My presence at a conference in Trondheim organised by old friend Aksel Tjora has given me much pause for thought. In 2013 we published a co-edited book called ‘Café Society’, and ever since we have been thinking about a companion volume of ‘Bar Society’. It is my turn to take the lead on this and I should get on with it. For my contribution I was encouraged talking with Aksel to develop a theme he has worked with around ‘rhythms’. Happily blogs give an opportunity to ‘think out loud’ without the pressures of peer review. So here we go: initial thoughts on the ways in which rhythms might inform people’s practices around bars.
I seem at the moment to be drawn to ideal types as a way of explicating and clarifying concepts and the ways in which they might offer an illumination of social phenomena. So the concept here is rhythm and the social phenomenon of immediate interest that of bars. Like cafes, bars come in all shapes and sizes and vary in policy and usage; but let’s set that aside for the moment. What of rhythms?
A while ago I did a blog on Lefebvre’s short discourse on ‘rhythmanalysis’, finding it intriguing and irritating in equal measure. It was intriguing because I saw potential in using rhythms in understanding and explaining social phenomena, and it was irritating because there was a singular failure to illustrate just how and why this might be the case. I draw here initially on this earlier blog for context before addressing ideal types. Lefebvre is interested in space and time and how these might be reconceptualised in the interests of the sociological-cum-interdisciplinary project of understanding society. He takes the idea of rhythm with a view to re-founding science and creating ‘a new field of knowledge’, namely, ‘the analysis of rhythms with practical consequences’.
His definition of rhythm is complex, elusive and frustrating. Everywhere, he writes, where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm. Therefore:
- Repetition (of movements, gestures, action, situations, differences);
- Interferences of linear processes and cyclical processes;
- Birth, growth, peak, then decline and end.
He goes on to write of polyrhythmia, eurhythmia and arrhythmia.
Polyrhythmia? Consider your body: ‘thus the everyday reveals itself to be a polyrhythmia from first listening.’ Eurhythmia? ‘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 aarhythmia is generally, at the same time, symptom, cause and effect.’ He continues: ‘the discordance of rhythms brings previously eurhythmic organisations towards fatal disorder.’ ‘Polyrhthmia analyses itself. A fundamental forecast: sooner or later the analysis succeeds in isolating from within the organised whole a particular movement and its rhythm. Often coupled empirically with speculations (for example, doctors in the field of auscultation etc), the analytic operation simultaneously discovers the multiplicity of rhythms and the uniqueness of particular rhythms (the heart, the kidneys etc). The rhythmanalysis here defined as a method and a theory pursues this time-honoured labour in a systematic and theoretical manner, by bringing together very diverse practices and very different types of knowledge: medicine, history, climatology, cosmology, poetry (‘the poetic’), etc. Not forgetting, of course, sociology and psychology, which occupy the front line and supply the essentials.’
In a paper co-authored with Regulier towards the end of his book, Lefebvre tries to apply his rhythmanalysis to the growth and nature of Mediterranean cities. It is highly speculative, partial and suggestive, even provocative, rather than comprehensive. Interesting references are made to the salience of rhythms of the climate, the sun and the light and the seas (the tidal ‘lunar’ ports alongside oceans are compared and contrasted with the largely non-tidal ‘solar’ ports of the Mediterranean). They build on such observations as follows: If it is true that Mediterranean towns are solar towns, one can expect from them a more intense urban life than in lunar towns., but also one richer in contrasts at the very heart of the town. While in Nordic and oceanic towns one can expect to find more regulated times, linked simultaneously to more restrictive, more disembodied and more abstract forms of (contractual rather than ritual) association.’ They go on to assert that Nordic towns tend to be founded on a contractual or juridical basis, while Mediterranean towns tend to be founded on tacit or explicit forms of alliance that extend to the formations of clans, mafias etc.
I described my blog as an attempt to float the thesis that rhythm might be a conceptual lens of some use to the sociologist. And I also suggested that there is a potential overlap with critical realism’s interdisciplinary focus on simultaneously active – using my general shorthand – biological, psychological and social mechanisms. Might these mechanisms be usefully viewed as rhythms, at least in relation to some phenomena of scientific interest? I can see, for example, how body rhythms might interact with those of mental states and social situations. And then there are Lefebvre’s companion concepts of polyrhythmia, eurhythmia and aarhythmia.
Maybe this gives flavour enough of Lefebvre’s invitation to explore rhythms, and also of its scope and potential. But my very limited ambition here is to specify some of the ways in which our lives – and visits to bars – might be understood and explained in terms of rhythms. In other words, my focus is on the ways on which rhythms insinuate themselves – as it were ‘functionally’ – into our everyday lives in general, and our visits to bars in particular.
One way to address this is via Margaret Archer’s notion of the ‘three orders’ that we humans navigate and through which we realise our concerns. There are:
- the ‘natural order’ (or the physical order), which encompasses the physical environment and the limitations and/or possibilities of our own bodies;
- the ‘practical order’, which denotes the skills, competencies and achievements in activities that, while socially framed, depend on the nature of things (eg mastering a technique or craft).
