Space, time and everyday life. Rhythmanalysis resonated with me because I feel like it is a great way to connect with our world in a deeper way and for a better understanding.
Chapter 1, Pages 5-18 The Critique of the Thing
P.5
Starting to look at some methods the first one is going from concrete to abstract. This can be used in practice, I can imagine that a company have a concrete problem to solve and comes up with a way to solve it, which becomes more of an abstract idea. In the text, Lefebvre mentions Specialists, doctors, psychologists, geologists, and historians for the first method. The second method completes the first but it is what will be used mainly in this text. It is a more philosophical method, you should use your "full consciousness of the abstract in order to arrive at the concrete."
P.6
The question "Is there a general concept of rhythm?" is being asked and Lefebvre answers the question with Yes, everyone possesses it. The only problem is that people usually think it has to do with movement, speed, sequence of movements or objects. Rhythm has to do more with repetition, there has to be repetition for rhythm to be there. "But there is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely." In everyday life, there is always something new happening but the thing that introduces itself has one thing to contribute with to the repetitive pattern and that is difference.
P.7-8
Lefebvre introduces a few very interesting questions that he answers.
"What is repetition?
What is its meaning?
How when and why are the micro and macro restarts, returns to the past in works and in time?"
Answers:
Absolute repetition is described as logical and mathematical thought. When it comes to identity A=A is thought of as identical and not equal. We can see that that is a logical thought might be by the fact that they look the same so they are the same. But quickly that is corrected to the second one is different from the fact that it is the second one. That shows a repetition that can be given to a sequence of numbers.
"Not only does repetition not exclude differences it also gives birth to them; it produces them." you can see that in a line of numbers such as in the text (2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) there are odd and even numbers.
"Differences induced or produced by repetitions constitute the thread of time?" I believe the answer to this is continuing in the text.
P.8
Lefvebre starts to talk about something I find very interesting to relate to and helps me to understand everything better. That something is nature. He talks about rhythms in the form of circular and linear repetitions. The circular would be the things that "originated in the cosmic, in nature: days, nights, seasons, the waves and tides of the sea." Then there is the linear which would be "human activity; the monotony of actions and movements imposed structures." Lefebvre describes great cyclical rhythms as "lasts for a period of and restarts: dawn, always new, often superb, inaugurates the return of the everyday."
The circular and linear could also be linked to one thing at the same time, like a clock (the traditional ones). It goes round and round every day but it also has the linear tick-tock.
P.8-9
Messsure "A further paradox: rhythm seems natural, spontaneous, with no law other than its unfurling."
This sentence made me think of a book that I just started to read "A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson". I haven't gotten far but in the introduction, Bryson (2003) says "Welcome. And congratulations." then Bryson starts to talk about the atoms that have built you and it is the first time the atoms have made exactly the combination that makes you. I can see the rhythm in that, the start of human life is a new line created together with the circular. You may think it is a natural spontaneous thing that happens to create you because it is the first time those atoms are formed in that particular way but at the same time, there is an order to it. The atom's next steps are to during approximately 650, 000 hours (Bryson, 2003) keep you alive, to make sure that you are you, even tho they don't know that they are, or even know that they exist. After the 650,000 hours, they will move on somewhere else in the universe. To possibly create new rhythms, patterns and interactions.
Back to Lefebvre, there is also some measure in rhythm, in music for example there is some measure of something anticipated coming in the rhythm on the note sheet, and there is a "law, calculated and expected obligation, a project." The way he measures rhythm is with Rational, Numerical, Quantitative, and Qualitative measures to make them superimpose with themselves. I find the superimposing very interesting, it paints a picture for me of how it all works in layers, but neither of the layers is less important. Some might be more hidden from the human eye but play just as big of a role as the very visible one. When you unfold everything to see the "panoply of methodology utilised categories (concepts) and oppositions would appear indispensable:
Repetition and difference;
Mechanical and organic;
Discovery and creation;
Cyclical and linear;
Continuous and discontinuous;
That wraps up everything Lefebvre has been talking about in the text so far. All of the different measures of rhythmanalysis.
P.10
But it would not be that easy, what is measurable and non-measurable? Time, could it be the one? As Lefebvre says "Why and How? Would the spatialisation of time be a preconditional operation for its measurements?." Humans might see time as a thing "deriving from a divine transcendence". But rhythm might help to understand these questions better. To know how a rhythm is defined you need to compare it to other rhythms, so it depends on how you measure it and what you compare it to in your measurements. If I as a human was to measure a rhythm, I would use what I have as a reference of rhythm which is my breathing, heartbeat and walking as Lefebvre mentions. What makes us measure with those things? It is probably because we usually measure with speed, frequency, and consistency. Those three ways to measure might help us to compare and see the rhythm concerning time, but we can normally only do so with our rhythms.
