Abstract
The practice turn in social theory has renewed interest in conceptualising the temporal organisation of social life as a way of explaining contemporary patterns of living and consuming. As a result, the interest to develop analyses of time in both practice theories and practice theory-based empirical research is increasing. Practice theorists draw on theories of time and ideas about temporal rhythms to explain how practices are organised in everyday life. To date, they have studied how temporal experiences matter for the coordination of daily life, how temporal landscapes matter for issues of societal synchronisation, and how timespace/s matter for the organisation of human activity. While several studies refer to, draw on, and position themselves in relation to ideas about temporal rhythms, those working with theories of practice have yet to fully utilise the potential of Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis for explaining the constitution of, and more specifically, changes within, social life. I argue that rhythmanalysis can be effectively combined with practice theory to better articulate the ways in which practices become connected through what I describe as processes of institutionalisation. I argue that this combination requires repositioning the role of time in theories of practice as neither experience, nor as landscape, but, building on Schatzki’s work on The Timespace of Human Activity, as practice itself. Drawing on Lefebvre’s concepts of arrhythmia and eurhythmia, and developing Parkes and Thrift’s notion of entrainment, I illustrate how institutional rhythms, as self-organising, open, spatiotemporal practices emerge, endure, and evolve in ways that matter for both socio-temporal landscapes and temporal experiences.
Introduction
The practice turn in social theory (see Schatzki et al., 2001) has successfully developed new and powerful lines of enquiry for examining the constitution of social life. In contrast to various structuralist, intellectualist, intersubjectivist, semiotic, and systems theories, a common feature of the broad church of theories of practice is that they refuse to promote either the individual or the social whole as the fundamental ontological phenomenon of social analysis. Indeed, practice theorists interrogate long-standing divisions that underpin such accounts and that exist in social theory between the individual and society, agency and structure, the micro and the macro, and subject and object, and instead position practices as a fundamental ontology for social enquiry. In drawing together, or in fact, rebuking such conceptual distinctions, a practice ontology permits an analysis of how certain practices and broader configurations of practices emerge, become established in, and disappear from social life. The success of this approach might be measured by the array of theoretical and empirical work that takes its cue from theories of practice and the range of substantive issues and topics to which it has been applied. Most notably the impact of changing configurations of practices on rates, types, and patterns of consumption (Warde, 2005) has been well explored in relation to environmental sustainability (see Shove and Spurling, 2013) and more recently in relation to public health (e.g. Cohn, 2014).
Time is central to practice-theoretical accounts of the social, not only because many practice studies historically trace the development and persistence of practices, and configurations thereof, over time, but also because in reproducing social life, practices are repeated in sequences and combinations that exhibit various forms of temporal connection. In some accounts, temporal connections between practices, sequences of activity, and therefore temporal patterns depend on practitioners’ experiences of time. In others, temporal experience is of less importance and practices are instead viewed as being held together in reproducing a socio-temporal order. Further accounts examine how timespace/s 1 are a central constitutive and connecting feature of practices. However, none of these positions have yet fully articulated how practices become connected in more densely entrenched and complexly connected configurations. That is, they have yet to explain how, in their repetition, practices have affect across the plenum of practices in ways that matter for the ongoing establishment, maintenance, and decline of institutions. In this paper, I ask how Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis ([1992] 2004) might be combined with theories of practice to explain processes of institutionalisation (understood as the emergence and entrenchment of various kinds of connections between practices) which lead to the establishment of the times and places in which activities of a certain kind regularly go on. I claim that rhythmanalysis offers much more than a set of tools to describe background socio-temporal orders. It is rather particularly suited to the task of analysing the forging and strengthening of connections between practices precisely because it is a theory that seeks from the outset to capture the interconnectivity, multiplicity, and complexity of social phenomena.
While multiple theories of practice exist and might be demarcated (see Schatzki, 2016b), in this paper, I focus in particular on the practice theory of Theodore Schatzki (1996, 2002, 2010a) to identify opportunities for combining his ideas with rhythmanalysis. I work with this particular version of practice theory, as I understand it, not to criticise it, but to help throw light on what I claim to be the underutilised concept of rhythms in practice-theoretical analyses. I argue that the concept of rhythms should be further developed in practice theory to better account for the emergence of particular organisations of practices and especially institutional configurations. I refer to Schatzki’s practice theory for three reasons. First, it provides a careful and comprehensive account of a practice ontology and one that has focussed particularly on the temporal(spatial) aspects of social phenomena. Second, it informs a great deal of work on practices, particularly in areas of research and debates within the field of sustainable consumption, to which this paper is partly addressed. Third, it provides solid conceptual ground from which to understand large social phenomena, like institutions, as constituted by configurations of practices and with which to develop an argument about how connections within practice organisations emerge. For these reasons I refer to Schatzki’s work, and at times those in conversation with it, to more robustly identify and evaluate how theories of practice and of rhythms might be combined.
