From the balcony to Caminito: an ongoing rhuthmanalysis 9781839099731

Table of contents :
From the Balcony to Caminito: An Ongoing Rhuthmanalysis
Abstract
Genealogical Note: Rhythmanalysis before Henri Lefebvre
Rhythmanalysis Exercise in Buenos Aires
Fragment: La Boca
First Movement
Second Movement
Third Movement
Second First (and Last) Movement
From Rhythmanalysis to Rhuthmanalysis
The Wandering Rhuthmanalyst
The Rhuthmanalyst's Situated Knowledges
Ethics and Politics of Rhuthmanalysis
Acknowledgements
References

Citation preview

FROM THE BALCONY TO CAMINITO: AN ONGOING RHUTHMANALYSIS Salome´ Lopes Coelho

ABSTRACT The work of Henri Lefebvre Rhythmanalysis, Space, Time and Everyday Life (2004) is generally known as the original proposer of rhythmanalysis, inspired by the last chapter of Gaston Bachelard’s book La dialectique de la dur´ee (1963), entitled ‘Rhythmanalysis’. Nevertheless, it was the Portuguese philosopher L´ucio Pinheiro dos Santos who developed the notion of rhythmanalysis. In this chapter I address this episode of the genealogy of rhythmanalysis aiming to contribute to a broader understanding of its context of origin. I also present fragments of a rhythmanalysis exercise developed in Caminito, Buenos Aires, as part of my research in the field of art studies. Following a pre-Platonic notion of rhythm (Benveniste, 1966), I draw on those fragments as much as on the reflexive confrontation of rhythmanalysis with feminist and ch’ixi epistemologies (e.g., Haraway, 1988; Rivera, 2018) in order to propose what I come to call rhuthmanalysis. ´ rhuthmanalysis; ch’ixi epistemology; genealogy of Keywords: Rhuthmos; rhythmanalysis; situated knowledges; travessia

GENEALOGICAL NOTE: RHYTHMANALYSIS BEFORE HENRI LEFEBVRE ´ Until I came across the book Filosofia do ritmo portuguesa (Cunha, 2010), Lucio Pinheiro dos Santos was just the name of a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Porto, on whose studies Bachelard (1963) based the chapter ‘Rhythmanalyse’ in his book La dialectique de la dur´ee. It is through this chapter Rhythmanalysis Research in Urban Sociology, Volume 17, 27–45 Copyright © 2022 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1047-0042/doi:10.1108/S1047-004220210000017002

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that we get to know about the existence of a work titled Rhythmanalyse published by the Society of Psychology and Philosophy of Rio de Janeiro in 1931. The fact that Pinheiro dos Santos lived in Rio de Janeiro when he sent his set of essays to the French philosopher may explain why there was doubt about his nationality. Pedro Baptista (2010) conducted detailed research into the life and work of Pinheiro dos Santos, having accessed and published unedited documents despite not being able to find the set of essays which Bachelard refers to nor to confirm the existence of such a publication or publisher. Based on a letter dated around ´ 1936, which Pinheiro dos Santos sent to Alvaro Ribeiro, Sobral Cunha states that no rhythmanalysis essay was ever published. In that letter, Pinheiro dos Santos writes: ‘[the] work I must publish on “rhythmanalysis” is not the kind of work a publisher seeks’ (Cunha, 2010, p. 32). It is understood that a copy of Rhythmanalysis was sent along with this letter, an updated and thorough work on several courses which Pinheiro dos Santos taught in 1929. According to Sobral Cunha, there were two copies of two volumes under the title Rhythmanalysis. One of the copies was sent to Bachelard although it was never found in his estate, nor was it in the estate of friends or intellectuals with whom Pinheiro dos Santos shared formulations of the text on rhythmanalysis. The other copy was burned by the rhythmanalyst’s widow, Maria Correia da Costa: It was to the rhythm of a catastrophe that the widow of the fearless Luso-Brazilian rhythmanalyst finally handed over his estate to the fire at the end of the fifties in front of the National Press. (Cunha, 2010, p. 14)

This action might have been a sublimation ‘of pain and indignation in the face of a society unable to recognise the value of one of its best’ (Domingues, 2000, p. 24). The intriguing story of the unsuccessful quest for the missing copies is so seductive that we could remain caught up in it, but let us not forget that there are some contents of Pinheiro dos Santos’ rhythmanalysis that are accessible. According to the philosopher, rhythmanalysis consists of a new paradigm of knowledge based on the analysis of rhythmic phenomena at the scales of matter, life and spirit. Sant’Anna Dion´ısio understands that ‘the essential vector’ of Pinheiro dos Santos’ philosophy arises from the belief that ‘the key to explaining everything that exists and transits would solely be the law of rhythm’ (Cunha, 2010, p. 36). Not only do Pinheiro dos Santos and Lefebvre agree on the enormous ambition of creating a new field of knowledge and to find a new science based on the analysis of rhythms, but also they coincide with the absence of a legacy permitting development of a systematised methodology. Rhythmanalysis, therefore, has the quality of a project, desire and ambition which is only slightly realised in the limited available material by Pinheiro dos Santos or in Lefebvre’s proposals. In order to understand the rhythmanalysis project and to critically consider contributions to the development of the scientific field and methodology which Pinheiro dos Santos and Lefebvre promised to inaugurate, it is essential to undertake concrete translations of it.

