Towards Lefebvrian Socio-Nature? A Film about Rhythm, Nature and Science

© 2008 The AuthorsJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Geography Compass 2/3 (2008): 659–670, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00107.x

Towards Lefebvrian Socio-Nature? A Film about Rhythm, Nature and Science

James Evans1* and Phil Jones2

1School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester2School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham

AbstractThe first thing you will notice about this article is that it is actually a film. Wedid not set out to make a film, it just ended up that way. We started out making musicout of environmental data, wondering why we only ever look at scientific data,why we do not listen to it. Wandering around the city passing through the transformedlandscapes of channelised rivers and broken industrial spaces, we wanted to revealthe socio-natural rhythms of this hybrid city. The text you see below represents theshooting script for a film that explores Lefebvre’s notion of rhythmanalysis in thecontext of socio-natural rhythms. The video accompanying it is far more interesting,including the environmental music that we produced by feeding scientific data throughsamplers and drum machines. The video questions the nature of scientific repre-sentation and whether the notion of rhythmanalysis can be stretched to explorerhythms beyond the human. Furthermore, the process of actually making the video,submitting it to this journal, and responding to the referees’ comments made usquestion the very nature of what constitutes an academic paper in the twenty-firstcentury. The accompanying commentary is our attempt to deal with these issues.

To link to the film please go to http://www.blackwell-compass.com/home_video#gecofilm.

SCENE 1

[title card – Prelude]

[library quad, establishing two shot, sitting in chairs]

[close up JE]

JE: Henri Lefebvre’s (1976, 1991) oeuvre offers a broadly Marxist analysisof how the productive forces of capitalism impact on urban life. Thecentral thrust of his work reacts primarily to the intrusion of capitalisminto the social, political and cultural rhythms of life and space. The effectsof capitalism are primarily understood as the erasure of urban life worldsthrough the homogenisation of rhythm . . .

[close up PJ]

http://www.blackwell-compass.com/home_video#gecofilm

660 A film about rhythm, nature and science

© 2008 The Authors Geography Compass 2/3 (2008): 659–670, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00107.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

PJ: Question: can Lefebvre’s tools of analysis be used to capture the socio-natural rhythms of the city as well as the purely social, cultural andeconomic? If rhythmanalysis attunes us to the hum of urban life worlds,and captures their destruction as a form of homogenisation, then can itnot also capture the rhythms of urban nature? Put another way, can wecreate a distinctively Lefebvrian nature?

[close up JE]

We address this task in three parts, which seek to extend Lefebvre’s writingon rhythmanalysis and urban life onto the less familiar ground of socio-natureand, finally, scientific representation. Therefore, three sets of questions:

SCENE 2

[Julian Clark’s office]JC: What are the original tenets of rhythmanalysis, and can we identifypossible departure points into the socio-natural world? Lefebvre’s emphasison the transdisciplinary and synthetic character of rhythmanalysis mayprovide grounds for its extension in this way . . .

[Rosie Day’s office]

RD: Can rhythmanalysis be used to capture socio-natural rhythms withoutdoing excessive violence to Lefebvre’s key precepts? Taking examples from aseries of urban socio-natural systems, we generate aural representations ofenvironmental data, and explore how they resonate with Lefebvrian ideasof rhythm.

[Lesley Batty’s office]

LB: Can this form of rhythmanalysis be further extended to articulate theinterrelation of human and natural rhythms beyond the urban sphere?What challenges and possibilities do rhythmic representations of techno-natureoffer? What is the relation between science, rhythm and sound?

SCENE 3

[title card – Allemande]

[general street scene, passers-by, etc.]

[voice over, JE: The idea that cities are comprised of a sequence ofrhythms has intuitive appeal to anyone who has sat and observed thepassing urban scene from a street café. From the sound of traffic andstaccato of pedestrian footfalls to patterns of fenestration on buildings andcultural rhythms of rush hours and siestas, cities disclose a complex yetordered whole, discernible to the careful observer. Lefebvre (1996, 228)tells us in The Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities that]


A film about rhythm, nature and science 661

[cut to Dominque Moran’s office] DM: ‘It is impossible to understandurban rhythms without referring to a general theory, which we will call“rhythmanalysis” ’.

