Lu Bao: Rhythm Analysis: A New Horizon of Temporal Critique in Foreign Marxism
Time is as ancient as space, and human cognition and discourse concerning it have flowed unceasingly. However, as described by American cultural historians Stephen Kern or David Harvey, human perceptions of space and time underwent a fundamental change at the beginning of the 20th century. It was as if all the achievements of modernity consciously converged to break through long-practiced social cognitions and embodied experiences regarding the structures of time and space. In recent years, the social sciences have treated time (including space) as a core subject of research, because people generally feel a scarcity of time and, simultaneously, suffer from the "stalling" panic and "falling behind" anxiety brought about by rapid technological development. A chaos has appeared in the temporal perception of human everyday life; the catastrophic consequences of an infatuation with speed and the anxious neurosis of fearing being eliminated by the times have torn apart the civilization of modern society as a whole. The fanatical cult of speed received explicit praise in the Manifesto of Futurism; as that manifesto stated, it is the dynamics of the machine age that transform energy into speed, leading to the ultimate consequence of self-destruction. The historical nature of temporal rhythms must be re-examined. Do practice and theory reveal differences in temporal rhythm between the pre-modern, the modern, and the hyper-modern? Given that capital modernity and science and technology have developed so rapidly that they have reached the level of what Schumpeter called "creative destruction," [1] how can we escape the subsequent social frenzy, vertigo, and life anxiety to seek a better hope for the future? Without understanding the changing relationship between temporal modes and social structures, we cannot understand modernity and its complex contemporary processes of aberration. Marxism, as a social critical theory of modernity, must respond to the aforementioned theoretical difficulties.
The "rhythmanalysis" (Rythmanalyse) that the French theorist of the critique of everyday life, Henri Lefebvre, focused on constructing in his later years, is a creative philosophical concept that uses Marxist social critical methods to answer the question of the abstraction and politicization of time during the process of social transformation. This is a new field of discourse for Western social critical theory, yet it has not received sufficient attention from the domestic academic community. Of course, due to the complexity of the problem of time itself, in this article, we are not limited to the theory of rhythmanalysis proposed by Lefebvre. Rather, we attempt to place this analysis of temporal rhythm within the overall scope of Western Marxist critical theories of time. Taking the political functions of temporal rhythm and the accelerated changes of social rhythm in the contemporary era as the central axis, we re-examine social critical theory to provide a Marxist explanation for the current state of acceleration in the rhythm of social life.
I. The Genealogy of Rhythmanalysis: Concept, History, and Theory
In modern times, although figures such as Marx, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Lukács, Gaston Bachelard, Marcuse, George Gurvitch, Guy Debord, Paul Virilio, Hartmut Rosa, and Masakazu Yamazaki have all successively touched upon the issue of "rhythm," the thematization of the important concept of "rhythmanalysis" was first centrally expounded by Lefebvre—the French Marxist philosopher, theorist of the critique of everyday life, and pioneer of urban Marxism. He emphasized that rhythmanalysis is a touch-up and addendum to the production of space. [2] "This work shows why Lefebvre is one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the 20th century, while also proving that his critical project transcends dogmatism and contains a potent, intoxicating vision. Through rhythmanalysis, he demonstrates how to understand the relationship between time and space within the totality of everyday life." Overall, for Lefebvre, rhythmanalysis is the final movement of his critique of everyday life; in his later years, he profoundly reflected on the mechanical picture of existence and the political consequences of the rhythm of everyday life under the conditions of modernity. Rhythmanalysis is not a mystical personal experience or poetic meditation. On the contrary, as a method of social critical theory inherited from Marxism, rhythmanalysis attempts to conduct a critical analysis of the deep mechanisms of manipulation and control of time and space by capital-dominated technological modernity in late capitalist society.
What is rhythm? Simply put, rhythm refers to the movement, unfolding, and vibrational forms of life in time and space. "The organization of all movement in time is called rhythm. Rhythm is a perception of time; it is a reflection of the continuity, orderliness, and regularity of objective phenomena. Rhythm unfolds in social time and space." At the macro level, it shares a family resemblance with Nikolai D. Kondratieff's "Long Wave theory" [3] and Fernand Braudel's concept of the longue durée. At the micro level, it is a biological or physiological concept inseparable from the body. In a fundamental sense, it concerns the question of the plurality of time.
However, within the discourse of philosophy, rhythm is a philosophical concept inseparable from historical time. Rhythm concerns not only the dynamic process of historical time but also our understanding of modernity. In his essay "What is Enlightenment?", Kant defined Enlightenment as the use of one's own intellect to emerge from a state of human immaturity. It was precisely through this concept that modernity gradually ceased to be conceived in philosophy merely as a new historical period or a new form of historical time, but rather as a world-historical project. This is because our consciousness of historical time and the regularity and progressiveness it manifests are an "invention" of modern society. In pre-historical societies, cyclicality predominated, and time did not form a distinct profile in human consciousness. In historical societies, history was endowed with significant meaning; history became a unified, totalized history and gradually formed a "totality" consciousness (zongti yishi), wherein the contradiction between the abstract homogenization and the differentiation of history became prominent.