P.11
"Rhythms escape logic, and nevertheless contain a logic" is a very interesting sentence. A relation between the logical (logic) and the dialectical (dialectic) is done and it can show what is identical and contradictory. The word Duel [la guel] (duality) is being used so by combining two different things. We need to think outside the old ways of comparing two things in a dialogue (two voices) and bring in the dialectic (three terms). It has recently gone from opposites like Good and evil, Light and Shadows, and rise and fall, life and death etc. to a triadic character of approach. Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis in Hegel.
P.12
It is with a perspective from three terms instead, as Lefebvre lists: past-present-future, possible-probable-impossible, knowledge-information-manipulation etc. So it becomes more complex and Lefebvre says "Now, the analytic approach becomes complex once it borders on complex realities." So this for me becomes a research method that is beyond the black and white and links to the dialectic approach. Hegel talks about Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis whereas Marx talks about economic-social-political. Other trios are being mentioned: melody-harmony-rhythm, and time-space-energy.
P.12-13
So the laws must come in three:
"Pleasure and joy demand a re-commencement." They need to be accompanied by pain, I also believe that you would not know what pleasure and joy are unless you knew what pain was and how it felt. It all depends on how you see it, pessimists may think only pain exists and then you experience pleasure and joy every so often. But I would like to think that everyone has pleasure and joy you just need to find its presence and the process of having it is knowing that you will be accompanied by pain now and then.
"The law of logic says: 'No thought or reality without coherence'. The dialectic proclaims: 'There is neither thought nor reality without contradictions'." They can not work together and the second takes out the first one.
"What is to demonstrate? What is to think (thought)?" Mathematicians are given as an example of how they simultaneously demonstrate and discover. But the answer is much more complex than that, and I am trying to understand it. But it is not very simple.
P.13-14
With my confusion, I continue to on something that becomes more clear to me. Two paragraphs talk about how today's humans have gone into a time of questioning. We question things "including the existence of space, including the foundations of knowledge, of practice and societies." Humans put themselves and other beings to the test. Creating weapons that can destroy humanity and many other species. I am not sure if humans see that humans and many animals may go extinct but nature and new beings will come back again. I saw a program on TV the other night about the planet before the dinosaurs. There was a long time of extreme cold where almost everything died out followed by a time just as long as the cold but with rain where nature started to thrive and create life again. But the species that were before were now gone. So indeed the dangers are accumulating but maybe only for the current species.
P.14-15
Rhythm might have given us the questions and the answers to all of our questions. We can learn and refer back to history, how it can slow down, speed up, advance or regress, look forward or backwards. But what is it referring to and what are the criteria? It seems to be political decisions, something that changes the way society works or has a significant change in the time, something that "intervene by imprinting a rhythm on an era, be the tough force or an insinuating manner." We learn how things work like someone taking care of machinery.
P.15
"Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm. Therefore:
repetition (of movements, gestures, actions, situations, differences);
interferences of linear processes and cyclical processes;
birth, growth, peak, then decline and end."
This is a good list to use as a framework when you analyse. Maybe things to look at, for the beginner of rhythmanalysis or the experienced.
P.16
Polyrhytmia - analyses itself. Many rhythms are happening.
Eurhythmia - unite with one another. The normal way of being (norm).
Arrhythmia - something happening out of the normal. Symptom, cause, and effect.
P.16-17
"What is it to think? And more precisely, what do you think when you speak of rhythms? Do reflections, discourses pertain to thinking, or simply to the verbal commentary of concrete rhythms?"
Everyone has to reflect on themselves, and to "think that which is not thought: the game at risk, love, art, violence, in a world, the world or more precisely the diverse relations between human being and the universe." So it is a part to think but it is not the only part, it is important to explore and express. The exploration could lead to something else, something unknown or surprising. This method links to my next point.
P.17
"(This garden that I have before my eyes appears differently to me now from a moment ago. I have understood the rhythms: trees, flowers, birds, and insects. They form a polyrhytmia with the surroundings: the simultaneity of the present (therefore of presence), the apparent immobility that contains one thousand and one movements, etc...)" This once again helps me to understand everything better, when it relates to nature and is presented more as a story, so I can visualize it better. There are no secret rhythms anywhere, they might not be obvious but rhythmanalysis makes us see more. Everything is in front of us and is silently telling us things. Everything knows itself, and the whole world knows it, some can speak and some is silent.