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A significant number of scholars have been exploring ways of operationalising rhythmanalysis specially since the contribution on rhythmanalysis by Lefebvre was published in 1992, and its translation into English in 2004. There is an increasing interest in rhythmanalysis within multiple fields such as geography, music and sound studies, dance and performance, or in the study of contemporary urban spaces and everyday life (e.g., Barretta, Miramontes, & Zorrilla, 2013; Charalampides, 2017; Chen, 2015; Christiansen & Gebauer, 2019; Crespi & Manghani, 2020; Edensor, 2010; Lyon, 2018; McCormack, 2013; Rodrigues, 2016; Stratford, 2015). My approach to rhythmanalysis is developed in the field of art studies understanding art and literature as ways of analysing and experiencing rhythms. Moreover, along with other scholars (e.g., Revol, 2015), I see the artistic practices as privileged ways to restitute the experience of rhythms and its analysis. Additionally, the operationalisation I propose calls upon perspectives from the global south, a gesture shared by other studies (e.g., Barletta, 2020). Specifically, this chapter undertakes a reflexive confrontation of rhythmanalysis with theorisations, epistemologically rooted in Latin America, critical of Eurocentrism.

RHYTHMANALYSIS EXERCISE IN BUENOS AIRES The first approaches to the practice of rhythmanalysis ‘in a living temporality’ (Lefebvre, 2004) I carried out were in the Argentine city of Buenos Aires. In the first phase, I proceeded by immersing myself in a determined daily life, adopting a regime of attention, perception and action that would allow me to get out of the usual rhythms while seeking to experience them immediately and closely. This stage also pertained to the training, education and exercise that the rhythmanalyst must carry out, according to Lefebvre, so as to modify their perception of the world, time and environment, i.e., to be able to tune in to rhythmic dimensions that deter their rigid perception. At this stage, there was no previously specific spatiotemporal framework, and I proceeded more experimentally, mainly by d´erive (about the affinity between Situationist International and rhythmanalysis, see Revol, 2015). This drift led to the subsequent identification of a spatiotemporal framework for rhythmic analysis: Caminito, in the neighbourhood of La Boca, due to the rhythmic disruptions I immediately identified. There followed moments of searching for the order underlying the rhythms, an operation that coincided with several returns to the place that I intended to rhythmanalyse. Finally, I sought to restore the rhythmanalysis exercises. I use the word ‘exercise’ since it conveys the idea of practice and body, which is, from the outset, important to highlight as well as its association with the plethora of entries to a topic or different exercises to approach and practice the same theme, etc. The form of restoration of the rhythmanalysis exercise took on a role as important as, or even more important than, the practical development of the methodology itself, and it showed the limitations of only using a written description to merely account for rhythms. In addition to writing (on site or afterwards), I made audio recordings and used a montage of ‘visual notes’,

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mainly composed by photos that I later assembled (montage). Regardless of the criteria chosen to restore the experience, rhythmanalysis revealed itself to be fragmentary, disarticulating the transparency of the world as a possibility. The fragments make sense in the relationship they establish between them, but, above all, with other absent fragments, i.e., out of frame. The organisation of the fragments, in restoring the rhythmanalysis, is also rhythmic in the sense that it is a possible and provisional configuration of elements in constant transformation. Not only is fragmentation found in the ‘objects’ of writing, but also in the writer. The rhythmanalyst is ‘simultaneously inside and outside’ the rhythms s/he analyses, says Lefebvre (2004, p. 27), one is touched and transformed by touching the rhythms and transforming them. We can, therefore, say that the rhythmanalyst abdicates a certain sovereignty of the self as a principle of unity. It is not a unique ‘I’ that lives the rhythms and writes about them; the ‘I’ that experiences is not exactly the same ‘I’ that writes, not only because all writing is mediated by memory (i.e., marked by a split between this ‘I’ that writes and the other ‘I’ that was and no longer is) but also because this ‘I’ disintegrates into the relationships it establishes with the worlds and their rhythms. Fragment: La Boca This exercise exists in several times and movements around three axes: (1) the historical time, (2) the time of the initial abandonment to the rhythm and (3) the time of the pursuit of rhythm. First Movement Surrounding the mouth of the River Plate, the port city of Buenos Aires has been expanding. In La Boca (literally, ‘The Mouth’), spatialities and temporalities coexist in a constant flow as it is one of the main tourist attractions in this city. Caminito, located there, is purported to be one of the 10 most photographed places in the world. I visited Caminito during my first week in Buenos Aires. Researching the city history, I learnt of a reference book Mysterious Buenos Aires by Manuel Mujica L´ainez (2005). Based on historical documents and fictional writing, the book tells the story of the city’s origins, starting in 1536, the year the city was first founded by Pedro de Mendoza with the creation of the fort of Santa Maria de los Buenos Aires. The Querand´ıes, then inhabitants of the banks of the River Plate, resisted the colonisation of the region; the envoy of the Spanish crown was forced to retreat. More than four decades passed and Juan de Garay founded the city for the second time in 1580. The first foundation became provisional; the founded city ceased to exist as such. A second foundation, more violent and powerful, was established; however, the shaky beginnings and strong resistance remained in memory. In the origins of the city, there is therefore an existence and a resistance, a being and a disappearance, a return and a reaffirmation. There is hence certain originary spectrality in the city of Buenos Aires. As a gateway to the southern territories, the port of Buenos Aires has become the centre of commerce in the region for centuries. Like other port cities, Buenos