We cannot discuss in detail here the philosophical investigations of time by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Paul Ricoeur, and others. To summarize, both Hegel and Marx attempted to transcend Kant's transcendental view of time. However, Hegel eternalized the "now" through Absolute Knowledge or the Absolute Spirit; the movement of history culminated in the highest spiral of the Spirit. Hegel had to face the problem of the objectivity of time as a natural condition; his subjectivist spiritual consciousness of time as interiority was detached from the dimension of social practice. Historical materialism, as the "science of history," provided a scientific explanation for the problem of historical time. In Marx’s view, historical time is neither eternal nor a neutral natural existence; on the contrary, history is created by humans with actual life through the practice of material production. However, this creation is not arbitrary but is a free creation built upon the foundation of the productive forces and material wealth previously created by all of humanity. In other words, historical materialism resolved the dilemma in the interpretation of historical time faced by classical philosophers such as Kant and Hegel. It transformed Kant’s idealist transcendental form of time into a socio-historical transcendental, ensuring the objective precondition of historical existence and the agency of humans in creating history, while simultaneously overcoming the dilemma of Hegel's linear metaphysical teleology of historical time and the transcendence of time-consciousness.
The issue of historical time is not the core of our discussion here, because we believe the problem of rhythm is not a simple problem of historical time. Taken as a whole, rhythm is the cadence of the unfolding, development, and change of human social life within multi-dimensional space. It has three dimensions: first, rhythm represents cosmic or natural temporality; second, rhythm concerns the experienced or phenomenological duration (durée) or personal time-consciousness; third, rhythm implies an intersubjective or social perspective, symbolizing the diversity of time-consciousness and the social forms produced through the struggle against conflicting rhythms. The distinction between these three dimensions primarily originates from the French sociologist George Gurvitch. Gurvitch argued that time is not only the time of the spirit, but also social, biological, cosmic, linear, and cyclical. Linear time replaced cyclical time by means of abstract temporality constantly displacing absolute space, although the latter never disappeared. This thought of Gurvitch profoundly influenced Lefebvre, who emphasized in Critique of Everyday Life (Volume II): "The critique of everyday life studies the problems, troubles, and consequences produced by the interaction of linear time and cyclical time in modern industrial society." Gurvitch believed that the bourgeoisie maintains its power and status precisely through efforts to control time. "The bourgeoisie produced an illusion that 'advanced time' (chaoqian shijian) occupies a dominant position. The bourgeois ideology of pursuing progress and that relatively high-speed rhythm of action and mobility resulted in this fast pace not leading to future-oriented action, but rather oscillating between progress and lag, prosperity and crisis." Using a "dialectical transcendentalist method," Gurvitch questioned and criticized Bergson's view of duration, intending to liberate time from objectivism and subjectivism to establish a multi-level method of temporal analysis. Although Gurvitch's research on the levels of social time was of pioneering significance, he did not continue to think deeply about or criticize the reasons why the linear view of history and time occupies a dominant position in modern society; these were tasks completed by Lefebvre over decades of critiquing everyday life.
Bergson’s view of time was always an object of Lefebvre's critique. In fact, Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and the concept of the "moment" (l'instant) were partly derived from Bachelard and his critique of Bergson’s durée. Lefebvre himself admitted that he benefited greatly from Bachelard's criticism of Bergson. Bachelard, in turn, traced the origin of the concept of "rhythmanalysis" to a 1931 work by the Brazilian philosopher Pinheiro dos Santos. Bachelard utilized the entire "knowledge" of the new sciences—based on relativistic physics, Einstein’s critique of simultaneity, and quantum physics—to refute Bergson’s doctrine of duration. However, he also inherited Bergson’s critique of rationalism and scientific positivism. This constituted a critique and obstruction of the Enlightenment view of progressive science since Bacon, as well as the closely related linear progressive views of time and history. Bachelard believed that Bergson was "wrong to find the essence of time in duration. The essence of time exists in the moment." In Bachelard’s view, duration is something innate that the intellect imposes upon itself, and rejecting this innate thing is crucial for acquiring the ability to tap into the "obvious facts of the moment."
Thus, Bachelard proposed his own "rhythmanalysis." In his view, "duration flows" is an illusion and a trick, a mental trap. Our world is discontinuous. The continuous flow of duration is merely a mental construction. Time and history are not continuous, linear durations, but are full of ruptures, gaps, jumps, rhythms, nodes, and heterogeneity. "Matter... is not only very sensitive to rhythm, but persists tenaciously at the level of rhythm, and the time it uses to develop certain details is a fluctuating time." Bachelard believed that duration (la durée) is essentially dialectical, formed on the basis of rhythms and fluctuations; they are material, biological, and psychological. Bachelard’s goal was to understand the complexity of life through the plurality of durations, each having its specific rhythm. Later, in his poetic analysis of elements such as water, fire, air, dreams, and earth, Bachelard deeply explored the "poetics of the metaphysics of the moment" and the "multiple variations of discontinuity," enriching the "basic materials" of how people experience rhythm. This perspective of Bachelard also had an important influence on Lefebvre.
