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Rhythmanalysis
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-973-1

Book part
Publication date: 5 November 2016

Çağrı Eryılmaz

During Gezi Protests of June 2013, hundred thousands of people from different and even opposite groups were together on the streets of Turkey against government for a month. The…

Abstract

During Gezi Protests of June 2013, hundred thousands of people from different and even opposite groups were together on the streets of Turkey against government for a month. The abruptness, severity, diversity and creativity of Gezi Movement make it unique among urban movements in Turkey. Protesters not only challenged the police violence and authoritarian policies but also defended public spaces of their city. My analysis of Gezi Movement is based on the comparison of Lefebvre, Harvey, and Bookchin who all integrated the critique of capitalism and revolutionary vision into urban movements. However, they are different in terms of what revolution, city, class, citizen, and urban social movements are. Gezi Movement is discussed through the similarities and differences of three approaches.

Gezi Movement is a good example of New Social Movements which lacks an organization, hierarchy and a leader. As an urban movement it provided a glimpse of heterotopia of Lefebvre where many different groups and identities challenge the abstract space of neoliberal capitalism. The protesters, as the producers and the consumers of urban commons claimed Gezi Park and Taksim Square as Harvey stated. The transformation of protests into neighborhood forums despite losing power and participation shows the civic potential of urban movement that may develop direct democracy of citizens as a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. The spatial analysis of Gezi Movement provided insight to the revolutionary potential of urban movements in neoliberal age.

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Public Spaces: Times of Crisis and Change
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78635-463-1

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Book part
Publication date: 26 November 2021

Frederick Harry Pitts, Eleanor Jean and Yas Clarke

This paper explores the potential of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a…

Abstract

This paper explores the potential of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms – specifically those between embodied circadian and biological rhythms and the rhythms of working life. It takes as a case study a prototype performance research method investigating the methodological and practical potential of quantified self technologies to reconnect the body to its forms of abstraction in a digital age by means of the collection, interpretation and sonification of data using wearable tech, mobile apps, synthesised music and modes of visual communication. Quantitative data were selectively ‘sonified’ with synthesisers and drum machines to produce a 40-minute electronic symphony performed to a public audience. The paper theorises the project as an intervention reconnecting quantitative data with the qualitative experience it abstracts from, exploring the potential for these technologies to be used as tools of remediation that recover the embodied social subject from its abstraction in data for critical self-knowledge and understanding.

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Rhythmanalysis
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-973-1

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Book part
Publication date: 19 September 2022

Christian Fuchs

This essay asks: How can we understand and theorise the impacts of robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on everyday life based on Radical Humanism? How can Lefebvre's ideas be…

Abstract

This essay asks: How can we understand and theorise the impacts of robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on everyday life based on Radical Humanism? How can Lefebvre's ideas be used to reveal the ideological character of contemporary accounts of the impacts of robots and AI on society? It engages with rather unknown works of the Radical Humanist Henri Lefebvre on the sociology and philosophy of technology such as Vers le cybernanthrope (Towards the Cybernanthrope). Foundations of a Lefebvrian, dialectical, Radical Humanist approach to the sociology and philosophy of technology are presented. This essay introduces Lefebvre's notion of the cybernanthrope and sets it in relation to robots and AI in contemporary society. Based on Lefebvre's critique of the cybernanthrope, this chapter develops foundations of the ideology critique of robots and AI in digital capitalism. It discusses examples of technological deterministic and social constructivist thought in the context of robotics, AI, and cyborgs and argues for an alternative, Lefebvrian, dialectical approach. This essay situates Humanism in the context of computing, AI and robotics. The chapter advances a Lefebvrian Radical Humanism by engaging in analyses of AI and robots in Post-humanism, Transhumanism, techno-deterministic approaches, social construction of technology approaches, techno-optimism, techno-pessimism, acceleratonism, the mass unemployment hypothesis and Spike Jonze's movie Her. This chapter shows that the major lesson we can learn from the Radical Humanist sociology of technology and Henri Lefebvre's works on technology is that Radical Humanism helps creating and sustaining technologies for the many, not the few. This insight remains of high relevance in the age of digital capitalism, smart robots and AI.

Book part
Publication date: 26 November 2021

Guido Borelli

This chapter is an account of a rhythmanalysis of a representation of daily life in Venice in calle Rugagiuffa in a YouTube series. This series – named Rugagiuffa in reference to…

Abstract

This chapter is an account of a rhythmanalysis of a representation of daily life in Venice in calle Rugagiuffa in a YouTube series. This series – named Rugagiuffa in reference to the calle in which was filmed – was self-produced by a group of young friends struggling with an everyday reality very different from the one presented by tour operators: a lack of rental property, unemployment or work that is demeaning and strictly off the books. In the first part of the chapter, I refer to the basic concepts of the rhythmanalytic methodology developed by Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier and use it to describe Venetian rhythms starting from the relations between the body and urban space. Then, I adapt Lefebvre's thought in order to show how the status of ‘city of art’ coincides, for Venice, on the one hand, with its commodification for exclusively tourist purposes and, on the other hand, with the trivialisation of Venetian daily life, reduced to a tourist spectacle. In the final part, I use Rugagiuffa as a bittersweet mise-en-scène of the ability of the tourist monoculture to take possession at various levels of daily life and its relationship with the residents. I argue that the daily life of the Venetian citizens is subsumed within the city's tourist-commercial spectacle to the point of imposing, in spite of themselves, a high degree of consensus, adherence, commitment and integration.