[back to street scene]

[Voiceover JE: Rhythmanalysis is based on an understanding of rhythm as‘always linked to such and such a place, to its place, whether it be theheart, the fluttering of the eyelids, the movement of a street, or the tempoof a waltz’ (Lefebvre 1996, 230). The rhythm is the essence of place, arelation, but also an internal duree, a la Bergson, that discloses an intrinsiccharacter of becoming . . . ]

SCENE 4

[interior two shot, seated]

JE: In doing so, rhythmanalysis captures the specificity of times and places,as they are expressed through various systems. Rythmanalysis is alsoLefebvre’s prescription, method, tool or way out. As concentrations ofhuman activity, cities are major producers of rhythms in social time,generating a polyrhythmy, which ‘always results from a contradiction andalso from a resistance to it . . . defined as the struggle between . . . the tendencyto homogeneity and the one to diversity’ (Lefebvre 1996, 239).

[close up JE]

In capturing the colonisation and homogenisation of the life worlds bythe forces of capital, rhythmanalysis suggests a more socially sensitivecritique of the effects of capitalism.

[close up PJ]

PJ: Lefebvre never directly considered the role of nature, or non-humans,in the urban milieu. But he did emphasise some core tenets of rhythmanalysisin general that may provide a suitable departure point for our explorationof socio-nature. One such point is the idea of synthesis. Lefebvre understandsrhythmanalysis as integrative of diverse realms. Consider the followingquote, again taken from The Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities.

[intercut Dom’s office]

DM: [Rhythmanalysis] requires notions and aspects to be linked to it thatanalysis too often keeps separate: times and spaces, the public and theprivate, the state-political and the intimate.

[Cut back, close up PJ]

PJ: Why not also human and non-human? Biological and social? Lefebvrebroaches these possibilities himself, saying



[cut to Dom’s office]

DM: ‘[T]his analysis of rhythms, in all their magnitude “from particles togalaxies”, has a transdisciplinary character’.

[Cut back, close up JE]

JE: The door is certainly ajar, then, for a rhythmanalysis of urban socio-natures.But further, beyond legitimising such a departure, Lefebvre hints at howthis may be achieved, saying that rhythmanalysis ‘gives itself as aim theleast possible separation of the scientific from the poetic’ (Lefebvre 1996).The emphasis on synthesis, and this talk of unifying poetic and scientificapproaches provides a potential point of departure into the realms ofsocio-nature. Can rhythmanalysis be worked through in light of currentacademic trends towards the non-human urban?

SCENE 5

[title card – Intermezzo]

[images of urban nature]

[Voice over PJ: While patently ‘there’, urban natures have tended to beignored by epistemologies that assume the ‘urban’ is an exclusively humandomain. This neglect has had very real consequences for the ways inwhich cities are thought and planned, concealing the important contributionsnon-humans make to the urban world, for example through providingfresh air, biodiversity or clean water. The importance of non-humans tourban existence has been highlighted in a range of work on socio-natures.Some authors have emphasised the ‘cyborg’ dimension of cities, the waysin which water, waste, air and other physical elements are interwoventhrough the urban infrastructure (Gandy 2005; Swyngedouw 1996).Other authors have sought to reveal the bioworlds of urban ecology andgreenspace, bringing other species to cognisance through notions ofcosmopolitics and conviviality. For example, Hinchliffe and Whatmore (2006)argues that we must learn to listen to non-human spatio-temporalities‘carefully’, as ways of being in their own right, if we are to successfullyincorporate them into our future urban environments.]