If Marx and Heidegger helped Lefebvre break the absolute view of time and space held since Descartes, Newton, and Kant, then Nietzsche played an important role in Lefebvre's breaking of dogmatic Marxism and historical determinism. Nietzsche’s influence on Heidegger, Leo Strauss...
Leo Strauss, Georges Bataille, Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze all exerted a crucial influence; Lefebvre was no exception. Lefebvre believed Nietzsche was "the one who finally opened the way for difference, since the same cannot affirm itself without the other; the other reveals itself through the same, and contains itself through identity. The struggle for difference has only just begun; it will not end with history." It is evident that the "Übermensch" spirit, which Nietzsche used to critique and negate the status quo with near-frenzy, provided a vital spiritual force and theoretical pillar for Lefebvre to break free from Christian ideological control and to wage an uncompromising, fierce critique of dogmatism and bureaucratism. Lefebvre synthesized Bachelard's thought with Nietzsche’s historical view of eternal recurrence, emphasizing the unity of continuity and discontinuity in history, as well as the unity of linear development and cyclical recurrence in time. For him, the "moment" and "rhythm" represent the rupture of continuity or linearity. Lefebvre consistently emphasized the importance of irrationalist factors such as cyclical biological rhythms, sexuality, and poetic creation (poiesis), highlighting the immense subversive power that festivals and carnivals hold against an everyday life characterized by total technical organization and bureaucratization. Lefebvre emphasized the need to maintain cyclical biological rhythms to resist mechanical repetition because life-time has become an object of total colonization by capitalism; time outside of productive labor has become the space for capital to realize the valorization of surplus value.
In fact, György Lukács recognized this in History and Class Consciousness. Building upon Marx's concept of reification and Max Weber's concept of bureaucratic "rationality," he identified the organized management of time and space by the logic of capital and its attendant political consequences. "The principle of rational mechanisation and calculability [must] embrace every aspect of life," and connections between people are "mediated increasingly through the abstract laws of the mechanical process." "The compulsory consciousness of modern time is not only manifested within the scope of labor and work as measured by productive forces; it has occupied all fields of life." People's life-time increasingly loses its qualitative, variable, and fluid nature, curdling into a reified space that can be divided into homogeneous segments. Even the soul and psychological characteristics of the worker become reified due to the promotion of "Taylorism" in the labor process. We can see this even more clearly in the Frankfurt School. Dialectic of Enlightenment critiqued the latent enslavement of the human being by advertising and the culture industry: the entire inner life of the people has been turned into a "sensitive instrument... the most intimate reactions of human beings have been thoroughly reified." Furthermore, in Marcuse's view, because the rationality of science and technology produces a new form of social control alongside manipulation, the power of technology and scientific rationality invades everyday life—including society, culture, and thought—so that everything human becomes "one-dimensional." The diverse or even conflicting rhythms of everyday life are homogenized into the monotonous linear rhythm of industrialized production.
This monotonous rhythm of industrial production increasingly dominates the general spectacle of social life. The true profundity of Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist International, lies in his observation that the abstract time of commodity production is the total inversion of time in the sphere of human development, while consumption time becomes a "pseudo-cyclical time" that dominates everyday life. Although this time is the homogenized time of exchange value, it masks itself in the forms of leisure, festivals, and so on, to satisfy people's false needs for individualization. Yet, this pseudo-cyclical time eventually makes everyday life "grow dull." "Pseudo-cyclical time" is actually an imitation of natural time; it is time transformed by industry, the "time of the spectacle, functioning both as the time of image consumption in the narrow sense and as the consumption-image of time in its overall extension." This is precisely the typical characteristic of the consumer society: through the constant production and reproduction of the spectacle, it produces a "pseudo-nature" in which leisure and vacations become the primary images of that pseudo-nature. This is an era without festivals; the festive rituals within the cyclical time of pre-modern society have been replaced by the false festivals of the pseudo-cyclical era. Debord sharply revealed the mechanism of the spectacle behind it: "It is the spectacle portraying itself, reproducing itself to an even denser degree. That which is presented as real life proves to be merely a more real 'spectacular' life." Debord ultimately chose the artist's dérive [4] and the détournement [5] of psychogeography as the path to sublate alienation and achieve a revolution of everyday life, thereby exposing the fetishism of the spectacle existing within daily life and constructing authentic life situations within playful, revolutionary, and negative contexts. Although Lefebvre collaborated closely with Debord and others, he did not subscribe to the revolutionary strategy of the Situationist International, considering it too abstract, leaning toward psychologism and artistic imagination while lacking practical feasibility.
