What a pity
That the people from the city
Can’t relate to the slower things
That the country brings.
(Neil Young, Here we are in the years)
Introduction
City rhythms, roaming the city. ‘stage one: starting up – stage two: slowing down for the turn – stage three: brutal restart, foot down, top speed, excluding traffic jams…’(Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 28) This is part of the rhythm Lefebvre describes as he sees it from his Paris window. But it is not just the city rhythm of Paris, it is the rhythm of Amsterdam, it is the rhythm of all cities.
17.12.2010 I hear the trams ringing their bells, riding like a giant caterpillar behind each other. They are waiting for cars, unlike usual, when instead the cars wait impatiently for the trams to pass. It was today I saw a different character of the city. Cars trying to restart but slowly sliding in the wrong direction, gliding down a slight slope in the road. Sounds disappear in the snow. The reflecting of a beam of sunlight suddenly exposes us to a blue world.
The snow works as a kind of Lichtung, a white blanket, that lightened up the world and its structures. Instead of befogging of the city, it revealed to us the city’s time, its cyclical and linear time. There was no reason to look at your watch because nothing in the city – or the city itself – knew what this t meant anymore. There is nothing useful to schedule when snow piles up at your doorstep.
In this essay I will use an unusual experience to take a closer look at the theories of Lefebvre concerning rhythms and experience, and search for integration with the ideas of Merleau-Ponty.
City rhythms
The structure of everyday life is a consistent repeating pattern that, in its cyclical and linear timeframes, gives form not only to the social but also to the physical structures of our surroundings. In ‘Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life’ Lefebvre reveals to us interrelations between space and time with regard to everyday life through biological, social and psychological rhythms. In this it seems as if he is attempting to free the human as object from its everyday constraints. The human rhythm is intoxicating, and all consuming. Just as Debord, Lefebvre ponders on the nature of the authentic experience. ‘We are caught in a hybrid compromise between aesthetic spectacle and knowledge.’ (Lefebvre, the knowledge of everyday life 132) Lefebvre seems to be able to find it from within his Paris apartment, looking out on the streets and onto the courtyard. But the humans, the subjects of his analysis, are caught in a system that has always existed. From the biological metronome that circulates our blood to the traffic lights that circulate our bodies.
So where can we find the authentic experience? And what is this authentic experience that is so different from everyday life?
‘The familiar is not necessarily the known’, said Hegel. Let us go farther, and say that it is in the most familiar things that the unknown – not the mysterious – is at its richest, and that this rich content of life is still beyond our empty, darkling consciousness, inhabited as it is by imposters, and gorged with the forms of Pure Reason, with myths and their illusory
Lefebvre follows Hegel in claiming that the unknown is at its richest in the most familiar things. Paradoxically, from our most familiar surroundings, we are often the farthest removed. They are well known to us from a very specific and very functional point of view, so well, that this point of view comes to take the place of our surroundings and the objects within them. This phenomenon is illustrated by the experiences of people during the early days of photography. People were often surprised by what they had photographed, even if the subject matter was a very familiar one. The ruthless eye of the camera caught more than their users were aware of. The equal importance that was attributed to all of the subject matter appearing on the snap shot was a far cry from the experienced reality. (The genius of photography, episode 1)
What rich depths can we discover in our familiar surroundings? On my way home from school, along my usual route I recently had such an epiphany. I was bored waiting at the traffic light which seemed to go on longer than usual. From the corner of my eye I suddenly began to become aware of a myriad of wires connecting unknown places with each other in a giant web above my head. A sense of amazement came over me as this world was revealed to me, that I – in my four years of living in Amsterdam – had not been aware of. In this intense and full experience (in which I seriously wondered if the wires had not been placed there overnight) all the mundane worries and thoughts were left behind. In this moment I did not see tram power-lines, but experienced seeing the pure shapes and forms in their physical realization above me. In this revelation, not only did I become aware of the power grid above my head, but the entire “familiar” surrounding got a whole new meaning. The familiar has the power to surprise and trigger a dialectical process that redefines our surroundings and our ways of living.
A forceful encounter
‘With these places are we in the everyday or in the extra-everyday?’
(Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 36)
While I was working on connecting my personal encounter to Lefebvre’s essay ‘Seen from the window’, something unexpected happened. It began to snow. At first, it was actually kind of a nuisance, because snow on the tram power-lines was not as I remembered my encounter, or how I envisioned my photos. It was when I went to take my pictures that I realized that the snow had not only thwarted my plans, but those of everyone around me. Walking through the city, strangers were talking and laughing with one another, cars would stop and give each other right of way no matter if they deserved it or not, and people were actually cleaning the sidewalk in front of their houses. Despite the fact that undoubtedly almost everybody was late, nobody was frustrated. The snow had changed the way people related to the city. The city’s rhythm had changed; the snow had illuminated the structures of our everyday life.