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Aires is a huge and unique footprint of the multiple passages it is comprised of. The present of the city is the most visceral image of the past, resorting to Walter Benjamin’s words (Didi-Huberman, 2002). Of all these passages, those of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century stand out, when, between 1862 and 1914, Buenos Aires multiplied its population by eight. La Boca, due to the proximity of the port where immigrants disembarked, became their place of residence, especially in the so-called conventillos, large houses with several rooms where countless people with low economic resources lived, and still live. Some of these conventillos, painted in bright colours, stand along Caminito in La Boca. Perhaps it was in La Boca that vagamundo, ‘wanderer’, a character from Mysterious Buenos Aires, arrived. Fugitive from love, disillusioned with this enemy that will surely reappear, wanderer knows that all that remains is to leave once again, ‘to walk again, to roam, and so on’, anywhere in the world, in his floating robes and with his tough virile hands (L´ainez, 2005, p. 238). The story goes that this character roamed all around the world and saw so many things and seasons that his life is measured in centuries, leading us to wonder what he might not have seen. He wandered so much that he confuses regions, years and episodes. The wanderer is a permanently displaced person, always on the verge of arriving and leaving – moved by love who in each geography and time takes different forms, a survivor who, somewhere at this moment, continues walking. Uprooting is a condition of the port, at least upon arrival – which always bears the possibility of departure. Space for circulation and of margins, of contradictions and exchanges, social contrasts and fluctuating working conditions, opposites entering an unstable balance, the port is the place where the individual becomes prismatic, like the space itself that welcomes and rejects him or her (Dalbosco, 2019, p. 41). Tango, music that is born on the banks-margins of the river (and also social margins), finds its poetics in the port, that of sadness and that of celebration gathered under the designation of melancholy, understood by Victor Hugo as the pleasure of being sad, as mentioned by Dulce Dalbosco (2019, p. 41) in her study on the poetics of tango. The wanderer is possibly a tango dancer, this dance that, before having lyrics, was just music and choreography; milongueros, milonga dancers, say that in order to learn how to dance tango well, you must first learn to walk well. Who better, then, than the one who has traversed the world for centuries? The 1926 Caminito tango (music by Juan de Dios Filiberto) is inspired by La Boca Caminito, but its lyrics (by Gabino Coria Peñaloza) were written on the subject of Caminito de Olta, in the province of La Rioja. The music and lyrics point in different directions, both referring to a caminito (path) and neither of them being the path it claims to be. Second Movement Caminito is so crowded and noisy – there is so much expressive intensity – the perception of danger of being stolen is so present that it is difficult to not want to leave right away. It is a Sunday afternoon in October, springtime, and the sun is

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not very strong. The path (‘camino’ in Spanish) deserves its diminutive – the suffix -ito means ‘little’ in Spanish as it is so short and narrow. Nowadays, its main entrance is what was then considered the ‘back’ of the path. The old entrance is flanked by a huge building with maritime motifs, as is true of other buildings in the area (see Fig. 1). A suitably dressed couple dance tango in a setting created by a circle of curious tourists, Maradona peeks from one balcony, Pope Francis from another one, and a huge sign painted in fileteado (a painting technique from the port of Buenos Aires) below the Havanna brand faces long queues waiting to be photographed, Mafalda by Quino, Boca Juniors, mate, folklore and handicraft from the north of Argentina everywhere. The old conventillos were transformed into museum houses whose content is the same merchandising as in any other stores with the exception of others selling more expensive craft objects and which are larger than the rest. None of this is Caminito, but actually a street next to it, with which Caminito itself is confused (a mistake that I made for a long time). The restaurants with their tables on the street create a narrow passage, along which you can walk, not without constant deviations from people coming from the right, others who stop suddenly to take pictures, to listen to the live music from one of the restaurants or to watch a painter at work. I hurriedly crossed the path, thinking that the only attraction was the strong and bright colours of the sheet metal houses to dwell more on what surrounded this path: the river, the abandoned factory, the motifs of boats on the buildings and the colours of the buildings (Benito Quinquela Mart´ın Museum, a school and De la Ribera Municipal Theatre). I learn through the colourful museum who the artist Quinquela Mart´ın is. The metal of the old bridge and the cranes strike me more than the bright colours. Quinquela painted the landscapes of the port (smoky factories and colourful boats) and the hard work involved (male figures bent by the weight of the coal). At that time, however, there were no factories in that area, nor were there any boats that were not in dark tones. ‘Not only did Quinquela painted the landscape, but also transformed it’, says the guide of the painter’s house museum, but this statement may be taken to the extreme. It is not clear whether Quinquela was an invention of La Boca or whether La Boca was an invention by Quinquela. It is said that the artist started to paint the houses with bright and vivid colours; the idea spread that it was the remaining ink from the paintings of small boats. However, the boats did not actually have those bright colours, except in his paintings. Nowadays, a tour guide of Caminito says that the sheet metal houses have the colours we see because they were painted with the materials left over from painting the boats. Caminito, that small street and museum, is in fact Quinquela’s creation, whether or not painted in the colours of the boats; it is the recovery of an abandoned train track, transformed in the 1950s into an open-air museum made up of sculptures, ceramic murals and engravings (many with port motifs) that Quinquela himself selected. What used to be a wasteland, completely degraded then, was recovered by the neighbours and turned into a pedestrian street, which was the setting of theatre plays for years.

