BOOK: Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre, 2004 (1992)

p. xiii

Influenced by Nietzsche, Proust and Marx, as well as Bachelard‘s Poetics of Space & Dialectics of Duration.

p. 8

There are cyclical rhythms and linear rhythms, which ‘separate out under analysis, but in reality interfere with one another constantly’.

The cyclical originates in nature, and the linear from social practice and human activity.

Time and space, the cyclical and the linear, exert a reciprocal action: they measure themselves against one another; each one makes itself and is made a measuring measure; everything is cyclical repitition linear repetitions. A dialectical relation (unity in opposition) thus acquires meaning and import, which is to say generality. One reaches, by this road as by others, the depths of the dialectic.

p. 9

Rhythm appears as regulated time, governed by rational laws, but in contact with what is least rational in human being: the lived, the carnal, the body.

p. 11

Rhythms escape logic, and nevertheless contain logic,, a possible calculus of numbers and numerical relations.

One meaning of the research, a philosophical goal, is to be found here: the relation of the logical (logic) and the dialectical (dialectic), which is to say of the identical and the contradictory.

It was necessary to set up list of oppositions and dualities that enter into analysis by rejecting first the old comparison of dialogue (two voices) and dialectic (three terms).

[...] thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

Triadic nature of the dialectic, trinity etc. Lefebvre describes this tendency towards the dialectic in analysis of  the relation or constitution of three terms which change according to circumstance, as mythomania, which ‘seeks to grasp a moving but determinate complexity (determination not entailing determinism).

p. 16

The notion of rhythm brings with it or requires some complementary considerations: the implied but different notions of polyrhythmia, eurhythmia and arryhythmia. It elevates them to a theoretical level, starting from the lived. Polyrhythmia? It suffices to consult one’s body; thus the everyday reveals itself to be a polyrhythmia from the first listening. Eurythmia? Rhythms unite with one another in the state of health, in normal (which is to say normed!) everydayness; when they are discordant, there is suffering, a pathological state (of which arrhythmia is generally, at the same time, symptom, cause and effect). The discordance of rhythms brings previously eurhythmic organisations towards fatal disorder. Polyrhythmia analyses itself.