I note from the outset the dangers that arise in attempting to ‘combine’ disparate social ontologies. An ontology is a way of conceiving of the world. Conceiving of the social world as made up of rhythms is not the same as understanding it as made up of practices. Therefore, any combination inevitably requires both building on and modifying each in producing a new conception of the social. As Schatzki (2016b) argues in a recent rejoinder to certain combinations and modifications to practice theory, this should only be attempted if the two theories are sufficiently compatible. I argue that rhythmanalysis is a promising companion for practice theory on three accounts. First, like practice theory, the ambition of rhythmanalysis is to move beyond distinctions in social theory and the dialectical thinking responsible for them. Second, and as a result of the first, like practice theory, rhythmanalysis is a flat ontology. Nothing exists outside of practices or rhythms in each case. Third, like Schatzki’s notion of timespace, time in Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis is a central constitutive feature of social phenomena. 2
From here I recount a necessarily abridged version of Schatzki’s practice theory, enough to be able to demonstrate how it might be successfully and usefully combined with rhythmanalysis. I note that, while for Schatzki, practices are not routines, they are inherently open, spatio-temporal entities that exhibit forms of regularity. I argue that this definition can also be applied to Lefebvre’s analysis of rhythms. I then outline the argument, in response to criticisms that practice theory is not useful for or is unable to examine large social phenomena, that practice theory is a flat ontology and therefore examines the constitution of social phenomena such as institutions, as the reproduction of more densely entrenched and complexly connected configurations of practices. However, I concede that practice theory has so far had less to say about how connections between practices become entrenched and go on to suggest that this is in part due to the way that time is most often conceptualised in social theory as temporal experience or landscape, as sometimes subjective and sometimes objective time. In building on a third way of conceptualising time, as described by Schatzki in The Timespace of Human Activity (2010a), I call for a combination of practice theory and rhythmanalysis that both recognises time as a central constitutive feature of social phenomena and that can describe the emergence and entrenchment of connections between practices. I describe how Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis can be effectively combined with practice theory to achieve this by developing two examples of processes involved in this kind of institutionalisation: eurhythmia and arrhythmia and entrainment. I conclude by discussing the conceptual ramifications and empirical implications of combining rhythmanalysis and practice theory.
Practices
According to Schatzki’s account, a practice is first a ‘… temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings …’ (1996: 89) The arrangement of this nexus is first described in Social Practices (1996) as organised by practical understandings, rules, and teleoaffective structures (which include ends, projects, tasks, purposes, beliefs, emotions, and moods). In his subsequent work, Site of the Social (2002), Schatzki amends this list of organising features to include the missing masses of non-humans, described as material arrangements, and later fully articulates the temporal and spatial organising features of practices in The Timespace of Human Activity (2010a). In the first instance, practices are therefore discrete spatiotemporal entities (they are made up of connected actions, doings and sayings) which are linked by understandings, rules, teleoaffective structures, material arrangements, and interwoven timespaces. An example of a practice is cooking. The actions that comprise cooking (turning on the stove, stirring the contents, plating up the food, and so on) are linked by understandings of what it is to do cooking (that it is a variously necessary, healthy, and communal thing to do); by formal and informal rules about how one goes about cooking (cooking foods for prescribed amounts of time, and perhaps clearing up as you go); and teleoaffectivities that structure the ends, emotions, and moods involved in cooking a meal (say that might be involved in cooking a meal for one’s family). The connections that link actions also extend beyond the practice to connect cooking with other practices, into bundles, which might include eating, shopping, and driving. In order to make a meal, it is usually required for one to go shopping for the necessary ingredients, and to transport these items home, sometimes by driving. This spatiotemporal extension of practices is what reproduces everyday and ‘normal’ ways of living and consuming.
Schatzki compliments this first notion of practice as a nexus, with a second of practice as performance. This notion of practice denotes the actual do-ing or enactment of the practice. Schatzki (1996: 90) writes that: ‘Each of the linked doings and sayings constituting a practice is only in being performed. Practice in the sense of do-ing, as a result, actualizes and sustains practices in the sense of nexuses of doings’. Practices then, have to be performed to be sustained. Without enactment by people, practices as nexuses of connections will fail to be reproduced resulting not only in the demise of that practice but the demise of necessary connections that call a whole host of other practices into being. If people stopped cooking at home, for example, the weekly routine of doing ‘the big shop’ at the supermarket might become a thing of the past.
Although it is important to distinguish between these two senses of practice, as nexus and do-ing, for conceptualising (among other issues) social change, spatiotemporal extension, and the reproduction of large social phenomena, Schatzki (1996: 48) emphasises that these two senses of practice are inextricably linked as ‘… two aspects of the one and same reality of human praxis’. Practice theory, therefore, develops an account of social life that starts with practical activity, and collapses distinctions between the individual and society, by investigating the spatiotemporal extension of practices to explain the reproduction of social life. In Schatzki’s words: … actions [the, sometimes causally, linked doings and sayings enacted in performance of a practice] collect through causality into various sorts of spatiotemporal networks that, in running through and connecting different practices, must be captured by terms other than “practice” - for example, “institution,” “group,” and “system”. (1996: 89)
Repetition
Another oft-quoted definition of what a practice is comes from Reckwitz paper ‘Towards a theory of social practices’ (2002). He writes that: ‘A practice (Praktik) is a routinized type of behaviour …’ (249) which consist of various bodily and mental activities, things, and knowledges and further that: ‘A practice is thus a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described, and the world is understood’ (250). Reckwitz’ nod to routine is a method of accounting for the reproduction of social order. In his words: ‘… the idea of routines implies the idea of a temporality of structure: Routinized social practices occur in the sequence of time, in repetition: social order is thus basically social reproduction’ (2002: 255). It is therefore sometimes thought that practices as entities are closed blocks, patterns, or ‘ideal types’ that are then filled out by performances that maintain or change the social order. In a recent contribution Schatzki (2016b) comments precisely on the role of routine in practice theory. He challenges the way in which this quote is sometimes adopted, noting that for Reckwitz, a practice is not an ‘ideal type’.