SCENE 6

[footage of river flows]

[Voice over JE: The current vogue for sustainable cities demands that wedevelop techniques of capturing the ways in which non-humans andhumans are related. Can rhythmanalysis be put to this task? An examplemay help here. Urban rivers are not just rivers, but socio-natural flows.This discharge diagram shows the interrelation of natural rhythms (the



flow variation reflecting different levels of rainfall each day), and socialrhythms (the intradiurnal variation of release of water into the watercoursefrom homes and treatment plants reflecting the pre- and post-workrush). Our challenge is to make non-human rhythms palpable, but muchgroundwork has been done by scientists and artists, who already speak forsocio-nature because they listen carefully. Although most obviously a scientificartefact, figure 1 also constitutes a ‘picture’ that reveals a socio-naturalrhythm, one which is both integral to the city, both social and natural,and yet usually concealed from us. Let us return to what Lefebvre (1996,227) says about the representational challenge of rhythmanalysis:


DM: Rhythms: they reveal and hide, being much more varied than inmusic or the so-called civil code of succession . . . Rhythm: music of the city,a picture which listens to itself, image in the present of a discontinuoussum . . . No camera, no image or sequence of images can show theserhythms. One needs equally attentive eyes and ears, a head, a memory, aheart. A memory? Yes, to grasp this present other than in the immediate,restitute it in its moments, in the movement of various rhythms.

SCENE 7

[images of cities]

[voice over JE: This is a particularly rich quote, offering valuable insightsinto the practice of rhythmanalysis. Rhythm reveals, rhythm is the musicof the city. It cannot be represented by either images or imaging devices.Rhythm is a picture that listens to itself. Rhythm is a picture that listensto itself? Let us listen to the diagram]

[black screen with music & explanatory title cards]

SCENE 8

[computer graveyard, one shot, PJ]

PJ: What we have is the sound of socio-nature, in this case producedthrough the aural representation of a visual graph. The mixing of auraland visual senses that are most often held strictly apart was what theabstract expressionists of the early twentieth century termed synaesthesia,or the synthesis of senses. They asked questions that sought to uncovera universal artistic language of emotion by exploring the synthesis ofthe senses.

[PJ voice over with same ambient sound][cut to close up of PJ. listening to a wall painted red.] What is the soundof red?



[cut to wide shot of painted wall, PJ stroking a blue part of it] How doesblue feel?[cut to close up of JE licking a saxophone] What does Jazz taste of?

[computer graveyard, one shot, PJ] PJ: Science is itself a synaestheticpractice, creating data through the transformation of sensory experience.The flow meters that recorded the passing of water in the river did not‘see’ the water, but felt it, requiring the technicians to translate this intoa visual format.[cut to JE elsewhere in the computer graveyard] JE: Urban socio-natureis characterised by a set of rhythms, and as such rhythmanalysis can beused to reveal, capture and resensitise us to them. Architects and plannersare already realising this to a lesser extent, working with soundscapes tohelp design livable places and capture the uniqueness of experiences associatedwith certain spaces.[cut to external location, close up] JE: Capturing the rhythms of socio-nature reveals the interwoven character of humans and non-humans in thecity, awakening us to the impacts that our actions and life worlds have onthose of nature.[close up JE with intercut of river footage] JE: In this sense, rhythmanalysishas the power to perform a similar critique of the effects of capitalism onsocio-nature as it does on the purely social life world, revealing rhythmsthat are being progressively homogenised by the process of developmentand destruction. The rhythms of birdsong are removed by the process ofbrownfield development, which infills sites that are used for feeding indensely built-up urban areas. Similarly, a river that has been culverted, orput underground, will have had its rhythms changed dramatically, with afar more pronounced flow regime. The rhythms of its meanders, whichstrike a balance between local topography and precipitation, have beenstunted in order to constrain its floodplain and free up space for development.Listening to the regimes of urban rivers over the last 200 years wouldproduce a pronounced effect on the listener, as intensity and noise levelsincrease. Similarly, charting the meander and sinuosity ratios would reveala shortening of rhythm, as the modified river tended towards a value of1 (Luna et al. 1966). Lefebvre (1996, 231) states,


DM: ‘Rhythms imply repetitions and can be defined as movements anddifferences in repetition. Yet, there are two forms of repetition: cyclical andlinear. Inseparable even if the analysis must distinguish and separate them.’[back to JE close up] JE: Here, we see the two forms of rhythm at play.The rhythms of capitalism replace cyclical rhythm with linear.[cut computer graveyard, close up PJ] PJ: The method by which we havequite literally synthesised urban socio-natures raises a series of questionsabout what could be called environmental rhythmanalysis more generally.