- the ‘social order’, which involves the structure of normative social relations, positions and institutional roles.
Each of these three orders is mediated by what Archer calls ‘internal conversations’ or ‘reflexivity’, which we use to navigate the three orders and to balance concerns across them.
The goal of the agent is to establish a modus vivendi or ‘way of life’ that satisfies their personal concerns (which are defined in relations to the three orders). Each order is distinct, irreducible and each has its own emergent properties, but they interact to shape human action.
For anyone unfamiliar with Archer’s work this might seem unduly heavy going, a sledgehammer to crack the nut of rhythm analysis. But it offers a fruitful way to broach rhythms. We are simultaneously active across Archer’s three orders, and, adapting Lefebvre, the rhythms in one can impact on the rhythms in another. Rhythms disrupted in the natural order – as with, say, the onset of a long-term physical or mental disorder – will likely cause dysrhythmia in the practical and social orders, occasioning reflexive renegotiations around concerns and projects. These negotiations may give rise to new rhythms as well as to anxiety and unrest.
But this is a ‘mere’ blog, not a paper to submit to peer review! So I am allowed to play with ideas. In this spirit, and in lieu of a more developed and satisfactory presentation of the potential for deploying the concept of rhythms in sociological analysis (along the lines of Lefebvre’s ‘rhythmanalysis’), I will here offer a provisional typology of rhythms for debate and others’ consideration.
Embodied rhythms – these emanate in the natural order and typically act to frame and construct possibilities for rhythms to form and solidify in the practical and social orders. The latter, in other words, are contained and constrained by universal human needs around body sustenance, maintenance, rest and recovery. This is not to deny some degree of bodily variation, by geography and climate for example, or around paid work by shift or at night; but it is to insist on a constraining universality of embodied rhythms.
Labouring rhythms – these respond to the rhythms established in the natural order, accommodate those in the practical order and are consolidated with reference to the structures and cultures prevalent in the social order. They reflect the human need to labour to live – that is, to deploy whatever skills and competencies they have acquired in the practical order to provide water, food, shelter and security – for all that this can take a multitude of different forms depending on their position in the social order.
Caring rhythms – these most conspicuously include parenting but extend across a wide range of human relations as well as companionship with other species and the environment. It is possible too to care for virtual as well as actual ‘friends’. Some people take ‘care’ to contact virtual friends not only regularly but when particularly anxious or at an agreed time every day.
Interaction rhythms – these govern the ways in which we present to and deal with others in routine day-to-day interaction, relating to such Goffmanesque phenomena as ‘passing’ and ‘covering’. These rhythms also emerge and engage all or the natural, practical and social orders.
Intimacy rhythms – these refer to times committed or negotiated for intervals routinely committed to relations with those significant others of prime salience for humans. Often these will be long-term partners but may also extend to kin, to special friendships and to consociates with shared or overlapping interests.
Sexual rhythms – these stretch from intimate relations with settled partners to liaisons with boy/man or girl/woman friends to attendance at clubs, dates and to paid assignments with escorts. They feature in this typology when they comprise more-or-less predictable rhythms impacting on day-to-day biographies.
Time-out rhythms – these occur when humans deliberately switch off from routine everyday concerns, either to watch TV, pursue hobbies or to chill out. They take the form of rhythms when they are patterned, as when weekend sporting engagements in football, rugby or tennis, or in weekly games of squash or bridge parties are factored in to the everyday whirl of life.
Political rhythms – these represent engagements with and pursuits of political agendas around local, national or global campaigns and issues, whether taking the form of Popper’s ‘piecemeal social engineering’ or oriented to more ambitious forms of societal transformation. They can cohere with time-out rhythms but can also make their presence felt independently, for example, via participation in regular and overtly political party meetings or via attendance at a succession of protests and demonstrations.
Rhythms typically come and go, are discordant and are open to disruption (for example, when someone is made redundant, changes job or retires, joins a church, forms a new relationship, suffers disablement or someone who is being cared for dies). There is in fact a constant causal interplay between rhythms emergent from the natural, practical and social orders. But for all this omnipresent risk of subjection to change and adjustment, rhythms are a prime way in which our lives are ordered. The extent to which this ordering is active or passive depends on who we have become, which is itself a product of our accommodation to Archer’s triad of orders. Her classification of people by their dominant mode of reflexivity is also relevant here:
- communicative reflexives are people who need the support and affirmation of others (‘similars and familiars’) before taking decisions;
- autonomous reflexives forge their own independent path through life, being very strategic in their decision-making;
- meta-reflexives are self-critical and oriented by values and notions of the ‘good society’;
- fractured reflexives are disoriented, disconnected and unable to cope with what life throws at them.
It is reasonable to hypothesise that autonomous reflexives are most active in shaping the rhythms in their lives, and that fractured reflexives are most passive in adopting rhythms prescribed for them by others and as a function of their circumstances.
To conclude this brief and exploratory blog, I am suggesting that adapting some version of Lefebvre’s rhythmanalsys (plus ideas reflected in his notions of polyrhythmia, eurhythmia and aarhythmia) might be helpful when investigating how people play out – or order – their everyday lives.