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While practices exhibit regularities they are fundamentally open. As they are enacted in context-specific situations, they are forced through reinterpretation and therefore an innovation that represents more than pure reproduction (2016b: 25). Practices, therefore, on Schatzki’s account are not routines. In his words: … practices are not composed of routines or, more generally, regularities alone. The practice of cooking certainly displays regularities: certain foodstuffs are regularly used, certain sequences of steps recur, specific pieces of equipment are reused for the same purposes, and so on. [But] … not all activities that make up cooking practices are regular or routine: people can use cooking equipment in innovative ways, foodstuffs can be mixed in indefinite combinations and in novel ways, people depart from recipes, even sequences of steps can be varied. (Schatzki, 2016b: 24)
Institutions
Various practice theorists (e.g. Gherardi, 2000; Nicolini, 2011; Schatzki, 2005, 2006b) have developed understandings of organisations, institutions, and large social phenomena which are rooted in practices. Despite this work, some authors drawing on practice theory ideas contend that practices are more or only useful for attending to the minutiae of daily life or to micro social phenomena. Such accounts develop a layered approach, relegating practice theory to accounts of interactions that take place in ‘daily life’ while processes of institutionalisation, issues of power, connection, and order are understood by reference to elevated phenomena sometimes described as supra-practice configurations. One such example is the multi-level perspective (Geels, 2002). The MLP and social practice theory investigate reconfigurations from different angles, with the former often following the biography of socio-technical innovations moving from production into application domains, and the latter focusing on the dynamics of daily life practices, including the appropriation of new technologies. (Geels et al., 2015: 6)
In practice theory, no special significance, organising potential, or property is attributed to large social phenomena. In the same way that practices of shopping, cooking, and driving are collected into bundles (variously linked through practical understandings; rules; teleoaffectivities; interwoven timespaces; and material arrangements) so too do these bundles connect with other bundles of practices, involved in, say, commuting, working, and leisure, to form complexes and constellations. In Schatzki’s (2011: 2) words: ‘Constellations of bundles are just larger bundles. So large social phenomena (like macro and global ones) have the same composition as do small, local, and micro phenomena: they consist of practice-arrangement bundles …’. 5 Schatzki draws on another flat ontology, actor-network-theory and Latour’s (2005: 178–184) description of oligoptica and panorama to describe how ‘large’ social phenomena are produced through combinations of ‘smaller' phenomena (Schatzki, 2016c: 38). Translated into practice theory, oligoptica might be thought of as a practice or a set of practices that are very densely connected to a narrow range of other practices. A panorama might be thought of as practice that is more loosely connected but to a very large number of other practices. While there are important differences in the way that practice theory and actor-network-theory conceptualise the social as made up of associations between actors and as connections between practices, there are also important similarities in how they deal with issues of scale. Both size and scale, and therefore power, are produced and not given. For example, shopping might be directly connected to driving and eating, but eating might be connected more loosely to a much wider range of activities including work, sleep, family time, meetings, celebrations, and so on. The point is that oligoptica and panorama have affect, but their effect is only produced in the maintenance of those connections, that themselves enable practices to be reproduced.
To understand large social phenomena in a way that is consistent with practice theory then, is to recognise institutions as made up of, regular, everyday practices. As Goffman (1991: 15) writes in the introduction to Asylums: ‘Social establishments - institutions in the everyday sense of that term - are places such as rooms, suites of rooms, buildings, or plants in which activity of a particular kind regularly goes on …’ Alternatively, as Davide Nicolini (2016: 100) writes in a recent contribution titled Making Sense of ‘Large Phenomena’ from a Practice-Based Perspective that: ‘… when it comes to the social, it is practices all the way down’. While place or physical location do not limit them, institutions as I define them in this paper are strongly connected organisations of practices, combinations and configurations that are regularly reproduced, and that, including forms like oligoptica and panorama, have particular and varied effects across the plenum of the social. Examples of ‘institutions’ therefore range in ‘scale’ from the regular enactment of activities that reproduce hospitals, universities, and entire education systems; financial institutions and economies; and Christmas dinner, the Monday morning commute, and the timing of domestic labour practices.