Notably, can science be used as a tool of rhythmanalysis, and if so, whateffects are created?

SCENE 9

[title card – Sarabande]

[location #10, interior bathed in TV light. Two shot]

PJ: It is worth returning to an earlier quote. Lefebvre (1996) claims thatrhythmanalysis ‘gives itself as aim the least possible separation of the scientificfrom the poetic’ (p. 228). This statement not only resonates with the ideaof synthesis, but also prompts us to consider how the scientific and poeticcan be brought together. The synthesised rhythms offered in this articledo this in a very practical way, uniting techne and poesis though thealternative representation of socio-natural rhythms.

[black screen with music and explanatory title cards]

[Close up] JE: In this sense, socio-natural rhythmanalysis as we present itconstitutes a reflexive use of techno-nature to listen to techno-nature. This isan unusual move – it is not common to listen to scientific data, but in manyways aural presentation is more apt for the rhythmanalysis of socio-nature.The poetic presentation in aural format provokes a more immersedsensory response. Marshall McLuhan (1964) always stated that the radiowas the ‘hottest’ form of media, because the aural sense provoked themost intense reaction among its listeners. [intercut extreme close up ofPJ’s eye reflecting TV flicker] In contrast, TV was cool (in every sense),providing a differentiated visual surface over which the eye flits like abutterfly [end of intercut], never arresting attention or building emotion.As he put it, the revolution is always broadcast on the radio.

SCENE 10

[lab, PJ in front of fume cupboard]

PJ: In Vue de la Fenêtre, one of Lefebvre’s (1996) more personal, poeticand rhetorical essays, he explores the relation of subject and object inrhythmanalysis, saying that in order ‘[t]o analyse a rhythm you have to beout of it . . . and yet to grasp rhythm you must yourself have been grabbedby it’ (p. 229). The aural representation of socio-natural rhythms achievesthis dual objectification/subjectification through uniting the scientific andpoetic elements of rhythmanalysis.[close up] PJ: There is another confluence between rhythm and science.In spite of the ocularcentrism attributed to post-Enlightenment Westernsociety, it is possible that science is an aural, as well as a visual, practice.When the expert listens to nature they hear only noise at first, what



Michel Serres (1997) calls La belle noiseuse, which constitutes all existence.The entire purpose of the experimental method is to isolate certain variablesby holding other factors constant, in order to reduce this noise and tuneinto the discernible rhythms of nature. In scientific parlance, relationshipsare concealed by background noise, commonly conceptualised as uncertainty,and represented as error bars on any given estimate.[cut away of white coated scientist listening intently to a test tube, withsame ambient noise for voiceover] PJ: Michel Serres (1997, 16) sees thescientific expert as a fraught listener, increasingly sensitive to noise, fluctuation,and error:

[intercut Dom’s office]

DM: The climb towards mastery is a promotion to anxiety and absenceof peace. The first stroke goes awry. The thundering passage, the flashingedges are a tremble. The bankside undulates. Mastery probably does comedown to this pathetic doubt.

SCENE 11

[‘church’ interior. JE in front of stained glass]

JE: The thundering passage is also called on in a spiritual sense. Almost400 years ago, George Herbert defined prayer as ‘the reverse of thunder’.The absence of noise allows rhythm to emerge. But the relation betweenrhythm and noise has one further twist. Communication experts havenoted a phenomenon called stochastic resonance, whereby noise in asignal may actually be helpful in allowing its rhythm to be detected(Morse and Evans 1996). Consider a clean perfectly rhythmical signal thatdoes not quite reach the threshold needed for detection. When the signalbecomes ‘noisy’, the peaks of the signal may reach the threshold, allowingdetection. The concept of noise is thus not antithetical to the notion ofrhythm; the two may require one another. This insight would certainlyseem to resonate with Lefebvre’s original observations on the complexityof urban rhythms.