As a counter thought, I am not sure everything knows itself, let us take an atom as an example, it does not know that it exists, and it does not know that the thing they have created exists, even though they spends a lot of time to make you you and the thing the thing. (Bryson, 2003). If we take a tree as an example, when it is growing in the ground I would say it knows what it is doing, it is taking actions according to its needs. But if you cut the tree down to use as wood. The moment that piece of wood is cut off it has somehow died, it is a piece that is now not functioning as it used to. Does it still know itself? As a counterthought to myself, Yes it could know itself, it knows that it needs to biodegrade. However, (another counter thought to my previous counter thought) if it gets treated to last longer by humans, has it been "mummified" or maybe I can just say preserved? Does it still know what it is doing? Let us say our piece is working as a table leg, does it know that it is a table leg? It would at that point be that a human has decided what it will function as. It is simply that because humans have decided that it is a table leg, is the thing still aware of what it is? This goes for any natural thing that humans use as something that was not created without human help. But if Lefebvre is talking metaphorically, then everything could know its purpose. Even if a human has decided the purpose of the thing.
P.17-18
Lefebvre is starting to classify rhythms, into four categories.
Secret rhythms: Psychological ones, recollection and memory, the said and the non-said, etc.)
Public (therefore social) rhythms: Calendars, fêtes, ceremonies, and celebrations. Or the ones that are said or shown out loud as an expression (digestion, tiredness, etc).
Fictional rhythms: Eloquence and verbal, as well as elegance, gestures and learning processes. (short- medium- long term calculations. The imaginary.
Dominating-dominated rhythms: Completely made up: every day or long-lasting, in music or in speech. Aiming for an effect that is beyond themselves.
All of these things "connect space, time and the energies that unfold here and there, namely rhythms." Rhytms is to be and to exist.
Chapter 1, Pages 19-26 The Rhythmanalyst: A Previsionary Portrait
P.19-20
So what will the rhytmanalyst have to do? To be attentive, to things beyond the obvious. The world will be your music in a way, but the type of music that is produced by our world, not only by sounds you can hear but by silences as well. You will also have to listen to your own rhythm and know it and then be able to step out of your own rhythms to appreciate the external rhythms. You should not forget your own rhythms, you will be the metronome while listening to the external rhythms. It does not sound easy to just be without disrupting the rhythms and not dislocating time.
P.20-21
Our bodies are great at producing music too, everything is in tune. "The body produces a garland of rhythms," the artist is nature, and it knows what beauty our bodies hold. We are a song with harmony and that learns from its history. We are not always a solo piece but a part of an ensemble, in gatherings or in harmony with nature.
"He hears the wind, the rain, storms; but if he considers a stone, a wall, a trunk, he understands their slowness, their interminable rhythm." ... "the forest, moves in multiple ways: the combined movements of the soil, the earth, the sun. Or the movements of the molecules and atoms that compose it (the object, the forest). The object resists a thousand aggressions but breaks up in humidity or conditions of vitality, the profusion of miniscule life." ... "The rhythmanalyst calls on all his senses. He draws on his breathing, the circulation of his blood, the beatings of his heart and the delivery of his speech as landmarks."
This is something I thought I could try for my thesis as a method. To try to understand the rhythms of what I will focus on. So instead of thinking as this pile of atoms creating me, I will think as the individual rhythms that the atoms create within me. I shall not forget my senses, to use my sense of smell, hearing, sight and impression of other living beings etc. Smells are a part of rhythms and reveal them, the different smells of the morning and the evening, or the hours of sun or darkness, how rain smells or the cold of new snow. You can then find traces to mark out rhythms. The rhythm analyst can not interfere with or create rhythms, "He must arrive at the concrete through experience." So to practice rhythmanlsysing requires patience and self-control, maybe it is similar to practising yoga, to find a sort of state of mind, maybe beyond or together with your Eurhythmia.
P.22
It goes even deeper than that, with more things related to how you should practice with rhythmanalysis. You have to educate yourself to modify your perception and conception of the world, of time and the environment. The emotions have to be modified in coherence with your concepts and non-pathological way. You also need to collect data from all the sciences: psychology, sociology, ethnology, biology; and even physics and mathematics. All of this is used to recognise representations by their curves, phases, periods and recurrences. It becomes an interdisciplinary approach together with the instruments you have. Instead of being completely in a space you are in a time more. Listening to the space just like an audience listens to a symphony.