Nicolini’s work on Practice Theory, Work, and Organization (2013) explains this approach to investigating social life through a method of zooming in and zooming out to reveal processes and scales of entrenchment: The zooming out of the texture of practice requires patiently following the trails of connections between practices; observing how these connections come to form entrenched nexuses or nets; how such nets of action produce effects; how such overarching or global practice nets manifest themselves in the local practising and how “local” performances are in part constituted through distant flows and motilities. (230)
Time and theories of practice
Readers of this journal well know that time has been thought about in different ways throughout history. Aristotle, for example, considered time to be the time of the natural world and as such was readable through and made understandable by the changes in planetary motions, the changing of the seasons, and so on (see Charlton, 1970). Following Descartes ([1637] 2005) and Kant ([1781] 1998), modern scholars tended to consider time as depending on the cognitive structures existing in the mind of the rational observer. Both contemporary lay and academic thought now tend to examine time as made up of a combination of these positions, often divided into two senses as scientific and experienced time. This distinction was first conceptualised by Bergson in Time and Free Will ([1889] 2008) and this understanding continues to play out in social theories of time. Adam (1990, 1995), for example, has demonstrated the importance of understanding these two senses of time (and multiple derivatives and interpretations of them) for social theory. While Nowotny’s (1992) classic article in this journal explores the range of socio-theoretical resources that are underpinned in different ways by one or both of these ways of thinking about time. The conceptualisation of time as split into two (on the one hand counted, quantitative, and objective, and on the other, experienced, qualitative, and subjective) also plays out in practice-theoretical accounts and especially in those accounts that seek to explain how practices are temporally connected. Below I describe how different positions emphasise each of these senses of time to explain the significance of temporal experience for the organisation of daily life and temporal rhythms as a background socio-temporal order, respectively. In building on the accounts that follow, my intent is not to criticise them, but to show how subjective and objective senses of time are mobilised in these respective accounts to achieve their conceptual ambitions. In doing so, I demonstrate the opportunities that are afforded for conceptualising processes of institutionalisation by adopting a third conceptualisation of time, which builds on Schatzki’s notion of the timespace of human activity.
Time in practices
On the one hand, work on practice theory and time emphasises the significance of temporal experiences for shaping the temporal organisation of the day. That is, how subjective experiences of time are central to the ordering of practices. Work on experiences of time shortage (Southerton et al., 2001) and ‘time-squeeze’ (Southerton and Tomlinson, 2005) describes how subjective experiences of being harried matter for the temporal organisation of what people do. Empirical examples that develop such an approach include how experiences of academic work matter for strategies for managing academic life (Spurling, 2015) and how leisure practices, such as wooden boating (Jalas, 2006, 2009) sustain, and are sustained, by the construction of a variety of temporal orientations and meanings. Dale Southerton’s work provides an important point of reference. According to Southerton (2006), practices have objective temporal features (which he takes from Fine’s (1996) five dimensions of time and) which include periodicity, tempo, synchronisation and coordination, duration, and sequence. These features matter for the ways that practitioners allocate practices, or are able to allocate them, within the temporal organisation of the day. Those that have shorter durations and that do not depend on particular forms of synchronisation and coordination with others (e.g. checking emails) are able to be slotted in around practices which have temporal features that establish them as more fixed within schedules (e.g. duration in the case of sleeping, or synchronisation and coordination with other practices in the case of meal times). However, practices and combinations of practices are accompanied by certain experiences of time. In work on the temporal distribution of domestic labour practices, Southerton shows that people rush to fit domestic labour and chores into ‘hot spots’ to make time for ‘cold spots’ to relax, chill, and potter. In his words: Hot and cold spots are about attempts to gain personal control over the temporal rhythms of daily life. As the accounts of being harried … indicate, such control is actually at the core of how harriedness is generated because temporalities are organized collectively. (Southerton, 2003: 20)
Practices in time
On the other hand, some practice theorists place less emphasis on the subjective experience of time and instead concentrate on how, in coming together, practices make time, or constitute temporal rhythms. Pantzar and Shove (2010), for example, provide a speculative discussion of the idea that temporal rhythms can be considered as the manifest outcomes of relationships between practices. More recent work by Southerton (2013) has highlighted the importance of understanding the extent to which temporal rhythms configure and condition practices. Moreover, Walker (2014) has described how societal rhythms provide temporal structures that organise practices, and hence energy demand. More empirical work has built on this idea that temporal rhythms are created by and constrain practices. Using time-use data, Anderson (2016) has studied the flexibility of the timing of domestic practices, such as laundry and Torriti (2017) has looked at the extent to which other kinds of domestic practices depend on the time of the day, and hence temporal rhythms.
In The Dynamics of Social Practice, Shove et al. (2012) describe how practices connect to form bundles and complexes and characterise the kinds of linkage involved. Practices, they suggest, connect in various ways, including by sequence, synchronisation, proximity, and coexistence. Drawing on Zerubavel’s (1979) work on patterns of time in hospital life, these authors describe how practices both constitute and are shaped by multiple temporal registers in ways that matter for when and how practices are reproduced. For example, the working day in the hospital may consist of some recurring practices including consultant, medicine, and ward rounds, clinic appointments, and surgeries each with their own times and each variously dependent on others, connected in sequence and combination. However, the temporal order of the day is also in part shaped by the temporal order of the week. The tempo, periodicity, and forms of synchronisation and coordination at weekends are very different from those on weekdays in hospitals, as are Mondays from Wednesdays. Seasonal and annual temporalities such as economic cycles, winter pressures, and school holidays cut across and matter further for the sequences, rate of recurrence, and interdependence of practices. These intersecting temporalities constitute a socio-temporal order, or a set of temporal rhythms, that shape connections between practices. Shove et al. (2012: 88) explain that practices connect in the bundles and complexes that they do as a consequence of competition and/or collaboration between practices. Some practices suppose and require the reproduction of others, and in being reproduced sustain sequences of activity and temporal landscapes. Others vie for the resources with which to be reproduced in given complexes, potentially disturbing the temporal order.
