In moving into this territory, several contributors argue that at any one point in time, societies are composed of a combination of overlapping rhythms. Instead of characterizing wholesale shifts from one temporal regime to another (e.g. from a traditional, habit-ridden mode to a modern society of endless flexibility), they notice that affluent countries continue to differ in their daily rhythms, their scale, flow and compositions. The French continue to indulge in long meals and Mexicans take their siestas, while Americans snack quickly and on the move. Italian children stay up late into the evening, whereas their German neighbours go to bed early. Eating, sleeping, working and many other daily practices follow significantly different rhythms, which cannot be ordered according to a scale of development or modernity. The diversity in the ordering, sequencing and frequency of everyday practices cannot be reduced to differences in class, culture, urbanism, economic organization or evolutionary stages. Rather than supposing some dramatic divide between consumer society and an earlier phase in which life was less complicated, more relaxed or more structured, the common challenge is to detail multiple scales – short-term cycles, seasonal patterns and processes that unfold over generations as well as weeks and days – and to describe episodes and experiences of chaos and frenzy alongside those of predictability and routine.
- Making time
Popular and academic accounts routinely assume that experiences of time – and especially those of being hurried and harried – are shaped by external ‘forces’. In so doing they overlook the extent to which temporalities are themselves continually reproduced, enacted and transformed through the sequencing and timing of daily practice. This is an important shift in perspective in that it suggests that consumption – the arch-villain in critiques of hurriedness – contributes to the making of time, and is not simply a drain, a sink which takes time away from living. Or, to put it more precisely, consumption, broadly defined as a bundle of various practices and the use of things, constitutes an arena in which daily life is woven together, often imperfectly, and sometimes with tears and breaks, but always in ways that configure and reproduce its temporal texture. In elaborating on this insight, the chapters collected here clear the way for further analysis of the temporal and spatial profiles of what people do and how these intersect to produce what Henri Lefebvre (2002 [1961]) referred to as the ‘pulse’ of society.
We are not the first to notice that temporal rhythms are actively reproduced in daily life. Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, originally published in 1992, completed a life-long exploration of everyday life that had started in the 1940s, which took him from an analysis of daily practices to their spatial and, eventually, their temporal dimensions (Lefebvre 1991, 2002 [1961], 2004). For Lefebvre, rhythms operated along several axes: they could be ‘secret’ (physiological rhythms; the said and the non-said) or ‘public’ (ceremonies, calendars); they could be ‘fictional’ (verbal rhythms, dreaming); and they could be ‘dominating–dominated’ (made up, with an effect beyond the rhythms itself). But he was especially interested in what made a rhythm tick as regulated time, its repetitions, its evolution and its more cyclical or more linear movement. In attempting to dissect the dimensions of rhythmic movement Lefebvre characterizes coexisting pulses and comments on how these modulate and amplify each other to produce a powerful temporal ‘texture’. These textures are depicted as forms laid down, if not imposed, by social agencies and acted out by a populace unwittingly caught up in this enfolding mesh. The city, in particular, was singled out for disciplining its inhabitants into a rhythmic flow of walking and living (see also Moran 2007). There are similarities between Lefebvre’s account of ordering rhythmic regimes and that of Michel de Certeau, who also emphasizes the realm of the everyday as a central site of social reproduction (Certeau 1984 [1974]). One key difference is that Certeau takes this to be a terrain of potential and actual resistance and subversion, rather than the arena of more passive compliance depicted by Lefebvre.
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Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann and Richard Wilk