From the Balcony to Caminito: An Ongoing Rhuthmanalysis

Fig. 1.

Photographs of Caminito and surrounding streets. Source: Author’s own images.

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Third Movement I get off the bus at the Caminito stop and immediately detect the smell of choripanes – bread with sausage, a popular food sold on the street. It is almost 1 p.m., the sun is strong and several people descend at the same stop. This time I decide to walk attentively, stop when relevant and go back where necessary. The railway traces are really present in Caminito, the result of an evident effort to reveal the ancientness of the relatively new. Black and white photographs of the port in its early stages coexist with the phosphorescence of the colours of the corrugated metal sheets and of the merchandising items. Everything is organised so that, at the level of the eye, the Caminito motifs prevail: predominance of colours (blue, yellow, red and green) and the ‘Argentinity’ trade based on the axes of tango, football, religion and gastronomy, especially meat, dulce de leche (milk caramel) and mate. With each step, Caminito seeks to build and maintain itself as a Caminito in a colourful, noisy and vibrant saturation. Above eye level, it is possible to see derelict houses in shades of brown, or an elderly woman at her bedroom window, where clothes dry on a line. Therefore, anachronies referring both to the origins of the port and to a past prior to Caminito, a past of wastelands, destruction and poverty, coexist in that spatiality. An old conventillo, transformed into a place to visit open to the public, sits alongside a conventillo where people still live today. One of the poorest places in the city has become one of the main tourist destinations in the city (and in the country) where people still live in conditions not very different from the past. In the surroundings, which I could only access by car – as it is considered to be too dangerous – the colour is lost but the houses’ corrugated metal sheets are still present. Next to Caminito, less than 20 meters away, life conditions can be similar to those of the port’s beginnings. On the other side of the railway line, where Caminito is now, and where almost nobody dares to go, the few restaurants that exist are empty, the streets almost deserted and the colours are diluted in subtle and discreet shades. This ‘outside’ (not only geographic and economic but also ‘temporal’) of Caminito is what defines it as a unique route and attraction for foreigners and nationals from other regions in Argentina. Only this time can I see the works of art in Caminito, those chosen by Quinquela and those exhibited by street vendors, as well as tiles of the Virgin Mary. I thought that the interest of such place was in the conventillos, in their colours; I was unaware that it was a museum created by Quinquela, let alone that Caminito was only a 100-meter passage, the streets around it being forks of that central path. Caminito, the school, the museum and the floor in front of it (see Fig. 2), created by Quinquela, bear bright colour footprints of Quinquela’s passage throughout the neighbourhood, at the mouth of the river. The water does not move, the river looks like an oily mirror of floating bottles, droppings on the surface and fish swimming. According to a report from Blacksmith Institute (2013) and the Sightsmap (2020, which uses data from a geolocation photosharing site owned by Google), only two steps separate one of the 10 most polluted places in the world from one of the 10 most photographed places in the world.

From the Balcony to Caminito: An Ongoing Rhuthmanalysis

Fig. 2.

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Frame from a video that I made in La Boca. Source: Author’s own images.

Second First (and Last) Movement Buildings looking like boats, stuck on land while yearning the sea; the river from which the neighbourhood unfolds is the same from which it departs because it is so polluted; the once modern railways are now a mark of antiquity; the wasteland transformed into the most important tourist area; the inhabited conventillos placed next to the conventillos that transform what once was poverty into an amusement park theme; the colours chosen by Quinquela, flanked by the immaculate white of the Proa Museum, flanked in turn by an abandoned factory with anonymous murals painted on its deteriorated walls; tango for export, choreography produced for and open to the world, coexisting with its ‘arrabal’ roots – border area, on the river banks (and urban margins) related to ‘crime’ and ‘evil life’, where tango was conceived, being thus initially forbidden and secret music (Cecconi, 2009). The fascination of such a small place as Caminito, simultaneously projected outside of it, always displaced, converges in its contradictions, in its conflicts in balance and in the tension of multiple temporalities, spaces and energies converging there; in polyrhythms whose relations create a network of tenuous balance, as if floating in the river, always in transit. Perhaps it was from Caminito that the wanderer has left and will always continue arriving.