At the same time as their allegiances and conflicts constitute the socio-temporal order, these relations are also constrained and shaped by it. Rather than as in the above example where practices are in a recursive relationship with temporal experiences, here practices as subjects are shaped by external and objective temporal rhythms. However, Shove et al. (2012: 90) note that the idea that practices compete and collaborate for resources is useful only up to a point. In their words: ‘… simple representations of this kind overlook the more subtle point that the recurrent enactment of practices and of links between them transform the terms in which competition and/or collaboration are framed’. Not only does the repetition of practices, and combinations thereof, transform the terms of competition and collaboration, but it also changes the whole range of ways in which practices connect, shifting entire complexes of practices.
How this kind of emergence and becomingness of constellations is to be handled is not entirely resolved. I argue that contending with this requires another way of thinking about time in practice. Shove (2009: 17) summarises the two standing positions concisely. In her words: ‘The first … that time is a scarce resource which practices consume. The second is that … temporal arrangements arise from the effective reproduction of everyday life, or, to put it more strongly, practices make time’. Taking inspiration from Sallis’ (1997) work on subjectivity, I argue for emphasising and developing a third way of thinking about time. Writing on the phenomenology of perception, Sallis (1997: 347) suggests that there are three ways of conceptualising the relationship between subjectivity and time: ‘… the first alternative says that the subject is in time, the second that time is in the subject, the third that the subject is time’. Similarly, I suggest that the first approach, described above, positions time in practices, while the second argues that practices make time. We might also consider that time is a constitutive effect feature of practice, or that practice is time.
Time as practice
In ‘The time of activity’ (2006a) and the timespace of human activity (2010a), Schatzki develops just such a radical reconfiguration of the role of time(space) 7 in practice theory, distinguishing it from both objective time (and space) and subjective time (and space) (25–31). He brings Bergson’s notion of unfolding duration together with Heidegger’s notion of the teleological dimensionality of the past, present, and future of existence, ascribing them, respectively, to the ongoing activity-mentality experience of performance and the hanging together of social life through interconnected practice-arrangement bundles (2016a: 27), to argue that time(space) is a constitutive effect feature of human praxis.
We can say that the position that Schatzki develops is neither that temporal landscapes are built up through practices, nor that practices are organised by subjective experiences of time (hot or cold spots, harried, rushed, or chilled time), whether those relationships might be considered mutually recursive or otherwise. In his words: ‘Timespace neither accrues to nor is built up through activity. It is, instead, a central constitutive feature of human activity, where by “constitutive” I mean helping to make up what something, in this case activity, essentially is’ (Schatzki, 2010a: ix). Time is instead conceived of as an inherent and constitutive feature of practices. Human activity should, therefore, be understood as inherently temporal. Time is opened, it comes to be, in the occurrence, the happening of activity. That is to say that temporal connections between practices, as effect features of practices, are made, maintained, and have affect, in the do-ing of practices.
Schatzki further refers to the interweaving of time(space)s to capture the expansive web of connections that form a constitutive and intrinsic infrastructure that underpins, or runs through, complexes of practices. In his words: … past practice organizations form a context for the current actions that carry on the practices involved and maintain their ogranizations. The same holds of interwoven timespaces. The interwoven timespaces that have been characterizing the practices people carry on form a context for the current activities through which the timespaces involved persist or do not persist. (Schatzki, 2010a: 213)
A rhythmic ontology of practice
Lefebvre’s notion of rhythms (always multiple) is particularly powerful because it is built on this same third way of conceptualising time and practice, that practice is time. As such, it permits an analysis that takes a step both beyond investigating how experiences of ‘time-squeeze’ matter for the organisation of daily life and beyond studying how practices constitute or make a temporal landscape that enables and constrains performances. As Lefebvre would have it, rhythmanalysis presents an opportunity to better develop accounts beyond the pervasive dialectical thinking that is responsible for reproducing problematic distinctions and dualisms in social theory. Such an ambition also pierces to the core of practice-theoretical ideas. He writes: ‘[Rhythmanalysis] does not isolate an object, or a subject, or a relation. It seeks to grasp a moving but determinate complexity (determination not entailing determinism)’ (Lefebvre, [1992] 2004: 11–12). So how does Lefebvre mobilise the concept of rhythms to capture complexity and indeterminacy in moving and what does this kind of analysis mean for how we might think about the constitution of temporal experiences and temporal landscapes?