This may be related to Lefebvre’s vigilance toward and critique of the psychoanalysis represented by Jacques Lacan. Lefebvre attempted to replace psychoanalysis with rhythm-analysis, thereby making the latter into "a science, a new field of knowledge." Lefebvre believed that psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists tend to "reduce capitalist alienation to a single sexual misery, thus ignoring its relationship with the state." They gradually turned the unconscious and sexual theories into a "standard ideology and a mythology of desire." Lefebvre disagreed with the Freudian school's doctrine of the unconscious, which carves the human body into fragments—such as the eyes, mouth, anus, and penis—ignoring the totality of the body. He argued that attributing physical and psychological problems arising under modern conditions solely to a pathological imagination is incomplete, if not erroneous. He believed "rhythm-analysis" could replace psycho-analysis because it is more concrete, more effective, and closer to the pedagogical methods of use (the appropriation of the body, i.e., appropriation as a spatial practice).
Overall, for Lefebvre, rhythm-analysis is a theoretical tool for studying the ebb and flow, as well as the harmonious coexistence, of cyclical and linear rhythms in everyday life. This theory holds that the deep mechanism of control lies in the technical shaping and abstract domination of labor production time rhythms and everyday life rhythms, thereby achieving the goal of micro-power governance over life and the body. In its pursuit of maximizing speed and efficiency, capitalism allows rationalized calculation to gradually invade everyday life, leading to the splitting of time into life-time and social labor-time. The industrial mechanical rhythm of modernity strips the natural cyclical rhythm from the life-world. The capitalist production process controls the rhythms of the body and realizes surplus value through the organized management of people’s daily life rhythms and the reproduction of labor power. It subjects space and time to homogenized calculation, fragmented division, and hierarchical isolation, ultimately reproducing the social relations of capitalist domination. Rhythm-analysis is a mediating means of understanding time and using time to resist time itself. Lefebvre believed that the capitalist discipline of everyday life rhythms is not only the reproduction of class, but also the reproduction of an abstract system built upon the body and its life-time. The rhythm of capital replaces basic historical rhythms; modernity produces everything on an almost "planetarization" scale, only to destroy it through war, progress, and speculation. As Lefebvre stated in The Right to the City, as time is increasingly abstractly divided, measured, and bounded, any political agenda must undergo a re-evaluation of time.
II. The Politics of Time: From Pre-modern Time to Modern Capital Accumulation Time
The re-evaluation of time is an impossible task. Here, we merely attempt to examine the changes in the nature of time during the historical transition from the pre-modern and medieval periods to modernity from a political perspective. Without understanding this shift, one cannot understand the social temporal structure of modernity, nor truly identify the secret of the domination of modern capital logic. In pre-modern societies, human life-time was primarily shaped by natural rhythms, characterized by cyclical natural time. Since the birth of Christianity, and especially as the Protestant ethic and its rationalizing logic took deep root in the life-world and leisure culture, "the individual's sense of own-time was constrained by the cycle of festivals in the Christian calendar as well as by the rhythms of labor required by social custom and agricultural production. This sense of self-time at that time fully determined the generally valid social time." However, since entering modern society—as noted by Lefebvre, Lewis Mumford, Pierre Bourdieu, and Giddens alike—time itself has increasingly separated into labor time and leisure time, and the linear time of the industrial age has gradually replaced the cyclical time of the pre-capitalist agricultural era. The transition from pre-modern time to modern time—that is, abstract, quantifiable, and homogenized exchange time—reflects the politicization of the nature of time itself and the routinization of the industrial labor production process, which accelerates social time rhythms. However, this shift in the nature of time did not happen overnight.
(1) The Industrial Clock: The Transition from Religious Providential Time to Industrial Labor Time
Jacques Le Goff, the French Annales School historian, pointed out that with the increase in the monetary economy, international trade, and merchant activity in the 12th and 13th centuries, time was organized much like money. Systems of bookkeeping, bills of exchange, and the management of monetary transactions required increasingly precise and standardized measurement of time. With the arrangement of time in monasteries and the appearance of town clocks, a usable and visible frame of reference was created. Time calculation reached new heights of reliability and accuracy. Of course, Le Goff was no technological determinist. He stated frankly that the fundamental reason for the shift from medieval time to modern concepts of time should be understood from the perspectives of social history, economic history, and the history of everyday culture, rather than the invention of clock technology.
