Lyon, Rhythmanalysis, Introduction

 

Dawn Lyon, (2022) Introduction: Rhythm, Rhythmanalysis, and Urban Life. In Rhythmanalysis: Place, Mobility, Disruption, and Performance. Emerald Publishing, Bingsley, UK.

Summary

Dawn Lyon, author of What Is Rhythmanalysis (2018), introduces this edited volume on rhythmanalysis by situating its contributions in  relation to the development of the concept by Lefebvre and Régulier, as well as to other recent volumes and works. She discusses L’s focus on the interaction of linear and cyclical time, and the factors of repetition and difference in any rhythm, which introduce “cracks” which contain “the potential for social transformation” (3). In conversation with recent volumes by Edensor, Smith and Hetherington, and Crespi and Manghani, and others, she raises the relation of Lefebvre’s concept of dressage to Simmel’s blasé metropolitan inhabitants. She notes that, while drawing on Lefebvre and Régulier’s work, many contemporary invocations of rhythmanalysis go beyond what they had outlined; Lyon lists five “possibilities of rhythmanalysis” explored in this volume, among other recent works. These are rhythmanalysis 1) as analytical tool (separating out and interrelating various rhythms and types of rhythms), 2) as conceptual tool (as mid-range concept connecting sensed and unsensed, or immediate and distant rhythms; and as critique), 3) as a method, or research strategy orchestrating a range of methods, 4) as “embodied and sensory practice,” and 5) as “urban poetics” (7-11). She then introduces the rest of the chapters organized along themes of place, mobility, disruption, and performance.

The Writer of Modern Life, Introduction

 

Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Edited by Michael W. Jennings; Translated by Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston, and Harry Zohn.

[I was looking to reread Benjamin's works on Baudelaire and the 19th century in a collection; however, the previous notes I took were on a collection called Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism which I seem to no longer have for some reason (it must also have been a pdf, perhaps I just had parts and not the whole). I also have notes on some essay versions published in the Arcades project. Anyway not finding the original, and having already pieced through the Arcades essays not long ago, I figured I would read this version because it has complete versions of some essays: I will draw on my previous notes in reading it.]

 

Summary of Introduction by Michael W. Jennings

 

Jennings's introduction goes over the selection of texts and introduces Benjamin's key concepts with short discussions. First off is the dialectical image, a form of theory by montage; I'm still having trouble understanding just what the dialectical image is and how it is supposed to work, what makes it "dialectical." It seems that the dialectics is in some tension between how the image has a meaning in the present, and what its past meaning was; beyond this there seems to be, or to be the potential for, a deeper undermining of any sense or pretension of a fixed meaning (or of an appeal to the authority of fixed meaning). This, perhaps, is part of the value of studying history: it can be used to unsettle or unfinalize [to borrow a term from Bakhtin] the present; but only if the historical itself is also approached in a non-finalizing manner. 

Next key concept is phantasmagoria, akin to Debord's spectacle; Jennings traces this to Marx [and thus to Stirner]. This is also inspired by Lukacs's concept of a "second nature" (as is the spectacle, most likely). One of the importances of, and criticisms of, physiologies and panoramas is how they were complicit with this phantasmagoria. Another key concept is the theory of shock, or rather of the receptability of the poet (like Baudelaire) to receive such shocks from modern life. The ideal modern poet or "hero" as Benjamin apparently uses the term, is thus not a separate unmoved observer but one who is wounded or marked, scarred by the world and expresses this. Anyway as "modern hero" Baudelaire is the replacement for the flaneur, and also to the flaneur's successor the detective, who carries on the objectifying, phantasmagorical fixing-in-place of the urban and of meaning. Baudelaire's work in contrast has a revolutionary potential, and this is tied to his use of allegory, although once again I am still unclear of how Benjamin's concept of this works. The concept seems close to the earlier one of the dialectical image that destabilizes knowledge and, more deeply, the possibility of knowledge. Long experience (Erfahrung) and isolated experience (Erlebnis) are discussed; contra other sources I have read (Brand, I think), Jennings draws out Benjamin's ambivalent positions on both. In any event these are then tied back to the concept of shock (and of spleen and ideal in Baudelaire): somehow allegory often serves to parry the shock of experience in isolated experience. The modern hero, however, does not parry these shocks, but gives expression to them. The concept of the ideal in Baudelaire is also raised; this is held in an ambivalent tension with the spleen, thus giving Baudelaire perhaps some of that in-and-out character of the [rhythmanalyst]. Mechanization is also discussed, and Benjamin's ambivalent position explored.

The discussion ends on the revolutionary potential in Baudelaire, and the ability of his poetry to counter or overturn "auratic" art, which supports the bourgeoisie, tying again to the phantasmagoria/spectacle. Benjamin's work itself fights the phantasmagoric account of history, by tying the past to the present in that unsettling manner.

Rhythmanalysis in Taxicabs and Soft Cabs: a report from three North American cities

Here is the abstract of my latest publication, a chapter in Rhythmanalysis: Place, Mobility, Disruption and Performance, edited by Dawn Lyon, and just now out in print:

Rhythmanalysis in Taxicabs and Soft Cabs: a report from three North American cities

Just who is the “analyst” who practices rhythmanalysis? The extension of the name “rhythmanalyst” to other than scholarly practitioners makes possible an investigation of the relationship of rhythmanalysis to other rhythm-analytic forms of knowing and representing urban space, and the ways in which these differing but related practices may challenge, undermine, or inform each other. In this paper, drawing on years of ethnographic and autoethnographic research in three North American cities, I discuss the rhythmanalytical practice involved in cabdriving, as this is shaped by the technologies drivers use to sense the city, and by the transformation of the taxicab into the “ridesharing” or soft cab. First, I discuss the occupational knowledge and wayfinding practice of cabdrivers, and the extent to which their work requires the development, by means of a variety of tools and practices, of a sense of the city as composed of multiple interacting rhythmic movements, or polyrhythmia, with which they must strategically converge and facilitate. Second, I discuss the redelegation of the role of rhythmanalyst to predictive algorithms and mobile interfaces, as part of the reinvention of the taxicab, and its associated micropolitics and power/knowledge relations, by smartphone enabled hailing and dispatching services. Struggles over, and transformations of, these non-academic forms of rhythmanalysis may provide insight, in turn, into the contemporary politics of the production of social space.