In developing a ‘new science’ of rhythmanalysis Lefebvre makes an onto-epistemological claim that the social world is composed of rhythms and that the way to study rhythms is through this ‘new science’ of rhythmanalysis. Rhythms compose all kinds of social phenomena and we can therefore, consider practices as open spatiotemporal entities, to be rhythmic. Importantly rhythms must not be regarded as things. Part of the innovation of rhythmanalysis is to resist the reification and presentation of identification. Like practices then, rhythms are not closed entities. Neither are they subjects or objects of an action or a relation. They are movings, forces, expenditures of energy that return with varying regularity in time and space. They are characterised by repetition and difference; by birth, growth, peak, and decline; and by their affect across a polyrhythmic ensemble.
A theory of practice inspired by rhythmanalysis would seek to make similar claims about the world and how it might be studied. Building from the claim that the social world is populated by practices, it would extend this position to argue that practices, as open spatiotemporal entities are repeated in time and space (repetition not involving closure), and that in being repeated, in returning, practices are changed, shaped also by the repetition, the moving, of others. This would not equate to an analysis of how one practice shapes another (recursively or otherwise), but how the moving of rhythms, the repetition of practices, ripples through the complexity of movings and doings that constitute the plenum of practices and the polyrhythmic ensemble.
At this point it is important to note that, as with ideas about practices, concepts of rhythms have been drawn on and developed by a variety of authors, from a range of disciplines, to study a number of empirical cases. In an edited collection on Geographies of Rhythm, Edensor (2010) and colleagues explore issues of rhythm and space across a number of sites from urban outreach in the polyrhythmic city (Hall, 2010), to changing everyday life in rural Irish towns (Conlon, 2010), to improvising cycling rhythms in urban spaces (Spinney, 2010). A recent special issue edited by Smith and Hetherington (2013) continues this theme on Urban Rhythms examining the rhythms of carnival crowds (Jaguaribe, 2013), the railway station (Revill, 2013), and the twenty-four-hour city (Smith and Hall, 2013). Henriques et al. (2014) bring a range of historical antecedents to Lefebre’s writing on rhythms, including Bode (2014), Laban (2014), and Spencer (1867), to bear on contemporary understandings of embodiment, culture, and rhythm in a collection that investigates the rhythms of gymnastics and dance (Crespi, 2014), of playing video games (Väliaho, 2014), and those involved in the sonic events of digital sound installations (Ikoniadou, 2014). Moreover, as described above, various theories of practice have adopted ideas from rhythmanalysis to explain the constitution of objective temporal rhythms. Walker, for example, has described temporal rhythms in relation to societal synchronisation and energy demand. In his words: The observable social patterns of repetition that we classify as rhythms are essentially patterns in the routinised or habituated doing of practices in similar ways at similar times (eating, sleeping, washing, for example), and/or a functional coordination of different practices into connected sequences (waking, then dressing, then eating, then travelling, then working and so on). (Southerton, 2013; Walker, 2014: 3) To pose the question of rhythms clearly, let us return to everyday life and the description of a day. The use of time fragments it, parcels it out. A certain realism is constituted by the minute description of these parcels; it studies activities related to food, dress, cleaning, transport, etc. It mentions the employed products. Such a description will appear scientific; yet it passes by the object itself, which is not the sequence of lapses of time passed in this way, but their linking together in time, therefore their rhythm. The essential will get lost, to the gain of the accidental, even - especially - if the study of fragments enables us to theorise certain structures of the everyday. (Lefebvre and Régulier, [1985] 2004: 77)
The aim of combining practice theory with rhythmanalysis should be to capture the ways that practices are linked, how they become more and less densely connected, temporally and in all other kinds of ways. It is to explain how practices become more fixed and flexible within bundles, complexes, and constellations and how connections become more entrenched, established, and institutionalised. In this way, this combination of practice theory and rhythmanalysis provides a powerful and novel description and explanation of how time is implicated in social action. Practices are now inherently temporal because they essentially return in time and space (they are rhythmic) and in returning they are always different. Moreover, they are inherently multiple because they are no longer (provisionally) stable entities but always partly made up of and responding to other moving practices. As such, practices no longer constitute a separate temporal landscape, nor are they shaped by subjective experiences of time, but in moving, they affect the plenum of activities, impacting on when, where, and how action happens in multiple, complex, and indeterminate ways.
In such a formulation, neither time nor practices are qualified by experience, understood as short or long, ‘harried’ or ‘chilled’. Nor are they counted in terms of days, minutes, weeks, and decades, shifts, terms, or seasons. Time can instead be thought of as an expression of the forces that practices exert across the plenum of the social as they are enacted and repeated. Time becomes instead something like the rippling effect across the pond that matters objectively for when and where action happens and that matters subjectively for experiences of ‘time-squeeze’, ‘time-pressure’, and ‘chill-time’. These subjective and objective times, experiences and days of the week, in this analysis become expressions or outcomes of the repetition of practices. Taking up the concept of rhythms in this way affords new opportunities to study how practices affect and are affected across the plenum of activity. It also requires a new vocabulary. In the final section, I articulate two example processes of institutionalisation: eurhythmia and arrhythmia and entrainment which begin to describe the entrenching, stabilising, reinforcing, as well as the disruption, breakdown, and decline of connections between practices.
