Swell

One of Henri Lefebvre’s last contributions to the study of social space was a proposal that was both a general theory and a method: rhythmanalysis. Anticipated in articles published in the 1980s – some of them signed with his wife, Catherine Régulier – it appears in a book that will see the light of day in 1991, shortly after its author’s death, but which, like all of Lefebvre’s urban work, took several years to be translated into English (Lefebvre, 2004). The purpose of rhythmanalysis – a notion borrowed from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1994: 65-66) – was to conceive of space as a reality shaken by great rhythms at once corporeal and social, objective and subjective, cosmic and cultural, which kept pace with everyday life, but also of those lesser rhythms that passed through it, beating it. He set out to study the cyclical regularities – ondulations, vibrations, returns, rotations – and the interferences or interactions that particular events exerted on them, which curled up or interrupted them. For the rhythm-analyst, rhythm is understood as repetition in which a regular contrast between long and short times can be appreciated, in which stops, silences, intervals, or, to use the musical simile, heights, frequencies, vibrations are included, restarting over and over again a process that is not uniform, but overflows with jolts and accidents.
 
The cadences that rhythmanalysis wants to study are not those of the monotonous rhythms of capitalist space-time, conscious, regular and organised. This finds its portrait in the clock and the chronometer as instruments for counting the mechanical time of the cycles of production. Lived time is not the time of capital, even if it is sometimes determined and ordered by it. Commodified time is quantitative and quantifiable; it is articulated, without ever being entirely confused, with lived time, which is qualitative, made up of discontinuous instants and intensities. Lived time is punctuated by rhythms that are the result of interactions between place, moment and energy that are always different, made of repetitions, but also of movements and differences, of contradictions, paradoxes and conflicts. It is mechanical, like a metronome, but also organic. Measuring it is difficult or impossible because it is cyclical and linear, continuous and discontinuous, quantitative and qualitative, internal to the body and external to it. Each rhythm has its own frequencies, speeds and consistencies. The lived experience is never simply rhythmic; it is at the same time polyrhythmic -diverse-, eurythmic -harmonious- and arrhythmic -marked by disturbances.
 
This perception of the rhythmic dimension of ordinary life is reflected by Lefebvre in a chapter of his book on rhythmanalysis entitled “Seen from the Window”. He describes his personal experience of opening a window of his house in Rue Rambuteau, opposite Beaubourg in Paris. When he does so, he is met with a barrage of mixed uproar and murmurs, indistinguishable at first: “the pedestrians move around them like waves around a rock, though not without condemning the drivers of the badly placed vehicles with withering looks. Hard rhythms: alternations of silence and outburst, time both broken and accentuated, striking he who takes to listening from his window, which astonishes him more than the disparate movements of the crowds” (Lefebvre, 2004: 29). Despite this confusion, the attentive ear recognises in it the rhythms half-buried beneath what seemed like noise; currents, sources and interactions that reveal a secret symphony in which we distinguish not only sounds but also things: a house, a market, a street or a bridge.
 
Lefebvre proposes an image with which he wants to make comprehensible this hidden polyphony emitted by real urban life: that of the sea waves. He writes: “To grasp rhythm and polyrhythmias in a sensible, preconceptual but vivid way, it is enough to look carefully at the surface of the sea. Waves come in succession: they take shape in the vicinity of the beach, the cliff, the banks. These waves have a rhythm, which depends on the season, the water and the winds, but also on the sea that carries them, that brings them. Each sea has its rhythm: that of the Mediterranean is not that of the oceans. But look closely at each wave. It changes ceaselessly. As it approaches the shore, it takes the shock of the backwash: it carries numerous wavelets, right down to the tiny quivers that it orientates, but which do not always go in its direction. Waves and waveforms are characterised by frequency, amplitude and displaced energy. Watching waves, you can easily observe what physicists call the superposition of small movements. Powerful waves crash upon one another, creating jets of spray; they disrupt one another noisily. Small undulations traverse each other, absorbing, fading, rather than crashing, into one another. Were there a current or a few solid objects animated by a movement of their own, you could have the intuition of what is a polyrhythmic field and even glimpse the relations between complex processes and trajectories, between bodies and waveforms, etc.” (2004: 79).
 
The recourse to waves to make the complexity and non-linearity of social space understandable is prefigured in one of the fundamental texts of Lefebvre’s urban philosophy, The Production of Space (1991), published in its original version in 1974 and translated into English almost two decades later, also once its author had been rescued from oblivion by the so-called spatial turn. In the work, he proposes a theoretical formula that preludes rhythmanalysis and which he calls spatio-analysis or spatiology (Lefebvre, 1991: 404). His assumption is that social space is an unstable system that cannot be reduced to any unity, since it responds to a multiple and in a certain sense innumerable plurality, each of whose constituent elements is often juxtaposed in an unpredictable way one on top of the other. The spaces into which the social space is fragmented are not closed continents, recognisable by their profile or their composition; distinct but inseparable, they maintain a relationship of mutual dependence that translates into all kinds of interferences and filtrations. This, applied to the knowledge of what Lefebvre names as the urban, distinct from the city as morphology, would require and generate a space whose structure is not made up of institutions, nor of predictable and calculable units, but of instants and encounters, of mobile topographies in which a proliferation of appropriations and meanings is registered.
 
