Rhythm seems a promising concept to connect a theory of practice with a meaningful performance of time and space. We can borrow this defining statement from Henri Lefebvre’s “rhythmanalysis” project: “Every rhythm implies a relation of a time with a space, a localized time, or if one wishes, a temporalized place” (Lefebvre 1996, 230). Metropolitan experience can be understood as differentiated practices of habitation performed in distinct rhythms.
How can we understand places in which collective decisions are being negotiated (ancient agoras, post-1789 National Assemblies, modern forums, etc.) without knowing the rhythms of the assemblies, the connection of social rhythms with production rhythms, the interdependencies of these rhythms, and so on?
Using the concept of rhythm, we can understand the qualities and characteristics of public space that are created through recurrent social practices. Rhythmicality is a way of understanding the present and the future as being punctuated by defining repetitions. Space becomes a socially meaningful artifact in the process of being “temporalized” through inhabitation rhythms.
If we follow Lefebvre, there are two forms of repetition that define two major types of rhythm: cyclical rhythms and linear rhythms. “Cyclical rhythms” can be considered as the ways through which recurrent natural phenomena appear to obey laws of rhythmical repetition. These laws make them predictable and therefore socially usable. Cyclical rhythms have “a determined frequency or period” (Lefebvre 1996, 231). There is a tendency to identify these rhythms with traditional societies where social life is organized and understood as repeating itself. Social rhythms follow the rhythms of the seasons and their corresponding productive duties.
In his famous distinction between cold and hot societies—the former lacking the idea of history and therefore enclosed in a constantly self-repeating universe—Claude Lévi-Strauss considers rituals “a machine for the destruction of time.” Alfred Gell is perhaps more accurate in noting that in such societies “it is not time that is destroyed, but its effects” (Gell 2001, 27). Cyclical rhythms use the experience of time in a way that coincides with the image a certain society has of itself. Cyclical rhythms produce social artifacts. The inhabitants of cyclical rhythms do not merely pay attention to the passage of time and its effects, but they give it specific social meaning by connecting the recurrence of social acts with specific forms of social reproduction.
“Linear rhythms,” according to Lefebvre, are “defined by consecutiveness and the reproduction of the same phenomena, identical or almost at more or less close intervals” (Lefebvre 1996, 231). In other words, “the linear is routine” (ibid., 222). Regulated work rhythms (mechanical as in hammer blows or bodily, as in rowing) appear as linear rhythms that can be extended infinitely.
In modern societies, a concept of time connected with historical conscience can be attributed to a linear conception of time. This time is “empty” and “homogeneous” (Benjamin 1992, 252) because what defines it is the linear rhythmicality through which time is measured. The everyday experience of time regulated by clocks and routinized in measured, repeated acts, can only have quantitative historical differences. With this framework, we can speak of an alleged “tempo of history” speeding up.
In modern societies, the myth of novelty is offered as a substitute to the experience of routines. Rhythmicality is banished as restraining and anonymous, whereas originality appears as the true mark of identity. Yet, imposed working and living routines are methodically regulated. Imposed order in time and space is half-concealed behind a well-calculated randomness. In its prototypical form, this condition resembles the structure of the advertising message: you are urged to buy something you know is produced in massive numbers, by being convinced that it was created “especially for you.” Your identity is supposedly verified and created through this act of buying.
The partitioned city and the “framing” of identities
In contrast to the supposedly modernist quest for universal order, public space in the “postmodern” metropolis appears to embody chaos and randomness. These characteristics have been elevated to key positive attributes of emerging urban environments. Privatization, and the consumer ideologies of individualistic hedonism that accompany it, transform practices used to “perform” public space into practices of self-gratification. These practices represent the city as a collection of chances (and places) for consumer satisfaction.
As Peter Marcuse, among others, has shown, the “postmodern condition” goes along with a new “partitioned city.” Urban chaos goes along with a fragmentation of the city that is far from random (Marcuse 1995, 244). The contemporary metropolis is increasingly becoming a conglomerate of differently defined enclaves. In some cases, literal walls separate these enclaves from the rest of the city, as with large department stores and gated communities. Walls can also demarcate “pride and status of rule and prejudice” (ibid., 249). These are the invisible walls defining ghettos, suburban neighborhoods, and gentrified recreation areas.1
One of the basic attributes of the “partitioned city” is that it destroys the public character of public space. Public space, a creation of the practices that inhabit it, “is always contestable, precisely because whereas there are criteria that control admission to its purview, the right to enact and enforce those criteria is always in question” (Henaff and Strong 2001, 4).
The partitioned city is full of privatized public spaces in which public use is carefully controlled and specifically motivated. No contestation is tolerated. Users of these spaces must be checked and categorized regularly. They must follow specific instructions in order to be allowed access to various services and facilities. A shopping mall or a large department store, for instance, are such quasi-public spaces. A company-owned town or an enclosed community, separated from the network of public spaces that surround them (streets, squares, forests, etc.), controls local space by limiting its use to certified residents. Holiday resorts often exhibit former traditional public spaces in theme parks featuring rural or village communities. Public life is reduced to the conspicuous consumption of fantasized identities in a sealed-off enclave that mimics a “holiday city.”
What defines these spaces as sites of “public life” is not the clashing rhythms of contesting practices (that create the political) but the regulated rhythms of routines under surveillance. The publicly exhibited identities of the users are enacted in accordance with those rhythms that discriminate and canonize them.
Social identities are performed in the quasi-public space of the partitioned city. The fact that different categories of people are allowed to enter the various enclaves and remain there is a critical indicator of their identity. Residential enclaves can exhibit recognizable collective identities, especially when inner or outer forces homogenize the residents. The suburban areas of American cities, the shantytowns of Africa, Latin America or Asia, the gentrified residential areas of different European cities, and the immigrant ghettoes all over the world equally exhibit visible urban identities. In these areas, public space is separated from the rest of the city and use is restricted to the members of the corresponding community of residents. Gated neighborhoods and impenetrable favelas take separation to the obvious limit.2