FROM RHYTHMANALYSIS TO RHUTHMANALYSIS From the approaches to rhythmanalysis carried out in Buenos Aires, from the complete surrender to rhythms to the rhythmanalysis exercise performed in La Boca, as well as a reflexive confrontation with theorisations critical of Eurocentrism, epistemologically rooted in Latin America, methodology dimensions

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stood out needing reconfiguration. Below I will address such reconfigurations, resulting from both rhythmanalysis exercises and theoretical dialogues. An overview of studies on rhythm over time reveals that systematised theorisations on rhythm emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century, when rhythm begins to attract attention in philosophy, science and arts (Crespi & Manghani, 2020; Golston, 1996; Henriques, Tiainen, & V¨aliaho, 2014; Michon, 2005, 2019). The interest related to rhythm as a scientific and philosophical subject was triggered by the transformation processes of modernity, even being understood as ‘the general interpreter of modernity’ (Guido, 2007, p. 8). It is precisely in the context of criticism of modern society, the guiding thread of Lefebvre’s thought, that the rhythmanalysis proposal develops. But what kind of modernity is this? Several authors have denounced the Eurocentric character of modernity, as summarised in an overview by Zulma Palermo (2013), criticising the fact that its explanation is based exclusively on intra-European phenomena, as if Europe and its history had been generated by themselves without any colonial interaction with other continents since the fifteenth century. In addition, the intellectual elaboration of the modernity process produced a specific perspective and a way of creating knowledge imposed on all other rationalities and knowledge production from various parts of Europe and of the world. It consists of a hegemony articulating the categories of race, work, space and large human groups for the benefit of capital and its holders. To this analysis, Mar´ıa Lugones (2008) adds the gender category which some decolonial authors have neglected. In turn Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2018) draws attention to the omission of the preceding Indian, indigenous and African theories, as well as the expropriation of their ideas for the source of the ‘Western temples of knowledge’ (Rouch, 2003, p. 101), for its own benefit as symbolic, cultural and academic capital. Instead of an epistemological articulation, in which all available knowledge and multiple ways of knowing are recognised and valued, whether acknowledged or not, Eurocentrism subsumes everything into a single way of knowing and living. To what extent are rhythmanalysis and the fact that it has developed at the core of the critique of modernity shaped by a Eurocentric view? Although Lefebvre’s interpretation of modernity partially escapes the Eurocentric tendency to forget the Earth and nature in the capital/labour dialectics, as stated by Coronil (2000), what about other dimensions of Eurocentrism? How can we develop a rhythmanalysis outside the Eurocentric framework? Using several critiques of modernity, their epistemological, ontological, political and ethical implications, and resuming Lefebvre’s proposal, I hereby aim to contribute to add complexity to the conceptualisation and practice of rhythmanalysis. I propose a first detour from the methodology, initially reflected in a displacement within language itself – that of replacing rhythm with its Greek ancestor rhuthm´os. It is not merely wordplay, the discourse acts on the named or even creates it, insofar as language is not a mirror in which reality is reflected; it acts performatively. The displacement of the name itself seeks simultaneously to reaffirm the concept of rhythmanalysis and to transgress it. This displacement ‘leaches and animates an old name’ – although rhythmanalysis is still a young methodology with the aim of giving it a new resonance, without ignoring that ‘the

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new is just an effulgent reappearance of the old’ (Bernardo, 2019, p. 64). The linguistic displacement I propose is a conceptual one, contributing to the criticism of the dominant definition of rhythm. Thereby I highlight and give voice to a desire shared by several authors (e.g., Meschonnic, 1982; Michon, 2005; Sauvanet, 1996) to draw attention to the different uses of the concept and to a ´ return to a pre-Platonic conception of rhythm, identified by Emile Benveniste (1966) in Probl`emes de linguistique g´en´erale. Benveniste found that rhythm was used in pre-Platonic philosophy, poetry and prose to refer to a mobile reality observed at the moment of its flow, naming a form as it appears in the eyes of the observer, in the particular moment and movement with which it takes that form. Rhuthmanalysis proposes to deviate from the exclusive conception of rhythm as a temporal organisation of the elements, without nevertheless neglecting such an organisation, focussing instead on the analysis of rhuthm´os. Instead of a rhythmanalysis, hence I propose to exercise a rhuthmanalysis. The Wandering Rhuthmanalyst On several occasions, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010, 2015, 2018) analysed some of the more than 300 images of The First New Chronicle and Good Government, a 1,000-page letter written in the seventeenth century to the Spanish crown by Felipe Guam´an Poma de Ayala, also known by the surnames Huam´an Poma, Wam´an Poma or Waman Puma, derived from the Quechua words Waman and Puma, Quechua being a language spoken by more than two and a half million people in the Andean regions of Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. One of the images analysed is reproduced here (Fig. 3), which reads in large print ‘Indian. Astrologer. Poet who knows’, and in smaller print ‘about the sun and moon ring, eclipse, stars, comets and time, Sunday, month and year of the four winds to sow food, since antiquity’. Rivera reads in the figure not only an indigenous ‘walker, philosopher, scientist – Astrology was a science at that time’ – but also ‘a farmer who sows food’ (Rivera, 2018, p. 208). I propose from this image, and from Rivera’s reading of it, that the rhuthmanalyst is also a wanderer who is in contact with the land, who knows, respects and is integrated into the cosmic cycles. Even though Lefebvre presents the balcony as a paradigmatic way of simultaneously being inside and outside the rhythms, being possibly the best position to grasp a rhythm and to be grasped by it (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 27), we may question that assumption. Because Lefebvre’s balcony is located above the street, on an upper level, permitting panoramic observation, we may argue that there is risk of misunderstanding not only above but also upper, perhaps based on an unquestioned privilege. We may start by asking: who can analyse the rhythms of Rambuteau Street from their own houses? Who can afford to live in such an expensive city? Who can inhabit an apartment with a balcony in Paris? What is the influence of those perhaps unrecognised privileges and their multiple resonances in developing a methodology? The panoramic analysis of rhythms is still complex, even detailed – providing an essential contextual perspective however, although it may reinforce the visual dimension of the analysis as some authors criticised (Crespi, 2014; Revol, 2015). Furthermore, the panoramic analysis