P.22-23
The importance in this way is also in how you see things, if you see a paper just as a paper and not what it tries to evoke it fails. You have to see beyond just the paper. But if we take commercials on TV or radio or your phone, if you see it as just what it is, it might have the power to influence you in the way it wants. But if you see beyond and see the rhythms of it you can see the nature of it as well as the culture and how it seeks to control you how you see it. So we need to look beyond to see and understand deeper, to not be affected and to be able to see things for what they tell us and beyond.
P.24-26
What is the rhythmanalyst not?
A poet: the focus is beyond words and the verbal. It is more a focus on temporalities and their relations within wholes.
A Mystic: Not a prophet or a sorcerer. The acts, the deeds, relate to reason. Only recognizes its power, and sets it in motion.
There is no way the rhythmanalys is changing life or should change life. Just "reinstating the sensible in consciousness and in thought, he would accomplish a tiny part of the revolutionary transformation of this world and this society in decline. Without any declared political position." This is all a focus on one individual and the individual has not yet understood the needs, desire, reflections and passions of others.
Additional thoughts:
It is interesting to see how so many people try to make sense of this world and everyone has such different theories and ways of doing it. That shows, even more, the power of rhythm, how it is not just one thing that fits all. Everyone is built by atoms in different ways and none of us works in the same way even though we are the same species. That shows what an incredibly complex world we live in, and to bring architecture to this has all of a sudden become a much bigger and more complicated task. Architecture is not just how humans use or see it, it is how every individual uses or sees it from humans to nature and animals. We all work together in a world, humans are here maybe 650, 000 hours and a tree is here much longer. We all work in different rhythms and it is up to us to align the linear and circular repetitions and see the rhythms that are in front of us and are silently telling us things.
References:
Bryson, B. (2003). A short history of nearly everything.
My chosen words from the text are with the verb highlighted:
Hidden To hide, To camouflage, To be out of sight, To escape
Movements To move, To manoeuvre
Repetition To repeat, To tesselate, To patternize
I also wrote down some key statements or key words from our discussion in class:
Rhythm is time
Rhythm is everywhere
Repetition but always different patterns
Induction = Start somewhere to continue
Deduction = Take away from things
Abduction = To lead away
Monotony = The same...
Rhythmanalys influx in stationary
In class, we were shown Lawrence Halpin’s The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment. It was interesting to go from rhythms to a text about 'scoring' hand and how to document all of these rhythms. How to get them out in a way that is not writing, but symbols and diagrams in many different ways. While scrolling through the pages there are a few that stand out to me, but I will have to look into them better to understand them fully. It is right tho to move on to our next tasks.
First drawing, with our eyes closed, like we usually do, but take in what we have done and read about rhythms with a feeling of 'scoring'.
At the top of the page is a few lines long and short in a pattern representing the room dividers standing in front of the windows. There is a line going representing the electricity and how it is moving from the ground up to the ceiling. In the middle of the page is a representation of what I saw before I closed my eyes which is a computer, with a hard drive, and the hard drive has things on it used and /or created by me. To the right of the computer is the mouse, which is used by my hand and is moving in different ways. I also hear different sounds such as stepping on the floor and talking in the background. I have also drawn the darkness I see when I close my eyes, and how it shifts slightly with the sun coming in through the window. I am also acknowledging the particles in the air that I can not hear or see.
The second task is to make a 'scoring' of the object we created, in my case it's the imbalanced dress. We should bring the words that we chose from the text with us in the drawing if we see it work. I had an idea to start 'mapping' my dress on the display unit.
In the photo on my 'scoring' you can see that I start to notice everything about the dress.
Water stains
Burn mark
Knot
Junction
Hole
Damage
Thread
Metal
Screw
After that, I started to think about what is related to the different things I see and what might have caused them to develop them almost like a mindmap. The similar "things" are all interconnected and go into other things about more specific "things". At the same time, it becomes clear where the design becomes denser. Where more rhythms are happening at the same time. On the list on my drawing, you can see that I did not finish it and there is more that could be added. But I think it is a good start to be able to 'score' my dress and to be able to further develop it. I got some feedback in the class:
Densify it and draw as an example a fungi rhythm and how it connects with the thread. How does that rhythm relate to the other? Maybe twisted fungi growth like the rope.
This is something I will take with me when I develop the rhythm 'scoring'.
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