With the emergence of urban society in the 14th century, the measurement of time itself was completely transformed to adapt to urban economic development and the necessity of urban labor conditions. The duration of workers' labor time, or the working day, became the central content of the struggle between the working class and the urban merchant class. Thus, the time marked by town clocks was not accidental or marginal, but a regular, standard time more reliable than cathedral bells. It was only in the 17th century, after Huygens invented the pendulum, that the mechanical clock became a reliable measurement tool and the concept of abstract mathematical time was publicly constructed. "This was not the time of disaster or festivals, but everyday time, a temporal network that framed and restricted urban life." It offered a better way to measure the workload of workers, serving as a major sign of the process of secularization. Traditional concepts of time gradually dissolved, replaced by a notion that "the idler who wastes time and does not measure it is no different from a beast, unworthy of being valued as a human being: he falls into a state almost lower than a beast. Thus arose a humanism based on the precise calculation of time." Time was no longer a gift from God, no longer the time of sin and grace, and no longer something that could not be sold. On the contrary, in the dawn of the Renaissance at the end of the Middle Ages, these traditional taboos were broken. The "divine grace time" that belonged only to God henceforth became human property, and temperance became a primary human virtue. Only with the arrival of capitalism and the violent push of the Industrial Revolution for social mechanical inventions could time be precisely calculated by mechanical industrial clocks down to twentieths. Time could be transformed into money; at this moment, the temporal structure and spiritual attitude typical of industrial society appeared. The process of dismantling life-time and labor-time began, and the length of life-time became precisely calculable labor-time and profit-time according to the needs of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, in Le Goff’s view, the universalization of this time was not only facilitated by technological and economic development but was also related to the symbols of honor and power held by urban lords and monarchs. Consequently, urban time became state time, and the individual's daily life-time fell under the dominance of the "economics of time," with the machine acting as the conductor's baton for labor time in the machine age.
(2) The Tyranny of Abstract Time: Capital Accumulation and the Birth of Modern Disciplinary Society
As Marx stated in Capital and its manuscripts, the working class could only be tied to the machine as its appendage, stripped of safeguards and with rest time utterly depleted. By the late 19th century, productivity continued to rise, primarily benefiting from technological refinements and improvements in the organization of the entire production process, as well as the working class's gradual adaptation and submission to the rhythm of machine production. In this socialization process fraught with conflict and struggle, "industrial society established the temporal norms for regulating labor time within a precarious balance between the internalization of labor habits and the external necessity of social existence." Marx was the first to analyze and dissect the commodification and organization of labor time; social necessary labor time creates the value of commodities, which implies that time itself has become a commodity. The capitalist manipulation, segmented regulation, and appropriation of the worker's labor time became the secret of capitalist modernity. The social necessary labor time spent producing a specific commodity is the result of abstracting all specific concrete labor and labor time. The Canadian Marxist philosopher Moishe Postone argues that the origin of abstract time is closely related to the social reality constructed by the spread of commodified social relations; that is, the discipline of abstract time did not arise solely from the spread of quantitative clock systems but must be understood within the historical process of "new practices of social relation production." The struggle surrounding labor time and the length of the working day is a generalized expression of the struggle over wage labor in capitalism; it impels the social construction of the abstract time of human activity. This abstract time is not a subjective construction but emerged alongside the development of bourgeois rule and serves bourgeois interests. In other words, this abstract time is objective—a form of real coercion and abstract oppression. The rhythm of the worker's labor has been dominated by the rhythm of large-scale machine production—the rhythm of producing commodities—which is the rhythm of the mechanical system’s movement. Just as labor was transformed from individual action into an alienated universal structure of totality, the expenditure of time was transformed from a result of action into a normative measure for action.
Regarding the formation of temporal norms and discipline, the renowned British Marxist historian Edward Thompson, in his essay "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" (1967), utilized rich folkloric materials to demonstrate that: "the division of labor; the supervision of labor; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports—new labor habits were formed, and a new time-discipline was imposed." This new time-discipline was both a prerequisite for and a consequence of the formation of industrial capitalism. Time-discipline in the factory is a form of abstract time—so-called abstract time being continuous, uniform, homogeneous time that can be divided into equal segments. Coincidentally, time is precisely the primary tool Michel Foucault used to analyze the modern disciplinary society. Foucault argued that the bourgeoisie’s mastery and control over life-time was achieved through "prescribing rhythms, imposing particular occupations, and regulating cycles of repetition." Foucault pointed out that time in bourgeois society is divided and planned with extreme precision, presenting rhythms and laws of motion. The body adapts to specific labor gestures of high efficiency and speed with high precision, concentration, and orderliness. Ultimately, this formed the "docile object" [6] of discipline, cultivated by capitalism through the temporal rhythm of labor itself, internal operational steps, and shaping structures within the production process. Thus, by effectively segmenting and regulating the relationship between time and the body, it guaranteed the "accumulation of time, dedicated to the continuous growth of profit." This is a micro-physics of power, an invisible and silent tyranny. Later, Deleuze renamed this disciplinary society the "society of control." In a society of control, institutionalized control over individual and social life is continuous, boundless, and essentially round-the-clock. The mechanisms of command and the effects of normalization "check every nook and cranny" [7], functioning at all times and entering the human interior in an even more microscopic way—far exceeding the disciplinary power of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