SCENE 12

[title card – Finale]

[Barber institute stage. Establishing shot of JE & PJ walking onto the stage]

[cut to two shot on the stage]

JE: And so to the finale! The elevating of atmospheric CO2 since 1959.Where else should we look for an example that demonstrates the massiveintertwining of human and natural rhythm? Notice the seasonal variationsin CO2 due to intra-annual variations in levels of photosynthesis. These



cyclical rhythms occur every year. Notice the linear rhythm of exponen-tially accelerating elevation due to anthropogenic emissions of CO2 intothe atmosphere.

[close up JE]

JE: ‘Rhythms imply repetitions and can be defined as movements anddifferences in repetition. Yet, there are two forms of repetition: cyclicaland linear. Inseparable even if the analysis must distinguish and separatethem . . .’ (Lefebvre 1996, 231).

[cut to reverse angle, JE]

JE: Here they are . . . The sound of climate change – what Paul Viriliocalls the greatest accident of all time. Let us listen to him on this point:[close up] PJ: The time of the finite world is beginning . . . generalhistory has been hit by a new type of accident, the accident in itsperception as visibly present – [cut to reverse angle] a cinematic andshortly digital perception that changes its direction, its customary rhythm,the rhythm of the ephemeredes or calendars – in other words the paceof the long-time span, promoting instead the ultra short-time span(Virilio 2007, 24–25).[JE sitting at the piano]JE: Listen to the building wave of noise . . . The thundering passage . . . Doesit make your heart race? Does it sound like the finiteness of the world,spoken through the erasure of all duration and rhythm? The foreshorteningof the globe sounded through the ultimate socio-natural rhythm. (Lefebvre1996, 132)?[cut to music & graph, then end credits]

Short Biographies

James Evans studied Geography at the University of Oxford beforemoving to the University of Birmingham for Masters and PhD. Followinga short stint as an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) post-doctoral fellow, he became a lecturer at Birmingham, moving to theUniversity of Manchester in 2007. James’ research explores the politicsof environmental governance, focussing on ecological planning, urbansustainability and questions of interdisciplinarity. Along with Phil Jones,he has written a textbook on urban regeneration in the UK that iscoming out in May 2008.

Phil Jones undertook degrees in history at the Universities of St.Andrews and Leicester before switching to geography for a PhD at theUniversity of Birmingham. He moved from a teaching contract atBirmingham to a lectureship in 2005. An urban geographer, his workapproaches the city from a variety of angles, from the politics of regen-eration through to bodily engagements with the urban and questions of



performativity. He is also interested in a variety of methodologicalapproaches including video and geographical information systems. Alongwith James Evans, he is currently working on an ESRC-funded researchproject ‘rescue geographies’ mapping local understandings of an areacurrently undergoing regeneration.

Note

* Correspondence address: James Evans, School of Environment and Development, Universityof Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. E-mail: [email protected].

References

Gandy, M. (2005). Cyborg urbanisation: complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city.International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, pp. 26–49.

Hinchliffe, S., and Whatmore, S. (2006). Living cities: towards a politics of conviviality. Scienceas Culture 15, pp. 123–138.

Lefebvre, H. (1976). The survival of capitalism. London: Allison and Busby.——. (1991). The Production of space (trans. by D. Nicholson-Smith, originally published in

1974). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.——. (1996). Writings on cities (trans. by E. Kofman and E. Lebas). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.Luna, B., Leopold, L., and Langbein, W. (1966). River meanders. Scientific American 214, pp.

60–70.McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: the extensions of man. New York: McGraw Hill.Morse, R., and Evans, E. (1996). Enhancement of vowel coding for cochlear implants by

addition of noise. Nature Medicine 2, pp. 928–932.Serres, M. (1997). Genesis. Michigan, MI: University of Michigan Press.Swyngedouw, E. (1996). The city as hybrid- on nature, society and cyborg urbanisation.