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Rhythmanalysis
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-973-1

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Book part
Publication date: 26 November 2021

Eirini Glynou-Lefaki

This chapter embraces a rhythmanalytic approach to address the complexities of a city recovering from a disaster. Bridging Henri Lefebvre's work on everyday life with his later…

Abstract

This chapter embraces a rhythmanalytic approach to address the complexities of a city recovering from a disaster. Bridging Henri Lefebvre's work on everyday life with his later work on rhythms this chapter engages his theory to analyse the case of L'Aquila, a city in central Italy that was destroyed by an earthquake in 2009. To this day, the city's skyline is dominated by cranes, while life unfolds along with sounds of the ongoing reconstruction. While the city is still recovering from the earthquake, the landscape of ruins co-exists with a landscape of construction. More than 10 years after the earthquake stripped away life from its historical centre, the city continues to live in a temporal in-between the disaster and its future ‘rebirth’. While most of the current research on the city neglects the city's everyday experience, my research decentres the debate by analysing the everyday rhythms of L'Aquila's historical centre. Additionally, drawing from walking interviews this chapter highlights the perplexing aspects of everyday life in the city emphasising how the city is negotiated and learned from the locals. This chapter highlights the way different temporalities blur in the everyday practices of reconstruction, emphasising how the city is lived and created in the here-and-now.

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Rhythmanalysis
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-973-1

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Book part
Publication date: 26 November 2021

Amy Sackville

This personal essay aims to make use of rhythmanalysis as a creative critical methodology to give an account of a visit to the French Riviera town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence. In so…

Abstract

This personal essay aims to make use of rhythmanalysis as a creative critical methodology to give an account of a visit to the French Riviera town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence. In so doing, it attends to the spatial, experiential and sensory dimensions of tourism, of individual physicality and of writing. The place of the rhythmanalyst as defined by Lefebvre is naturally aligned with that of the creative writer. The necessity of being at once immersed and at a remove, of attending to rhythms by ‘getting outside them, but not completely’, of taking the position of ‘the observer, simultaneously centre and periphery’; the ‘abandon[ment to] duration’; the transgression of limits (Lefebvre, 2004, pp. 17, 46, 37): this might describe the space and time of writing. As such, the experience of the act of writing is brought to the fore and considered as a subject in its own right; rhythm is central to the composition and form. This essay takes its cue from ‘Seen from the Window’, but moves through different thresholds and allows that motion to shape the text; and from ‘Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities’, in its concern with the intersection of public and private in the urban environment, but with a greater attention to the inhabited, present body, and particularly the sense of smell (Lefebvre, 2004). It seeks to work with and against Lefebvre's example by placing a feminine body at its centre, while recognising the particularity of that authorial body: a white woman and a tourist, at leisure (Lyon, 2019; Reid-Musson, 2018). As a work of creative writing, it privileges the subjective, narrative and impressionistic over the analytical and abstract.

Book part
Publication date: 26 November 2021

Gordon Walker

In rhythmanalysis, energy is positioned centre stage in defining what rhythm is and how it manifests: everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an

Abstract

In rhythmanalysis, energy is positioned centre stage in defining what rhythm is and how it manifests: everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy there is rhythm (Lefebvre, 1992/2004, p. 15). However, there is no further explication and little engagement in subsequent scholarship. I discuss this absence and propose a thermodynamic, materialist understanding of the energy in rhythm, linking to Lefebvre's interest in physics-thinking, and to his and Régulier's commitment to a multi-disciplinary rhythmanalytic project. I consider the polyrhythmic interweaving of energy flows in everyday life and the relationship between the techno-energy of energy systems, and the ‘natural’ energetic exchanges of planetary movements, ecological processes and organism functioning, including human bodies. I outline how an energetically oriented, multi-disciplinary rhythmanalysis can be applied to the climate crisis, to its arrhythmic consequences as well as to its making and mitigation in the rhythms of society and economy. I then focus on the rhythm energies of urban life and the challenges of transitioning urban mobility away from the domination of hydrocarbon-powered automobility systems. The polyrhythmic structure of urban automobility is characterised, encompassing rhythms of fuel supply, fuelling, vehicle movement and pollution generation. The rhythm-energetic shifts involved in moving to shared public transport, electric rather than hydrocarbon powered vehicles and to the corporeal, calorie-fuelled rhythms of walking and cycling are laid out, considering what they change, what they retain and what they add to the polyrhythmia of urban mobility.

Details

Rhythmanalysis
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-973-1

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 26 November 2021

Jessie Lauren Stein

This chapter extends Henri Lefebvre's writings on rhythm to explore how time, space, power and difference articulate themselves in the uneven social relations of intercultural…

Abstract

This chapter extends Henri Lefebvre's writings on rhythm to explore how time, space, power and difference articulate themselves in the uneven social relations of intercultural space. Taking Lefebvre's ‘Seen From the Window’ chapter as a theme, I propose a variation of rhythmanalysis which interrogates the politics of copresence at a dance party in Munich, Germany. Plug in Beats is a participatory party – songs are selected by the crowd through a karaoke-like process. The monthly event was initiated in 2015 when a refugee camp was installed near an arts and cultural center. The party creates a space for dialogue between new migrants and established locals occupying a wide range of social positions. I look at the implications of rhythm for studying intercultural dance through a rhythmanalysis of one party in June 2018. The methodological approach is framed around the embodied multisensory participant observation advocated by Lefebvre; however, the analysis draws on additional ethnographic data from interviews, audio recordings, Shazam (a song identification app) and video footage. I propose a relational rhythmanalysis which engages the historical and geographic power dynamics at work in music, dancing and in the party space. Such an approach, I argue, reveals how participants negotiate and sometimes reconfigure social relations of difference through rhythm itself. While there are limits to the questions that rhythmanalysis allows the researcher to ask and answer, it is a valuable means to engage how power and difference work – and might be more equitably reworked – in migrant-receiving and otherwise heterogeneous spaces.

Details

Rhythmanalysis
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-973-1

Keywords

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