(3) The Commodification of Time-Space: The Colonization of Modern Everyday Life
The rule of time constructed by the forms of commodity and capital is not limited to the production process; it gradually extends into all spheres of everyday life. In Marx’s era, capitalist modernity was in its ascendant phase, and productive labor time occupied the center of people's lives. Although rationalized calculation and organization had begun to permeate everyday life, everyday time itself did not attract much attention. At that time, the control, brutal suppression, and exploitation of workers by machines and capital-commodity production were merely a violent, overt rhythmic rule, still confined to labor production and the factory. However, from the late 19th to the early 20th century, the monotony and repetitive linear time and rhythm of this industrialized, rationalized, and modern everyday began to permeate and enter daily life. This point was later emphasized by both Lukács and Lefebvre. Lukács pointed out in History and Class Consciousness that due to the intensifying process of rationalization in capitalist production, "time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable 'things' (the reified, mechanically objectified 'achievements' of the worker, wholly separated from his total personality): in short, it becomes space." This mechanized labor became such an insurmountable everyday reality that people could only exist as onlookers of a reified system, becoming isolated atoms dominated by abstract laws of time. Postone noted: "The equality and divisibility of quantitative temporal units are abstracted from the sensory reality of day, night, and the seasons, becoming a quality of urban everyday life." According to Lefebvre’s view, alienation does not only exist in the sphere of labor production but begins to comprehensively cover the whole of everyday life, including politics, economy, culture, and society. Everyday life becomes monotonous, trivial, and bland, as it realizes a transformation from an era of relative poverty in material life to a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption where everyday life is comprehensively colonized and organized. This rule of linear temporal rhythm becomes an ideological state apparatus for the working class's self-understanding and self-discipline. People are ruled by a micro-biopolitics—namely, the hidden rhythms of mechanical repetition within alienated everyday life. Revealing this shift was a major theoretical contribution of Lefebvre’s life. The process of the gradual commodification of time and space "caused the most profound transformation of the everyday social life formed with the advent of capitalism. Combined, the two constitute the core phenomena of the organization of the production process and the workplace, as well as the core phenomena of how the intimate background of everyday life is experienced."
III. From Modern Society to Hypermodern Society: The Acceleration of Social Rhythms and Its Consequences
Modernity, through the continuous acceleration of the emerging technological revolution, has fundamentally reshaped the time of everyday life to such an extent that we must redefine the meaning of modernity. Redefining it is not about adding a more "fashionable" concept to the jungle of critical discourse, but rather because the speed at which modernity advances continuously breaks through the boundaries of human existential space, causing modern history to rush forward in an accelerated march; people must run constantly just to stay in the same place. This rhythm of time-space has created a new experience of life, over which theorists have engaged in complex debates. The promise of modernity, which used economic growth and acceleration as a pledge of freedom and liberation, has been replaced by infinite anxiety over a "world out of control." Postmodern discourse emerged precisely at this juncture. People have scrambled to use concepts such as post-industrial society, post-scarcity society, risk society, liquid society, and network society to define this massive change.
Contemporary Austrian sociologist Helga Nowotny points out: "Acceleration no longer simply means the speeding up of all social processes. Acceleration also promotes the formation of temporal norms of generally increased mobility, a mobility that is simultaneously the result of technical and economic progress produced to overcome the barriers of time-space distance in the transmission of goods, people, resources, and information... Mobility has become the socially dominant temporal norm." Harvey and Zygmunt Bauman have respectively provided profound analyses of this issue through "time-space compression" and "liquid modernity," both believing that the compression and "disappearance" of space are driven by the acceleration of time. However, because acceleration causes the "shrinking of the present," temporal rhythms have polarized in two directions. In the work of Hartmut Rosa, a prominent contemporary German sociologist and representative of the fourth generation of the Frankfurt School, on the one hand, the time of everyday life, life-time, and historical time have all become an omnipresent "simultaneity" (the instant), so much so that it seems as if society has entered a state of "frenetic standstill." On the other hand, the disorder, fragmentation, and contingency manifested everywhere in modern time have thoroughly exhausted the energy and sources of meaning for the utopian imagination of the project of modernity itself. Therefore, the continuous acceleration of modernity has not escaped itself to enter the postmodern condition, but has merely reached a "hyper" stage by completing modernity prematurely. We have moved from a modern society into a hypermodern society.
Contemporary French philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky points out that hypermodern society possesses significantly different characteristics compared to the forms of classical modern society. "Hypermodern society modernizes modernity itself, rationalizes rationality, and universalizes, privatizes, and intensifies competition." It is not the postmodern stage that prevailed in the 1980s and 1990s, but rather an entry into a higher stage of hypermodernity. It is not an alternative to or a sublation of modernity, but a redefinition of the era in which modernity has developed to the point of excess, surplus, and perfection.