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Fig. 3.

Drawing by Waman Puma and my copy. Source: Author’s own images.

promotes a remote, frontal and focal vision. Despite Lefebvre’s indication that the ‘auditory and cerebral apparatus’ play ‘the primary role (…) in the grasping of rhythm’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 69), what are the sounds that reach that balcony? Which sounds do we grasp or not being in that balcony? Rhythmanalysis from the balcony must be coupled with a ‘wandering rhuthmanalysis’ which descends from the balcony, ascends, walks, changes perspectives, accesses different sides and sounds of the same things, stops and accelerates. It is not just about a displaced view and listening, but also, above all, a listening and a ‘view in displacement’ (Didi-Huberman, 2002, p. 75), like that of the wanderer that never ceases to leave and arrive, in the book by Mujica L´ainez. The walk is not understood here as a literal and linear movement of walking involving the feet, displacement from one point to another, but as a gesture of crossing – travessia – and contacting with the vital rhythm, a topic I have developed elsewhere (Coelho, 2020). Thus understood, the rhuthmanalyst also includes the peripheral, unfocussed, blurred and unclear vision, as well as placing their skin alongside the other sense organs.

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The ‘Indian, astrologer, poet who knows’ by Waman Puma carries, in his left hand, a quipu, which is a set of colourful wool threads with different knots used since pre-Incan times to record events, products and little-studied rituals (their meanings still unknown). What Waman Puma takes in his hand is, therefore, the very image of the enigma, of the indecipherable records for many, of the language shared by some, inaccessible to others. The rhuthmanalyst walks hand in hand with the mystery, carrying it, bearing it, and by means of that, s/he also reveals the impossibility of understanding everything and of comprising everything, hence the necessary fragmentation in the restitution of the rhythmanalysis exercises. As I sought to enter the image by Waman Puma, adding the gesture of the hand to that of the eye, I started to draw it in my notebook, aiming at opening other ways of understanding and attending to the image. It would be a question of thinking about the image with the hand, starting from an image other than itself, displacing its sense, despite the aim of copying it as faithfully as possible. These pretensions were quickly abandoned as, after finishing the drawing, there was nothing significantly different or new. I put my drawing aside for months. Later, when I returned to the drawing, it struck me that the feet had been poorly copied. It was not surprising, though, since drawing feet has always been difficult for me. In this context, this constraint seemed more significant. What is this walk that is done on three-toed feet, on what even appears to be three feet instead of two? In the drawing as in the crossing/travessia, the feet are not the basis, since the rhuthmanalyst’s walk is done in several ways. The basis of the walk is instability itself, indefiniteness, transfiguration. It is the dissolution of form and the contact with the flow in constant circulation, the vital rhythm. The shape of the feet dissolves as the walk does not entail the way of walking, but it is a metaphor of dislocation, displacement, movement – crossing/travessia. The interval between the drawing and revisiting it allowed me to access information that I did not have before. The gesture of drawing, therefore, brought a different thought of the image and the idea that the rhuthmanalyst resorts to the drawing, and other modalities of knowledge not limited to a pre-defined academic code, as a way of thinking. Simultaneously, the form of restitution of rhuthmanalysis experiences is closely related to the artistic disciplines and the underlying experimentation. Therefore, rhuthmanalysis is part of a family of practices linked to literary and artistic creation, and developing, documenting and restoring its experience also require means traditionally associated with art (Revol, 2015). The Rhuthmanalyst’s Situated Knowledges When I resumed drawing my copy, I also realised the absence of something significant: the landscape. I unwillingly erased what is seen in the background, the Andes mountains range and the ground. In my recreation of the drawing, I removed the wanderer from his context, and by doing so, the dimension that had

