(with Manghani, S.) Rhythmanalysis: An Interview with Paola Crespi. Theory, Culture and Society (Online) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Rudolf Bode’s text Rhythm and its Importance for Education (published by Eugen Diederich, Jena, 1920) has both a theoretical and a practical aim: to clarify the nature of the rhythm phenomenon in order to lay down the foundations of ‘Rhythmic Gymnastics’. Bode engages with the work of his contemporaries, such as Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Karl Buecher and Ludwig Klages, and comes to identify rhythm with a continuum devoid of rationality. The text is unique in its ability to meaningfully connect such diverse fields as philosophy, gymnastics, anthropology and politics and shows, in this way, the potential of ‘rhythmanalysis’.
Rhythm Returns: Movement and Cultural Theory
Body & Society, 2014
This introduction charts several of rhythm's various returns as a way of laying out the theoretical and methodological field in which the articles of this special issue find their place. While Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis is perhaps familiar to many, rhythm has appeared in a wide repertoire of guises, in many disciplines over the decades and indeed the centuries. This introduction attends to the particular roles of rhythm in the formation of modernity ranging from the processes of industrialization and the proliferation of new media technologies to film and literary aesthetics as well as conceptualizations of human psychology, social behaviour and physiology. These are some of the historical antecedents to the contemporary understandings of rhythm within body studies to which most of the contributions to this issue are devoted. In this respect, the introduction outlines recent approaches to rhythm as vibration, a force of the virtual, and an intensive excess outside conscious...
2014
The translation of Rudolf Bode’s 'Rhythm and its Importance for Education' and Rudolf Laban’s ‘Eurhythmy and kakorhythmy in art and education’ aims at unearthing rhythm-related discourses in the Germany of the 1920s. If for most of the English-speaking world the translation of Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life marks the moment in which rhythm descends into the theoretical arena, these texts, seen in their connection with other sources, express, instead, the degree to which rhythm was omnipresent in philosophical, artistic, socio-economical and psychological discourses at the turn of the 20th century. Some commentators, such as Lubkoll, have recently highlighted the centrality of rhythm in Modernity, lamenting a lack of scholarship focusing on this phenomenon. This is arguably due to a lack of access to sources accentuated by the language barrier; if, indeed, the ‘rhythmanalysis’ of the turn of the century is not an exclusively Teutonic phenomenon, it is also true that a copious amount of material on rhythm of this period is written in German and remains untranslated. In this sense, then, this translation aims at contributing to the project of a cultural history of rhythm.
Some suggestions for a Phenomenology of Rhythm
Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music, 2010
This is a beginning, a few suggestions, and little more. It is based on a big idea concerning a broad field of activity and phenomena, and a perhaps quixotic speculation concerning the most fundamental level at which humans apprehend and make worlds. It brings together disparate areas of study and practice in an attempt to explain origins of how we live together, and how we understand each other and the things and situations among which we find ourselves.
SAGE Research Methods Foundations, 2019
This entry is about rhythmanalysis as conceived by French philosopher, sociologist, urban scholar, and literary critic Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991). Rhythmanalysis can be thought of as a tool of analysis that shows how change occurs through the imprinting of new rhythms on an era (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 14). It has been described as both conceptual and corporeal since, on the one hand, it offers a critique of spatio-temporal relations in capitalist society and, on the other, it suggests a research practice. Rhythmanalysis has attracted considerable interest in the 21st century, since the publication in 2004 of the English translation of Lefebvre's short book, Rhythmanalysis, Space, Time and Everyday Life, which was first made available in French one year after his death in 1992. It is regarded by some scholars as the fourth volume in his hitherto three-volume work, Critique of Everyday Life. It adds a temporal dimension to Lefebvre's long-standing analyses of space. And it is credited with giving Lefebvre something of an afterlife, as his popularity in the Anglo-American academy has soared since its publication (Elden, 2006). Rhythmanalysis has been taken up and developed across the social sciences, notably within geography. It has been used in particular to study mobility, place, work, and nature as well as consumption and leisure practices, education, and identity. Rhythmanalysis is a 'strategy of inquiry' rather than a method per se. It draws on documentary, ethnographic, and audiovisual methods and can be used for the analysis of big data. Dydia Delyser and Daniel Sui (2012) argue that it cannot be captured within a qualitative-quantitative divide, and this fits with broad understandings of time and space as 1 both measurable and something that needs to be understood through subjective experience. Rhythmanalysis is nevertheless most often associated with a qualitative tradition, in particular with ethnography, and this entry focusses on the use of rhythmanalysis in qualitative research. The discussion is divided into four parts. The first critically presents Lefebvre's thinking on rhythmanalysis and how he advocated for it as a research practice centred on the body. The second discusses cultural historical rhythmanalysis using documents and materials. The third explores rhythmanalysis as a form of ethnography. The fourth focusses on audiovisual methods to document, perceive, and analyse rhythm. These approaches to doing rhythmanalysis are not mutually exclusive and may be combined. Lefebvre and the Development of Rhythmanalysis Lefebvre lived for most of the 20th century, from 1901 to 1991. His early years in southwest France stimulated his interest in agrarian life and cyclical time. He celebrated rural life and
Rhythm and Critique: Techniques, Modalities, Practices, 2020
This chapter locates the practice-inspired approach to rhythm of choreographer and movement-thinker Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) in the wider context of critical theory focusing on rhythm and rhyth-manalysis. In doing so, its aim is both to add a signifi cant and overlooked voice to the ongoing debate on rhythm which has unfolded in Western thought, and to argue for the value of a practitioner's insight into this prominently if not exclusively theoretical arena. Laban's attempts to defi ne, analyse and understand rhythm are here discussed in relation to his artistic output and his philosophy through an exploration and analysis of unpublished manuscripts and drawings held at the National Resource Centre for Dance at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. Anticipating what Henri Lefebvre famously argued in Rhythm-analysis (2004), rhythm is for Laban at the same time a quantifi able phenomenon (Takt) unfolding in space and a qualitative variable (rhythm itself), suggestive of what Lefebvre would later describe as 'what is least rational in human being: the lived, the carnal, the body' (9). Laban studied rhythm's intensities in his 'Effort theory' in English factories in the postwar period. This work resonates with but at the same time differs from Taylor's project of time-motion studies, in that rhythm plays the central role of resisting the impact of machine work on individual workers. Rhythm's effects on space and its impact on the dynamics of the moving body are also explored by Laban in his Choreutic theory, of which several models in the form of sketches and drawings are discussed in this chapter. In order to understand and reconcile the inner (Effort) and outer (Choreutics) study of rhythm, Laban, later in life, relied on topological structures such as knots and Mobius strips to devise his theories, something that resonates with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan and Michel Serres.