The rhythmic model of hypermodern society is no longer the natural cyclical rhythm of the pre-capitalist agricultural society, nor is it the purely mechanical linear rhythm of industrial capitalist society; rather, it is the rule of "transformative rupture" or highly urgent abstract time in hypermodern or accelerated society. "Hypermodern society is such a society where people's experience of time increasingly becomes a universalized sense of severe anxiety and constantly intensifying time-pressure." Ultimately, it signifies the acceleration of civilization. The domination of urgency brought by this accelerated temporal rhythm is precisely the hallmark of "hypermodernity." If modernity was constructed by capitalism through the continuous increase of labor time and the critique of this increase, then hypermodernity is an era in which people generally feel that time is continuously decreasing. The internal mechanisms of this transformation are complex, while its social consequences are filled with uncertainty—to the point where people lose the direction of liberation politics, exhaust the meaning of spiritual culture, and even face the destruction of life itself.
(1) The Closed Internal Cycle System: The Three-Dimensional Acceleration of Technology, Social Change, and Everyday Rhythms
Contrary to the common view, technological acceleration is not the inaugural cause of social rhythmic acceleration. How modernity became embroiled in complex acceleration processes involves multi-dimensional kinetic mechanisms. The first dimension is technological acceleration, proposed by French urban theorist Paul Virilio; the second dimension is the acceleration of social change, revealed by German phenomenologist Hermann Lübbe and political scientist Matthias Eberling; the third dimension is the acceleration of the rhythm of everyday life, grasped by sociologist Georg Simmel and the critic of everyday life theory, Lefebvre. These three dimensions are not isolated or separated fragments but an internally connected whole. Technological acceleration, the acceleration of the pace of life, and the acceleration of social change form a closed internal cycle and self-driven system, fundamentally altering our forms of life practice, social structures, and modes of communication.
First, the acceleration of technology implies a technical leap in society from the pedestrian pace and horse-drawn carriages of pre-modern times to the industrial transport revolution, the information transmission revolution, and today’s artificial intelligence revolution. However, the acceleration of technology is manifested not only in what Virilio calls the increased speed of transporting people, goods, information, and military weaponry, but also in the quickened pace of social reproduction itself. The continuous shortening of socially necessary labor time in capitalist society is a direct means for capital to gain a competitive advantage and extract surplus value and excess profit. Beyond accelerating the speed of labor production, this must also find final realization through the cycles of exchange and consumption; the bourgeoisie will restlessly shorten the turnover time of capital circulation. This effort to reduce turnover time must be achieved through the constant acceleration of innovations in the mode of production, science and technology, and organizational management. Such innovation has overflowed from the economic sphere and permeated everyday life. In hypermodern society, the logic of temporal acceleration is situated directly at the core of the distributive patterns of modernity; success is defined as being faster, stronger, more efficient at work, and more competitive for resources. Therefore, the "dromological" [8] revolution proposed by Virilio is first and foremost a revolution in the speed of production—a revolution that has strode into the "digital revolution" and "intelligent revolution" of the 21st century.
Second, the acceleration of social change refers not only to the reorganization of work processes in increasingly shorter timeframes but also to the fact that practical activities—within the functional, value, and behavioral spheres respectively—define a certain temporal phase as the "contraction of the present." Consequently, attitudes and values, fashions and lifestyles, social relations and class groups, and forms of social environments and habitus are all changing at a continuously increasing rate. The primary cultural logic of Western modernity is the pursuit of the sum and depth of experiences, such as material abundance, the satisfaction of desire, wealth, prestige, and ambition. Within a human’s brief lifespan, what the world offers far exceeds what we can possibly experience; a contradiction arises between "world time" and "life time." Thus, accelerating the pace of life naturally becomes a strategy for managing the "desiring-machine." [9]
Third, the acceleration of the pace of life is manifested in both objective and subjective aspects. The objective aspect refers to the shortening or compression of behavioral events, such as an increase in the number or density of daily life units like eating, sleeping, walking, entertainment, and family gatherings. The subjective aspect refers to a continually intensifying sense of time scarcity, time pressure, and a stressful sense of oppressive acceleration. This is, in fact, the modern predicament faced by humanity—what Heidegger calls "mortals"—when confronted with an infinite world.
(2) The continuously accelerating social rhythm has exerted a massive and complex influence on human daily life and the spiritual world.