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been erased stood out: the Andean spatiality, which marks his worldview based namely on the complementary duality between high and low, the sky and the earth, the moon and the sun. A wanderer thinks within a living temporality and also through a living spatiality. The thinking of the wanderer is situated, insofar as his or her gestures are also situated. In my copy, there is nothing in the wanderer’s landscape that identifies where s/he is, except for the stars. We refer to the stars, as we would the wind, the rivers, the flora or the waves of the sea. The rhuthmanalyst is attentive to his/her body, being a kind of metronome that records the pulsations of the world, as Lefebvre said, not only does s/he mark the regularity of the beats but also guides him or herself through the stars, the vibrations, the currents, etc., s/he listens both to regularities and irregularities, the attention involved is not only numerical and paced but also seismic and volcanic. The rhuthmanalyst knows the surroundings because s/he is made of it, and it is made of him/her. The rhuthmanalyst bases his/her analysis on the non-separation and mostly the non-hierarchisation between the human and other forms of existence, rather affirming the existence of continuity among the biophysical, human and supernatural worlds, as I will discuss below. A fundamental point of rhuthmanalysis is, therefore, situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988, 1991). The rhuthmanalyst not only thinks about space-time being there, space-time also ‘thinks’ through the rhuthmanalyst and becomes a gesture, words. Space, its materiality, concreteness and the way of organising it are not mere results of a previous way of ‘being’ expressed in this context. The rhuthmanalyst knows and fosters ways of being-thinking-moving firmly situated in the ‘here and now’ of his land, of his material location on the planet (Rivera, 2018). To Haraway, situated knowledge implies making expressive the multiple affections of a specific territoriality, in four simultaneous planes: epistemological, ontological, ethical and political. Epistemologically, situated knowledges entail an effort to think beyond the objective-subjective duality. Ontologically and ethically, situated knowledges seek to give …a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others’ practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions. (Haraway, 1988, p. 579)

When situating knowledges, the rhuthmanalyst does not assume space or place as essential; s/he takes into account that these are historical creations that should not be assumed or naturalised, but which should be understood as resulting from the multiplicity of relations of place and power. Likewise, knowing the variable conceptions of time, the rhuthmanalyst is receptive and attentive (in a creative way) to the multiple temporalities of the same moment. Situated knowledge is supposedly neither neutral nor ignorant of the power dynamics which traverse, build and update relationships, nor does it seek to nullify the fact that the body that investigates is a gendered, racialised body and so forth. In addition to objective-subjective duality, the rhuthmanalyst suspects and seeks to disarticulate dualities such as active-passive, object-subject, abstractconcrete, poetry and cultivation. Rivera (2018) tells that in Aymara and

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Quechua, poetry and cultivation are sometimes expressed by the same word. Theory and practice, knowledge and doing, intellectual work and manual work, hand and eye, nature and culture, reason and emotion, academic knowledge and that of the ‘people on foot’ (Rivera, 2018) are not separated in the rhuthmanalyst’s work. Its epistemological and ethical premise is not of separating these elements, but of inhabiting the fertile and energetic contradiction of the tensions between them. Instead of dualities and binarisms, Rivera (2010, 2018) proposes the Aymara concept of ch’ixi, around which she develops an epistemological proposal with which the rhuthmanalyst dialogues. Ch’ixi usually refers to the colour grey resulting from the juxtaposition in small dots or spots that can be seen closely in two opposite or contrasting colours. This, like other Aymara notions, corresponds to the idea that something, at the same time, is and is not: ‘a gray ch’ixi colour is and is not white, it is white and it is also black, its opposite’ (Rivera, 2018, p. 69). The power of ch’ixi is that of the undifferentiated which conjugates opposites without annulling or resolving them; therefore, it is not a matter of hybridising concepts or binarisms, but inhabiting the discomfort and tension between both and their aporias. The rhuthmanalyst inhabits precisely the antagonistic and insoluble multiplicity of what is and what is not simultaneously: s/he traverses and is traversed, s/he is present in a time that breaks out in multiple temporalities and s/he walks in a landscape that is simultaneously transformed and transformative of the rhuthmanalyst’s interior landscape. Rhuthmanalysis participates in, and seeks to contribute to, a way of producing knowledge from chuyma (Rivera, 2018), an Aymara word that simultaneously refers to the lung, heart and liver. This knowledge comprises not only breathing, care and attention to the other but also a dose of ‘liver’, i.e., of anger, of a certain energetic impulse. The rhuthmanalyst’s thinking involves not only these bodily dimensions and the metaphors implied in them but also other organs, those of other people. The rhuthmanalyst’s knowledge does not cultivate its solitary, lucid, rational being and that of the eye (nayra) (Rivera, 2018, p. 121), but it rather conjugates it with the group (with whom the rhuthmanalyst shares instead of competing) and which is made from the liver, lung and heart or rather livers, lungs and hearts. The lung refers, in rhuthmanalysis, both to its own breath (in the sense of persistence, of resistance) and to others’ lungs with whom we relate; the liver refers to collective anger, the heart to the sharing of emotions and mutual care, and thus rhuthmanalysis breathes not only individually but also collectively. In Spanish, there is the word ‘corazonada’, a noun that refers to a hunch, a suspicion that something is going to happen, a strong intuition. To think with chuyma is also to be open to ‘corazonadas’, to knowledge which is not exclusively cognitive, which does not proceed by deduction or induction, but to adopt the internal movement of things, inserting ourselves into a mobile reality and intuitively capturing a sense (of direction, and also of meaning), constantly changing.

