At the end of his book The Production of Space, Lefebvre suggests that an analysis of rhythms, a rhythmanalysis, should “be expected to put the finishing touches to the exposition of the production of space” (405). Lefebvre particularly points out the significance of “rhythm,” for he considers rhythm to be something indispensable for the understanding of time, space, and everyday life. In his opinion,
“[e]verywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm” (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 15).
On the one hand, each individual or object is made up of several rhythms which exist polyrhythmically under the surface of simultaneity. Lefebvre tends to center on the organic part of rhythms of everyday life which is different from the mechanical reproduction and, more importantly, which always has “something new and
unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive” (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 6). In other words, repetition will produce difference and trigger something new.
On the other hand, instead of being fixed and having identical absolute
repetitions, each object in our daily lives has “its place, its rhythm, with its recent past, a foreseeable and a distant future” (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 31). Lefebvre goes on to suggest that rhythms are “the music of the City” (Rhythmanalysis 36). When overlooking the streets from the window, one may perceive the shuttling cars, the pedestrians passing through, the sunlight, the shadows changing constantly, or the leaves dancing polyrhythmically with the wind. Each of them carries its characteristic rhythm(s) and has its own time and space. Even a piece of tile or brick records and represents some part of time and space. Interlaced with cyclical and linear repetitions, each one is pregnant with abundant memories, telling the stories of the present, the past, and the future. Therefore, when walking pass Roosevelt Road and coming across the Bombax ceibas in full bloom, I can perceive the season of spring and recall the life cycle of these trees. Their red flowers with five petals appear before the new foliage and later produce the capsules that contain white fibers like cotton.
Furthermore, I would remember those young days when I first met ceibas in my hometown Tainan, and those moments when I pressed the shutter to take the photos of them. It has to be noted that every rhythm implies some particular memory. It is internal or individual and social or historical at the same time. Only when we refer rhythms to other related moments can we demonstrate them. Lefebvre in this light claims that rhythm
requires equally attentive eyes and ears, a head and a memory and a heart.
A memory? Yes, in order to grasp this present otherwise than in an instantaneous moment, to restore it in its moments, in the movement of diverse rhythms. The recollection of other moments and of all hours is indispensable, not as a simple point of reference, but in order not to isolate this present and in order to live it in all its diversity, made up of
subjects and objects, subjective states and objective figures.
(Rhythmanalysis 36)
While every day is the theatre for diverse rhythms and their conflicts with the socio-economic organization of production and consumption imposed on them, the living body, with the organs which have rhythms respectively and interact with each other inside the body, is
the site and place of interaction between the biological, the physiological (nature) and the social (often called the cultural), where each of these levels, each of these dimensions, has its own specificity, therefore its space-time: its rhythm. (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 81)
The body is composed of a bundle of rhythms, and everyone who can call on all his senses, according to Lefebvre, is the rhythmanalyst. The rhythmanalyst is “all ears”
(Meyer 149), listening to everything in the world, especially those things which are usually unnoticed. For him,
[n]othing is motionless in the eyes of the rhythmanalyst. He hears wind, rain, thunderstorm. In observing a pebble, a wall or a tree trunk, he perceives the slowness of movement of these objects…. The rhythmanalyst strives to rehabilitate sensory perception. He pays attention to breathing, the heartbeat, the words. He is careful to avoid giving priority to any one act of sense perception. (Meyer 149)
Instead of being strait-jacketed by disciplines, social conventions or any kind of constructed knowledge, the rhythmanalyst is like a child who can think with his instincts or his body. He is the observer, turning on all his senses to perceive and to experience everything. He is active and always “listen[s] to his body, to whatever it communicates to him” (Meyer 149). The body of the rhythmanalyst, in Kurt Meyer’s words, becomes “his metronome” (149).
In my view, Lefebvre’s rhythmanalyst has some similarities with Charles
Baudelaire’s flâneur—the man of the world as well as the man of the crowd—whose interest is the whole world. The flâneur is the man who wants “to know, understand and appreciate everything that happens on the surface of our globe” (Baudelaire 7), and who lives very little “in the world of morals and politics” (Baudelaire 7). From my perspective, both rhythmanalyst and flâneur not only have the instincts but also hold the urges to contemplate on everything around them, to examine or appreciate cities, and to grasp the lights beyond the external impositions—morals, politics, socio-economic organization of production, reproduction, consumption, and circulation.
Still, they are partial to different ways to experience cities. While Lefebvre puts his emphasis on the rhythmanalyst’s living body which is rich in a garland of rhythms, the flâneur, having been a recurring motif in the literature, is closely related to the act of walking. The former focuses on each polyrhythmic (or symphonic) moment, while the latter exhibits the city—usually the neglected fragments—by strolling around the streets back and forth, by passing through the crowds instead of simply standing at a corner or looking from a window. In the next part, I would like to explore the identity of the flâneur, tracing its origin and then regarding its walking as “a space of
enunciation” (de Certeau 98). Then by inserting the illustration of flâneur into
Lefebvre’s rhythmanalyst and representational space, I intend to look for one possible stand to “accomplish a tiny part of the revolutionary transformation of this world and this society in decline” (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 26).