fabric that entails a certain degree of consent, adherence, commitment and participation (if not integration): we are all involved in the institution, even when we do not objectively belong to its established form. Lourau brings an effective example in support of this thesis:

«it does not matter whether I am rich or poor, whether I am an employee or a shareholder: the institution of the bank, and the institutions connected to it, affect me. I deal with the bank, even if I have no bank account, no savings account, no postal account, because the bank is the established form of regulation concerning the circulation and accumulation of capital» (ibid.).

Through the implication of the researcher, rhythmanalysis recognises the importance of arbitrariness and suggests a methodological freedom rather than a dogged pursuit of positivist truths through poorly designed research. Arbitrariness highlights the methodologically nomadic nature of rhythmanalysis that refuses to enclose itself within disciplinary boundaries that would limit its trajectories. This does not mean that rhythmanalysis is not receptive to methodological discussions. Rather, it means that it is grounded in an understanding of social experiences as reverberating and impregnated, and methodologically situates itself in the midst of social phenomena, as opposed to all those research practices that stand above social phenomena.

6. Ritmanalysis today

Élements de rythmanalyse shares the same fate as most of the Lefebvrian reissues of the last thirty years: that of having received attention and having (re)opened the scientific debate only after being translated into English. It all started in 1991 with the publication of The production of space (with an afterword by David Harvey). From then on, there has been a crescendo of re-editions and production of essays and volumes (mainly in English) dedicated to the eclectic theoretical universe of the French philosopher. Compared to this relatively recent production, Élements de rythmanalyse opens up further possibilities: the empirical possibilities of applied research. It is since 2004, when the text became accessible to Anglo-Saxon scholars in their own language, that the number of studies that have referred in various ways to rythmanalyse as a research method has rapidly multiplied. To this it must be added that, as the elaboration on rhythms is far from being presented by the author himself as a closed system, but only sketched out in this small treatise, many researchers have devoted themselves to not only exploring its empirical potential, but also to trying to define its procedural aspects in some way. The Lefebvrian concepts of “polyrhythmics”, “eurythmy” and “arrhythmia” have been variously declined to show that places and times are constituted and function through mobile flows of capital, objects, energy or matter passing through and around them. In this respect, places and times exist in a constellation of rhythmic entanglements: polyrhythms containing multiple temporalities, in harmony (eurythmy) or in contrast (arrhythmia) with each other in an ever-evolving rhythmic assemblage.

The number of essays dealing directly with spatio-temporal urban issues, as well as those exploring the technical possibilities of perceiving the environment (audio-visual, time-lapse, sound recording, use of drones, etc.) and the kinetic modalities (walking, traveling by train, bus, subway, ferry, car, bicycle, etc.), as well as the static modalities (the window, the table at the bistrot, the bench, etc.) is constantly growing and it is not our purpose to give an even concise review here.

However, this is a good sign. Firstly, the realization that there is a widespread and heterogeneous use of Lefebvrian rythmanalyse by scholars located in all parts of the world and – picking up on the remarks in the previous chapter –“differentially implicated”, pulls the ground from under the feet of all those who disapprove of the Marxist orientation in research activities. The extraordinary reception of a research practice produced by a Marxist scholar (albeit an unorthodox one, as Lefebvre certainly was), testifies also the fact that there is room for conducting non-Marxist critical research using methodologies born within Marxist thought. Élements de rythmanalyse is part of a variegated strand of research opened up by the Anglo-Saxon world: that of bringing to attention the work and the life (yes, even the life) of ‘the ignored philosopher and social theorist’ (Aronowitz, 2007, p. 133). The hope is that this will help both to bring a breath of fresh air into the immense realm of research dealing with time, space and energy, and to focus research themes on the conditions and possibilities for each of us to realize a less boring and serious everyday life, more attentive to minutiae and more “ordinary”. Precisely in the hope of an everyday ordinariness, capable of restoring to us the pleasures of a rhythmic existence, I could not find a more apt conclusion to this paper than that given by Georges Perec (1989) to stimulate not the discovery of new fields of research, but rather the creation of new ways to approach the research:

«what speaks to us, it seems to me, is always the event, the unusual, the extraordinary: front-page articles in five columns, headlines in huge letters. Trains only begin to exist when they derail, and the more dead there are among the travelers, the more trains exist [...] Behind an event there must be a scandal, a crack, a danger, as if life should only reveal itself through the spectacular, as if the exemplary, the significant, were always abnormal: natural cataclysms or historical upheavals, social conflicts, political scandals [...] Everyday newspapers talk about everything except the everyday. Newspapers bore me, they do not teach me anything; what they report does not concern me, it does not interrogate me, nor does it answer the questions I ask myself or would like to ask. What really happens, what we live, all the rest, where is it? What happens every day and is repeated every day, the banal, the everyday, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual, how to account for it, how to question it, how to describe it?» (ibid, p. 12, my translation from French).