In an exact opposite sense of how Lefebvre describes our everyday life, we are transformed: we are able to seize the human facts. We see them where they are, namely in humble, familiar, everyday objects: the shape of fields, of plugs. All sense of normal city life has dissipated. The cyclical had become the linear and the linear the unknown. For example, the once cyclical rhythms of trams and busses had degraded into the linear passages through the city, and at times become completely unpredictable adventures – a voyage into the unknown. In the park, new muffled sounds arise from the rhythm of the pedestrians: gliding, pause, shuffle and slide.
‘Rhythms. Rhythms. They reveal and they hide’ (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 36) All that was hidden by the rhythms now became illuminated by a blanket of snow. The disrupted rhythms, instead of being an obstacle in the daily grind, are a revelation granting the inhabitants new eyes with which to see, and a new body with which to explore the world. The complete experience works through all of our senses to create a new meaning. The impact on our sense of reality works upon us to the core ‘Acquiring a habit is indeed grasping a meaning, but it is motorial grasping of a motorial meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty 208)
It is not the snow that we find fascinating, but the way in which it lets us experience the world. Naturally, unexpected and almost pure. In this we can see Lefebvre’s idea of a moment:
[A] dialectical moment marks the turning point of reality and of the concept: the fundamental intervention of the negative which leads to disalienation but also to renewed alienation, to suppression through negation of negation, but also to new stages in the process of becoming and to new figures of consciousness. (Lefebvre, The theory of moments 343)
The intense moment of lighting redefines our reality, and leads us away from our cognitive shorthand towards a more direct experience. But how is it that our fascination with the snow and the ways in which it illuminated our lives seems to disappear faster than the snow?
Everything is connected
The second phase of the illumination does not take long to show its face. By throwing a wrench in the gears, everyone has taken the time to enjoy the view. To re-see the world from a new perspective. But now, the moment has come and gone, the snow has turned to a grayish-brown pulp, and the urge to get back to the usual order of things grows stronger. Too long in the snow, we see how we begin to long for the rhythms again. We can approach this longing for the rhythm with apprehension to the idea of the body that understands (kapiert) his moves, explained by Merleau-Ponty . The city as body understands his own moves.
The renewed ways of working in the snow are too much of an effort to achieve the same goals. Being in a rhythm has its advantages because of the fact that there is no constant appeal to be conscious of the entire process. As Merleau-Ponty points out, we learn to drive a car by physiologically automating certain procedures. This frees up our conscious attention to focus on other issues such as where we want to go, and if we are still on track (Merleau-Ponty 209). The cities bodily rhythms emulate this process. The temporary disruption begins to feel more and more like a disruption as the experience of lichtung begins to fade, and instead we feel like infants learning to walk again.
In the final stage of the dialectical process of alienation from our surroundings – rediscovery through disruption – there is rediscovery through returning. Returning to our usual order of things, we find that there is a renewed depth to be found. Again like Merleau-Ponty’s image of an automated body that frees up attention for new tasks, the rhythms of the city are able to compress the mundane, automate them, so that an effective division of labor can take place, and we as a whole, and as individuals can achieve great depth in specialized tasks.
Conclusion
In our everyday life we are engaged with city rhythms that beat in a collective unity, and propel us into a complex network of structures. In this unity, are we alienated from life? That is a difficult question to answer. Certainly it is so that we are not constantly experiencing our surroundings to the fullest, but is this possible?
In any case, to fully experience our surroundings, to confront the unknown, there is no need to seek out distant places. ‘Our search for the human takes us too far, too ‘deep’, we seek it in the clouds or in mysteries, whereas it is waiting for us, besieging us on all sides.’ (Lefebvre, the knowledge of everyday life 132) A small amount of snow, or an unexpected structure can cause us to momentarily grasp the naked present.
Works Cited
Fixing the shadows. The genius of photography. BBC. London, October 25 2007.
Lefebrve, Henri. ‘Rythemanalysis: space, time and everyday life’. Seen from the Window. Tr. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. New York: Continuum, 2004
— The knowledge of everyday life. Blackboard < http://blackboard.uva.nl/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_45056_1%26url%3D>
— The theory of moments. Blackboard < http://blackboard.uva.nl/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_45056_1%26url%3D>
Merleau-Ponty. Fenomenologie van de waarneming. Tr. Douwe Tiemersma en Rens Vlasblom. Amsterdam: Boom, 2009.
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