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Ethics and Politics of Rhuthmanalysis What is the ethical and political dimension of rhythm and the rhuthmanalysis proposal? Certainly there are several answers to this question; I am hereby proposing one of them. The rhuthmanalyst recognises the multiplicity of ways of doing, thinking, relating, building and experiencing the biological and the ‘natural’. S/he starts with an understanding, similar to, but not limited to, the Andean worldview, of non-separation – and consequential non-hierarchy – of human/ inhuman, nature/culture. Rhuthmanalysis questions the Western belief system, the cradle of rhythmanalysis, making it dialogue with other cosmologies and with the conception of so-called inanimate beings – such as plants, animals, minerals or immeasurable material entities – not as mere objects, but as forms of existence. The existence of a relationship between human life and the vast plurality of beings – living or not [where the dead are explicitly included] – that exists in the ‘immeasurable cosmos: animals, plants, substances, sites and landscapes, rocks and metals, the sky and its myriads of worlds, the deep holes and underground rivers of the unknown interior of the planet’ is considered as such (Rivera, 2015, p. 210). One of the rhuthmanalyst’s ethical and political fundamentals is, as such, the critique of the humanist paradigm that places the Earth at the centre of the universe, the human being at the centre of the Earth and nature at the bottom of the hierarchy. The rhuthmanalyst seeks not only to criticise hierarchies, places of privilege of human beings over all things and the privilege of some humans over others but also to think outside the paradigm itself, despite its Western hegemony. In this sense, elements in the cosmos will not be understood as manipulable by the human element constituting it. Human action does not take place on supposedly inert, passive matter, which is ready to be manipulated. ‘Matter is not stupid’, as Federici (2016) says, it acts, reacts, resists, avenges… matter breathes and acts based on a dynamic of continuous reciprocity. Not even language can be determined as a differentiating – and hierarchising factor of the human aspect, although the question of language has always been used to demonstrate human superiority, which would justify animal use and abuse (Cragnolini, 2012). ‘All philosophers have stated that the animal is deprived of language’, highlights Derrida (2002), and they did so by creating that word ‘animal’. Since the inception of humanity, the human being has given himself the word ‘animal’ to ‘identify and recognise’ himself, with a view to being what is said to be ‘men, capable of responding and responding in the name of men’ (Derrida, 2002, p. 62). The ethics and politics of rhuthmanalysis thus reside in the questioning of the conception of the cosmic and human worlds as separate, the political consequences of which are now clearly visible in the environmental emergency we live in and in its intrinsic relationship with extractive, ‘developmentalist’ and ‘integrationist’ neoliberalism, a device of world domination for the purposes of the colonial Eurocentric vision that conceives the European as advanced/ modern/civilised and the indigenous as backward/pre-modern/uncivilised. *

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Pinheiro dos Santos and Lefebvre were, as we have seen, eager to inaugurate a new field of knowledge, rhythm being the protagonist, leaving their followers with the challenging task of developing and materialising the refulgent methodological orientations that they advanced. Based on the rhythmanalysis exercise I developed in Buenos Aires, as well as on the critical theorisations of Eurocentrism, I seek to contribute to such methodological development by proposing the following – following because it follows, but following mainly because the answer is yet to come. I suggest using the designation rhuthmanalysis with the view of returning to the pre-Platonic understanding of rhythm and appropriate methodological uses. As for forms of restitution of rhuthmanalysis exercises, in addition to considering that artistic forms of expression – such as drawing and literature are those that best allow developing and accounting for the analyses, I believe that the fragmentary character is transversal to this restitution. Therefore, the restitution of rhuthmanalysis proceeds in fragments. Being dialectical, rhuthmanalysis, as Lefebvre foresaw for the analysis of rhythm, does not seek synthesis, it is ch’ixi as it inhabits contradictions and tensions without seeking to resolve them. The rhuthmanalyst settles precariously in a mobile reality, adopting a sense of constant change and also capturing it intuitively. This is possible because the rhuthmanalyst does not take a single and fixed viewpoint; his/her knowledge is wandering, made from chuyma, and it is not even strictly human (but also not transcendent). Rhuthmanalysis also thinks from the plant, the stone, the animal and the dead. One of its fundamental ethical and political dimensions lies precisely in the non-separation and non-hierarchisation of the human/inhuman, nature/culture. The experimental and kaleidoscopic character of rhythmanalysis requires an intense permanence in it and also requires that we walk along it, like wanderers, so that it unfolds, just as Caminito in La Boca demands that we traverse it and be traversed by it so that it reveals itself.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was part of my PhD research funded by FCT – Fundação para a Ciˆencia e Tecnologia (Portugal) through the doctoral fellowship SFRH/BD/52274/2013.

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