Rythmanalysis

To study diverse spaces and diverse temporalities - rhythms in the concrete.

Thought strengthens itself only if it enters into practice: into use

the body (and rhythm) and the everyday
Normally we only grasp the relations between rhythms, which interfere with them. However, they all have a distinct existence. Normally, none of them classifies itself; on the contrary, in suffering, in confusion, a particular rhythm surges up and imposes itself: palpitation, breathlessness, pains in the place of satiety

Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm

Repetition (and difference)
No rhythm without repetition in time and space, without reprises, without returns … But there is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely. Whence the relation between repetition and difference … Not only does repetition not exclude differences, it also gives birth to them; it produces them
(Lefebvre 2004: 6-7)

the metronomic and the rhythmic

Rhythms are the music of the city, a picture that listens to itself. No camera...

struggle between a measured, imposed [tahmily] and exterior time, and a more endogenous [daruni] time.

the show the appropriation of spaces in a non-political way,

In social practice, scientific knowledge and philosophical speculation, an ancient tradition separates time and space..

Modernity curiously enlarged, deepened and dilapidated [virane] the present.

The trap of the present; the immobility of things; a moving but determinate complexity
Repetition, difference and the passage of time; Cartesian geometry, changing places and phenomenological space
The body (and rhythm) and mobility

Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot … The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world


Rhythmanalysis as a discipline:
Rhythmanalysis has the aim of the least possible separation of the scientific from the poetic.

Rhythms are lived (and you must have lived them) but to analyse them you have to be out of them. To listen to the rhythms require attentiveness and a certain amount of time....

study rhythm you need eyes, ears, a head, a memory and a heart

Any study of rhythms are necessarily comparative.





Forms of rhythms (in order of the texts):
Intervals,
clusters,
time broken and accented,
intense rhythms,
slower rhythms,
superimposed rhythms,
variation and non-variation,
increase and decrease,
accumulation points,
repetitive and different rhythms,
longer durations,
emptiness,
polyrhythmicality (symphonicality),
simultaneity,
synchronicity,
succession of alterations,
differential repetitions,
interactions,
hierarchy,
determinant rhythm,
order of grandeur,
humane scale,
stop/resume,
currents, streams,
flux and reflux,
the immediate in its moments and movements,
remembrance of other moments and of all the hours,
that what remains to scale,
rhythms always needs a reference,
complexity,
loops,
plurality of rhythms,
all gatherings of bodies are polyrhythmical,
an open totality,
a meta-stable equilibrium,
movements and differences in repetition.





There are two forms of repetition: cyclical and linear - inseparable even if the analyses must first distinguish and separate them and the rejoin them. Mathematicians clearly distinguish two types of movements, rotations and trajectories, [seire khaty] and have different measures for these two types.

1) Cyclical rhythms (big and simple intervals [modat/fasele] , social organisation manifesting itself, or alternating rhythms with short intervals, day and nights, hours and months, seasons and years, tides, solar rhythms and lunar rhythms). Generally of cosmic origins and numbered with duodecimals based on twelve. Each have a determined frequency or period, and also new beginnings.

2) Linear rhythms (succession, routine, perpetual, chance, encounters, predetermined encounters). Defined by consecutiveness and the reproduction of the same phenomena, identical or almost at more or less close regular intervals. The metronome. Generally emanates from human and social activities and particularly from the motions of work. The point of departure of all things mechanical. Linear rhythms have a tendency to oppose themselves to what is becoming. The linear, including lines, trajectories and repetitions is measured on a decimal base (the metric system).

The cyclical and the linear enter into a perpetual interaction and are even relative to each other, to the point that one becomes the measure of the other.

Polyrhythmy always results from a contradiction and also form a resistance to it - a struggle between to tendencies, the tendency to homogeneity and the one to diversity.




Other kinds of rhythms than cyclical and linear:

• Speech have two kinds of expression:

a) rhetorical [manaayee] and frontal

b) immediate and spontaneous


• Rhythm of the self and rhythm of the Other (BG: of the same person):

a) The rhythms of the Other are the rhythms of activities turned outward, towards the public, the rhythms of representation, more contained, more formalised (corresponding to frontal expression in speech);

b) The rhythms of the self are associated to rhythms more deeply inscribed, organising time more towards private life, more silent and intimate conscious forms, presence;

The Self and the Other are not cut off from each other.

• The rhythms and interactions of the multitude of social actors and roles


• The rhythms of groups


• Ritual have a double relationship with rhythms



What rhythms are studied more in detail:


• bodies (alive and human, walking, feet, pedestrians, alone, groups, crowds, stretching out, hurried carryings, nonchalant[sahlengarane] meanderings, encounters, see and meet each other, looking, going home, leaving home, appearance of faces in windows, also dogs);

• daily rhythms (rush hours, late evening, nights, dawn, schedules, times with prohibition, regulated time; preparing food, sleeping);

• gestures (hand-in-hand, waving hands - messages not being signs, - conventions, ways of being, chewing and eating e.g. gum, sandwich, hot-dog; mannerisms, habits);

• movement and traffic (pedestrians, cars, traffic lights, flows, comings and goings, passers-by, stopping, drifting);

• exchanges of all kinds (material and nonmaterial, objects and words, signs and products);

• sounds (tongue, speech, noises, voices, mumblings, rumours, cries, calls, words, silence, different languages);

• sudden events (accident, explosion, fire engine);

• festivity (opening, adventure, games, agitation); The extra-daily (dancing, singing, making music)

• ritual;

• rhythm of moods (calm, melancholic, sadness);

• seasons (trees, flowers, lawns, plantations, leaves, seeds, fruit; spring, autumn, winter; the time of each being);

• weather (downpour);

• built environment and urban functions (streets, junctions, avenues, houses, facades, monuments, places, squares, courtyards, gardens - including their ageing; doors, windows, balconies, terraces, fountains, (little) bistros and shops, shop windows, workshops, markets, attics; meeting places, scene settings, spontaneous popular theatre; closed and enclosed; public and private, outside/intimate; room, apartment; areas; palaces, churches; steps and stairs);

• light and darkness:

• colours (grey, multicoloured, white, green);

• smells (stink of fumes);

• the present-absent (money and its circuits, the omnipresent State, logic, division of labour, leisure as product, opacity and horizons, obstacles and perspectives);

• what one hides /shows/goes to see outside,

• the tide, and waves;

• Americanisation.