Institutional rhythms
If social life can be conceptualised as made up of multiple and intersecting, moving practices that, in being reproduced affect and shape other practices within the plenum of activity, and that in returning change and are changed, then we need new ways of describing the processes that characterise the ways that bundles, complexes, and constellations of practices are reproduced, emerge, break down, and shift. Concepts that describe relations between two or three entities, as in competition or harmony will be insufficient for the task, for grasping this moving, and indeterminate complexity. What is required is a novel analysis and vocabulary that does not focus on isolating subjects, objects, relations, or chains of causation, and instead captures the exertion and expression of forces, the ebb and flow of activities, and the ripples of influence that extend through the plenum of activity and that establish institutional rhythms. Only a handful of resources exist for conceptualising these processes. Lefebvre gives us a first foothold, others might be adopted and adapted from the chronogeography of Parkes and Thrift (1979, 1980), and it is possible to imagine more. In this section, I outline Lefebvre’s ideas of eurhythmia and arrhythmia and the notion of entrainment taken from Parkes and Thrift and developed by Schwanen et al. (2012).
Eurhythmia and arrhythmia
Lefebvre’s description of the relationship between eurhythmia and arrhythmia provides a first way of conceptualising how in their repetition, practices establish and strengthen connections. Within a given polyrhythmia there exists bundles or collections of rhythms that are in sync, healthy, and ‘normed’. Lefebvre describes these rhythms as eurhythmia. In that same polyrhythmia there are rhythms that are desynchronising, pathological, and different. He describes these as arrhythmia. In eurhythmia, rhythms mutually depend on, support, and reinforce each other. The repetition of a given bundle of rhythms necessarily calls into being others and is itself reproduced through that repetition. In arrhythmia, rhythms fail to be repeated in a synchronised, healthy, and ‘normal’ way and break down. Because rhythms depend on and are variously interconnected with each other, a given arrhythmia can bring a whole eurhythmia into fatal disaster (Lefebvre, [1992] 2004: 16)
Most importantly, eurhythmia and arrhythmia must not be associated with arguments about the way that practices collaborate and compete for the time, space, or other kinds of resources with(in) which to be reproduced. Ideas about collaboration and competition require relations between practices to be provisionally fixed and static, existing as in harmony or in conflict. Thinking in terms of the eurhythmia and arrhythmia of repetitions of practices is rather about process, dynamism, and flux. Eurhythmia is not opposed to arrhythmia in the same way that collaboration is opposed to competition. Instead every eurhythmia always already contains arrhythmia, pauses, breaks, and off-beats. As arrhythmia are reproduced they weaken previously strong connections, but in doing so, they also build and strengthen other and new connections, new eurhythmia. It is this dynamic relation between rhythms that matters for processes of disrupting and weakening connections, while at the same time strengthening and establishing dense and complex connections. In being regularly reproduced, eurhythmia, that is, organisations of practices, are strengthened and made more resilient to the effects of arrhythmia. Lefebvre and Régulier describe this dynamic process and relation through the metaphor of the rolling, rocking, and moving of the sea. But look closely at each wave. It changes ceaselessly. As it approaches the shore, it takes the shock of the backwash: it carries numerous wavelets, right down to the tiny quivers that it orientates, but which do not always go in its direction … Powerful waves crash upon one another, creating jets of spray; they disrupt one another, absorbing, fading, rather than crashing, into one another. (Lefebvre and Régulier, [1985] 2004: 79)
Entrainment
In their (1979) paper on ‘Time spacemakers and entrainment’, Parkes and Thrift draw inspiration from research in the field of chronobiology, particularly from the idea that temporal development in biological organisms is a result of numerous interconnected periodicities that are fundamental characteristics of biological processes. They argue that social life can also be thought to be constituted in the same way, as being made up of so many ‘clocks’. They write: ‘The territory of human action is established through the occurrence of recurrent events both rhythmic and periodic …’ (355) As geographers, and in developing the field of chronogeography, Parkes and Thrift are particularly concerned with spacemaking and the territory of human action. That is, how the repetition of human action plays out in the constitution of place. Leaving aside the specifically spatial aspects of the organisation of the social for the moment, what is important to take from this work for the purposes of this paper is the idea that the repetition of activity is fundamental to the establishment of order in social life. Parkes and Thrift suggest that repetitious cycles of activity exert force on and shape each other, and that some set the pace for the recurrence of others.
‘The environment of our lifeworld contains synchronizing or entraining forces … These entraining agents may be referred to as Zeitgebern, time-givers or time-producers. They impel another cycle to assume synchronization …’ (Parkes and Thrift, 1979: 356).
Adopting this idea of entrainment is particularly useful because it allows us to get a handle on the dynamics of the plenum of activity. It permits an investigation of which rhythms impel others to assume synchronisation, to search for distantly connected and affected rhythms, and to point out which rhythms are not drawn with the returning of a set of activities. Nevertheless, caution needs to be taken in adopting this idea so as not to overplay the role of Zeitgebern. The ability to entrain must not be considered as an objective temporal feature or element of a given set of rhythms or practices. It does not exist in practices. Such an analysis risks repeating theoretical missteps that distinguish between lower and higher tiers of activity, between those practices that can entrain and those that cannot. Adapting the idea of entrainment to a rhythmic ontology of practice means recognising entraining forces as neither abstract, distinct, or universal elements. Entrainment is rather an ongoing and contested process. Entraining forces exist only by virtue of the reproduction of a given polyrhythmia. Just as relationships between rhythms are continuously becoming different as they are repeated in connection with others, so too do resulting entraining forces evolve. So, while Parkes and Thrift advocate identifying and hunting for the Zeitgebern, and the ‘clocks of social structures’, I rather suggest that the idea of entrainment can be developed not as a property of rhythms, but as a product of the affect exerted through the plenum of activity.