Hence the eloquence of the representation lent to this Lefebvrian idea of social space by the swell of sea waves. Like waves, social spaces are not things bounded by each other, colliding by their contours. Like every wave, every social place can only be understood as interfered with, snatched, confronted, disrupted and interrupted by other equally shifting and fickle social places. Lefebvre seeks here the model that fluid dynamics lends him:
 
“A much more fruitful analogy, it seems to me, may be found in hydrodynamics, where the principle of the superimposition of small movements teaches us the importance of the roles played by scale, dimension and rhythm. Great movements, vast rhythms, immense waves – these all collide and ‘interfere’ with one another; lesser movements, on the other hand, interpenetrate. If we were to follow this model, we would say that any social locus could only be properly understood by taking two kinds of determinations into account: on the one hand, that locus would be mobilized, carried forward and sometimes smashed apart by major tendencies, those tendencies which ‘interfere’ with one another; on the other hand, it would be penetrated by, and shot through with, the weaker tendencies characteristic of networks and pathways” (1991: 87).
 
This social space that Lefebvre thinks of as subject to continuous shocks and oscillations is similar to what Merleau-Ponty (2000) calls anthropological space, as distinct from geometrical space (312-352). Geometrical spatiality is homogeneous, univocal, isotropic, clear and objective. Geometrical space is an indisputable space. Anthropological spatiality, on the other hand, is experiential and fractal, in the context of a society in which complexity and plurality continue to grow, threatening – through contempt or indifference – the centralisation and unification on which political control in modern societies depends. Earlier, another antecedent to Lefebvre’s conception of social space as a convulsive sea was the non-cartesian epistemology with which Gaston Bachelard (1984) defined spatio-temporal plots, at the antipodes of any distribution into clearly delimitable spatial units (135-178). These visions of social space as chronically unsettled space prepare the understanding of the city as an example of a complex self-organised system, shaped by critical mechanisms acting far from equilibrium, that is, to name it as Lefebvre (2004) did, in ‘metastable equilibrium’ (404). For its part, if urban anthropology were to become aware of the fluctuating and unsettled nature of the society it seeks to know, its spatial being as waves, it would recognise its exercise as that of a kind of surfing, an activity consisting of gliding over the moving surface of a reality – urban life – in a permanent state of upheaval.
 
Two last notes on how Henri Lefebvre (1995) uses the analogy with the waves to speak of other things. He does so in a work published in 1962 -Introduction to Modernity- to refer to himself and his own vulnerability, lost in a totality reminiscent of the sea, a tumultuous instability, made up of repetitions of the same thing that is never the same, that is other but not completely. This paroxysm wants to devour him, and in the face of this he opposes a fragile structure – that of his self – at the mercy of dangerous and threatening waves, each one “contains innumerable smaller rhythms, like an entire world; it gives birth to smaller waves which themselves carry delicate water-movements, small furrows, whorls, lace, brocade and foam” (129). Elsewhere, he uses the restless sea in a hedonistic and voluptuous sense, associating it with enjoyment, in this case of the beach. He does so in a piece of writing that the sociologist Mario Gaviria asks Henri Lefebvre to write about their experience in Benidorm, a summer town on the Spanish Levantine coast. This happened in 1973, but the manuscript remained in a drawer until, much later, in 2018, it was rescued (for the Spanish readership) [1], translated and published in Spanish by Ion Martínez under the title Hacia una arquitectura del placer (Lefebvre, 2018). There he describes the sensual experience of contact with the sun, the sand and the waves. “The waves (what a beautiful name, the waves, always repeated, always different, uncertain, defined, each one with its form, caressing, violent)” (102).
 

References
 
Bachelard, Gaston (1984 [1934]). The New Scientific Spirit, Beacon Press.
Bachelard, Gaston (1994 [1958]). Poetics of Space, Beacon Press.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991 [1974]). The Production of Space, Blackwell.
Lefebvre, Henri (1995 [1962]). Introduction to Modernity, Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri (2004 [1994]). Rhythmanalysis Space, Time and Everyday Life, Continuum.

Lefebvre, Henri (2014 [1973]. Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment, University of Minnesota Press.
Lefebvre, Henri (2018 [1973]). Hacia una arquitectura del placer, CIS.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2010 [1945]). The Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge.