Past Read: Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life

Lefebvre, Henri, Gerald Moore and Stuart Elden. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life. (Continuum, 2004)
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Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) was one of the more influential, productive, and iconoclastic philosophers of the twentieth century. Rhythmanalysis (2004), his final book and the capstone to his earlier trilogy Critique of Everyday Life, was originally published posthumously in French in 1992, and later translated to English in 2004.

Lefebvre was known as a sociologist as well as a philosopher and Marxist. On that score, he focused his analysis on the sensory perceptions of quotidian experience. He was particularly interested in the ways that everyday life has been structured through modernity. In Rhythmanalysis, he argues that the temporal structuring of life into specific chunks (e.g., work separated from the weekend separated from downtime, etc.) has alienated us from our more natural, human, biological rhythms (the circadian rhythm comes to mind). Modernity has altered our structuration of life, and it is essential that as we view the modern, the urban, and the global, we expand our view beyond the limited orthodox Marxist focus on means of production alone. As Mohamed Zayani draws out in his introduction to the work (cited below):

The concept that Lefebvre claims to have added to the vocabulary of Marxism is “the everyday.” To better define this fundamental concept, Lefebvre makes a subtle but important distinction between daily life (la vie quotidienne), on the one hand, and the everyday (le quotidien)and its corollary, everydayness (la quotidienneté) on the other: 'Let us simply say about daily life that it has always existed, but permeated with values, with myths. The word everyday as an object of programming, whose unfolding is imposed by the market, by the system of equivalences, by marketing and advertising. As to the concept of ‘everydayness,’ it stresses the homogenous, the repetitive, the fragmentary in everyday life'  .... [T]he everyday does not simply refer to the perfunctory functions that individuals perform but instead designates the common denominator of these functions; it means by its sequence rather than its substance. (4)

Rhythmanalysis, then, is a close reading of the rhythms of life within the context of an urban modernity.




Further reading:

For two essays that briefly situate rhythmanalysis within broader Marxist thought, see:

Henri Lefebvre, Catherine Régulier & Mohamed Zayani (1999): "The Rhythmanalytical Project." Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 11:1, 5-13

Mohamed Zayani (1999): "Introduction to Rhythmanalysis." Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 11:1, 1-4