Capitalism, Nature, and Socialism 7, pp. 65–80.Virilio, P. (2007). The original accident. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Links

There are a surprisingly large number of artists and scientists who areinterested in the interface between these two areas of work. This list oflinks is purely a taster of the wealth of stuff that is out there, but it showshow people are trying to break down the barriers between two modes ofrepresentation and practice that are so often seen as diametrically opposed.Some of it is wacky, some of it is obscure, but it is all thought-provoking,and builds on some of the issues concerning science and representationthat our video grapples with.

http://dataisnature.com/Dataisnature is a weblog of personal and recreational research containinginformation and links covering the following topics – Robot Art, Algorithmicand Procedural Art, Computational Aesthetics, Glitch Aesthetics, Vj’ing,Video Art, Computational Archaeology and similar subjects. This websitehas a whole host of interesting art-science crossovers.

http://dataisnature.com/



http://www.infection.bham.ac.uk/BPAG/Dub/origin.htmlGenomic Dub celebrates recent successes in the field of genomics andevolutionary biology. It highlights common threads that link current scientific,artistic and social issues with the past (e.g. the Darwins’ involvement inthe anti-slavery movement), and to explore the potential for encodingmacromolecular (protein and DNA) sequence data into dub music.

http://www.platdujour.co.uk/Matthew Herbert is an artist who produces work on the industrial foodcomplex. The Truncated Life of a Modern Industrialised Chicken usesfield recordings from 30,000 broiler chickens in one barn, 24,000 oneminute old chicks in one room of a commercial hatchery, 40 free-rangechickens in a coop, one of those chickens being killed for a local farmers’market and its feathers washed and plucked, a dozen organic eggs fromtescos, and a 2.0-l 21-cm pyrex classic bowl made in the UK.

http://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/news/archive/list/display/?id=120508&month=july&year=2007Ansuman Biswas and Jem Finer of the Pogues are artists who work at theintersection between science and art. The two artists ‘play’ Jodrell Bankradio telescope, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. See an edit of thehour-long performance here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98Nrux8O5kk&feature=related

Further Reading

A number of books have been written on the historical relations betweenart and science, especially focusing on the classical and renaissance periodsbefore modern disciplines emerged, and art and science became seen asantithetical. These are interesting, but recently some texts have been publishedthat look specifically at collaborations between artists and scientists.

Wilson, S. (2002). Information arts: intersections of art, science, and technology.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.This book gives an overview of artists who use concepts and research frommathematics, the physical sciences, biology, kinetics, telecommunications,and experimental digital systems such as artificial intelligence in theirwork. The book also explores theoretical writings and emerging scientificand technological research that is likely to be culturally significant in thefuture. Usefully, the book provides lists of resources including organizations,publications, conferences, museums, research centres, and Web sites.

Strosberg, E. (2001). Art and science. New York: Abbeville Press.A more traditional look at the use of art in science and vice versa.An entire academic field is devoted to the study of ‘science communication’.This mostly means the ways in which science is represented in newspapers

http://www.infection.bham.ac.uk/BPAG/Dub/origin.html

http://www.platdujour.co.uk/

http://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/news/archive/list/display/?id=120508&month=july&year=2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98Nrux8O5kk&feature=related



and political speeches, and how scientists might better communicate theirresults to the public. From a whole field we have picked three things thatprovide a brief and interesting introduction to the topic.

Weigold, M. (2001). Communicating science. Science Communication 23(2), pp. 164–193.This is a good summary of the field that is shorter than any of themultitude of books that have been written on the subject.

Science and the Public: A Review of Science Communication and PublicAttitudes to Science in Britain.Based on research sponsored by the Office of Science and Technology andthe Wellcome Trust, this report brings together research that maps theprovision of science communication with research exploring public attitudesto science, engineering and technology. It is intended to start a consultationprocess within the science communication community regarding prioritiesfor future activity.The report is available at: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_wtd003420.html

Ashlin, A., and Ladle, R. (2006). Environmental science adrift in theblogosphere. Science 312, p. 201.A brief but interesting look at environmental science on the Internet.

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_wtd003420.html

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Towards Lefebvrian Socio-Nature? A Film about Rhythm, Nature and Science

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