To illustrate this idea, it will be useful to refer to how Schwanen et al. (2012) mobilise this concept in their study of the rhythms of urban nightlife. This study emphasises that temporal ecologies, as they describe them, are exclusionary and therefore contested. Their research shows that the rhythms of the opening and closing of bars and clubs shape women’s participation in the night-time economy much more than they do men’s. Leaving aside the added complexity of exclusion and inequality for the moment, what this study highlights first is the entraining capacities of bar and club opening times. They write: ‘The stronger the entraining capacities of an element, the more its effects will ripple through a polyrhythmic ensemble as an accordion effect and the greater the rhythmic conformity that will ensue …’ (Schwanen et al., 2012: 2066). Rhythmic conformity, the strength of eurhythmia to be able to resist arrhythmia, is directly related to entraining capacities. Certain, well-established institutional rhythms are able to entrain others, or in their words: ‘… institutionally inscribed rhythms, such as opening hours of facilities and public transport timetables, are capable of entraining the rhythms of many practices and people in a given place (Parkes and Thrift, 1980)’ (Schwanen et al., 2012: 2066–2067). For Schwanen et al., institutional rhythms have far-reaching and entraining effects. They also observe, following DeLanda (2013), that they are usually characterised by a ‘slower’ rate of change. In any case, the central point is that institutional rhythms are not manifestations of hierarchical process or representative of macro social phenomena that exists beyond the plenum of practices.
Institutional rhythms are composed of returning and connected, open spatiotemporal practices, albeit in a configuration that exhibits a strong eurhythmia. Schwanen et al. (2012: 2066) are clear when they write: ‘Entrainment should not, however, be seen as a deterministic and top-down or hierarchical process emanating from a single core or a few centres … entrainment is open-ended, characterised by contestation, and based on local self-organisation’. The analytical consequence for a rhythmic ontology of practices is therefore not to hunt for the Zeitgebern but to investigate the processes of institutionalisation as the emergence, establishment, and entrenchment of connections between returning practices. That is to understand how a given set of rhythms are reproduced and in returning strengthen their connections that enable and support further repetition. With this approach, entrainment is not an ability or feature of a set of institutionally inscribed rhythms but an outcome or expression of the movings of rhythms within a polyrhythmia as they crash into one another, disrupt each other, adjust to each other, absorb each other, and affect each other.
Conclusion
The aim of this paper has been to develop understandings within the field of theories of practice of how practices connect to form bundles, complexes, and constellations, and to show how processes of connection matter for conceptualising institutions. I suggested that theories of practice, while recognising a range of types of connections, often emphasise the importance of temporal connections between practices for explaining the constitution of social life and its temporal organisation. I claimed, however, that connections between practices are not mediated by subjective experiences of time, and nor are they shaped by an external set of temporalities (sometimes described as temporal rhythms) of their own making. I argued that in order to explain the establishment, entrenchment, and disruption of connections, that it is necessary to reposition time within practice theory not as existing in practices, or to consider that practices are in time, but to see time as a central constitutive feature of practices, or that time is practice. Conceptually, the implications of combining practice theory with rhythmanalysis are that time is no longer an external phenomena against which organisations of practices should be read. Neither is temporal organisation drawn out and privileged from other forms of connection, not only spatial, but material, jurisdictional, and so on. Empirically this means, following Lefebvre and Régulier ([1985] 2004), that studies of everyday life and the patterning of ways of living and consuming should not (only) seek to examine the products of institutional rhythms, that is the parcelled out sequences of time and their cumulative periodicity in the forms of societal synchronisation and externalised temporal rhythms. Instead, studies building from the approach outlined in this paper would investigate how rhythmic practices become and have become connected on their own terms. Ideas of eurhythmia and arrhythmia and entrainment provide two examples of the local self-organisation of institutional rhythms, but there are more to be discerned, to explain further how rhythms absorb one another, bifurcate and split apart, how they take forms like oligoptica and panorama, and how they come to colonise polyrhythmia. Moreover, in developing further this emerging vocabulary and analysis, it will be necessary to account for several issues that I have ‘put to one side’ in this paper. These include more fully articulating the layering of constitutive effect features of practices (including their intertwined temporal, spatial, material, and jurisdictional aspects) and understanding issues of power and exclusion as part of the reproduction of entraining forces and institutional rhythms.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the DEMAND Research Centre (
), funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number EP/K011723/1] as part of the RCUK Energy Programme and by EDF as part of the R&D ECL-EER Programme. It was also supported by Lancaster University in the form of a 50th Anniversary Lectureship. I am especially grateful to two anonymous reviewers and to colleagues in the DEMAND Research Centre for their comments and advice which have greatly improved this paper.