The ever-accelerating pace of life, coupled with the application of rapidly advancing science and technology in smart urban spaces, has led to a continuous weakening of the individual's internal power to resist risk. "Speed has replaced human relationships, efficiency has replaced quality of life, and frenzy has replaced leisurely enjoyment." Because we worship the "supremacy of the present," many fields are implementing this hyper-rhythm—a rhythm that dominates the corporate life-chain under globalized competition and the oligarchy of financial logic. There is a perpetual pursuit of more short-term benefits, doing the most work in the least time, and working without interruption. Consequently, this competitive race ensures that urgency takes precedence over importance, immediate action over reflection, and the local over the global. It also "creates an atmosphere of dramatization, persistent fatigue, and a series of psychosomatic disorders." For instance, the increasing feeling of physical and mental exhaustion, exacerbated obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression, anxiety, and the high prevalence of suicidal ideation are negative manifestations of human subjective psychological experience in this accelerated society. Meanwhile, sectors ranging from organic food, body care, hygiene and epidemic prevention, and leisure consumption to psychotherapy, psychiatric treatment, and emotional play-based education are proliferating rapidly, becoming new "bespoke" service sectors. They drive what Lefebvre and Baudrillard called the "consumption society" into a "hyper-consumption society." What people crave is no longer material commodities, nor symbolic sign-value, but rather the re-commodification of life itself, psychological security, emotional memory, cultural heritage, and identity. "It is both the misfortune of existence and the pleasure of change—a desire to continuously intensify and re-intensify everyday life. It is precisely this desire that sustains the gradual escalation of protectionist consumerism. This is perhaps the fundamental desire of the hypermodern consumer: to reawaken one’s own experience of time and to relive it as a grand adventure. Hyper-consumption should be thought of as an infinitely repeated emotional rejuvenation therapy."
(3) The end of sleep accelerates the destruction of human life.
Today, sleep is no longer a natural biological and physiological experience of humanity; it has become a variable function manipulated by capitalism, serving the dual roles of both instrumental rationality and physiological utility. In Capital, Marx elucidated in detail how the capitalist application of machinery oppresses the worker's body and spirit. Machines in the hands of capital break through the temporal and moral limits of day and night, as well as the natural rhythms of the worker's body. "It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over meal-times, incorporating them into the production process itself wherever possible," resulting in "the limitless extension of the working day, which threatens the very roots of the social life-force." Regarding the causes and consequences of sleep deprivation and destruction, the renowned contemporary American art historian Jonathan Crary has put forward the most radical view: a row of searchlights suddenly flares up at midnight but never turns off again, fixed into a state of permanence. This planet has been reimagined as a non-stop workplace or a 24-hour shopping mall, filled with endless commodities for your selection, giving you the illusion of a temporary diversion. In this state of sleeplessness, production, consumption, and disposal never cease for a moment, accelerating the consumption of life and the depletion of resources.
Through his theory of 24/7 late capitalism, Crary explains how the rhythms, speeds, and modes of increasingly intensified, timeless consumption shape human experience and perception. The disappearance of modern sleep and the acceleration of the rhythm of daily life are simultaneous symptoms of the birth of capitalist modernity. Capitalist enterprises have been radically transformed by the development of network information technology and smart technology, which has also brought about a more flexible, capillary mode of control. People's domestic spaces are occupied by various wireless networks and smart electronic products, such that time for rest in the bedroom and on the bed is completely swallowed up. The light of electronic screens and information pushed by various platforms bombard the cranial nerves, leaving a nervous system already exhausted from the day in a state of high excitement. The biological clock is destroyed, and insomnia follows. The necessity of purchasing globally popular sleeping pills is proof of this. "Billions of people are taking drugs to combat depression, mania, ADHD, or other ailments; the nervous systems of more and more people are being molded into a similar form." In Crary’s view, sleep is the unsubduable residue of daily life; he is concerned not with the "end of capital" but with the "end of humanity." Because the human biological clock is a form of regularity and rhythm by which life itself resists external risks and diseases, a disrupted biological clock inevitably brings about insomnia, fatigue, depression, low immunity, and even various diseases. "Capital has become an 'out-of-control behemoth,' not only murdering the body, time, cities, and social wealth," and "murdering creative human capacity," but "also murdering that which nurtures humanity: nature." The essential movement, change, and becoming of life are replaced by the simulated, false spectacles created by capital. The acceleration of capital’s rhythm brings about the destruction of life in its entirety.
IV. The "Harmony-in-Diversity" [10] of Rhythm: The Possible Future of a Deceleration Civilization
In summary, as a new domain of social critique, rhythmanalysis is first a development and deepening of Marxist theory. It possesses the critical spirit of Marx’s social theory while also exhibiting the characteristics of an ontological phenomenology of time. Simultaneously, it takes the shifting political structure of time as its core horizon, critically analyzing the new contradictions and alienations emerging in the hypermodern society of capitalism from the perspective of daily life. However, this alienation manifests through the seemingly pure natural law of "time," forming an abstract "time-fetishism." While "acceleration" theory focuses on the alienation of the temporal dimension, rhythmanalysis concerns itself with the structural alienation of human life-time and space in their entirety. Thus, contemporary social critiques of "acceleration" can be incorporated into the theoretical problematic of rhythmanalysis. Rhythmanalysis attempts to reveal the hidden threads of hypermodern society and develop our expectations for new social forms and ideals of liberation from these alienating contradictions. The continuous acceleration of social rhythms brings about not only the destruction of nature, the overloading of physical vitality, and a state of social disorder, but also unfair temporal competition and distribution, as well as dilemmas concerning moral and ethical injustice. In short, social acceleration has not led people into the infinite growth and sharing of productive forces and the equalization of relations of production; the promises of the "good life" in modernity have not been fulfilled. Instead, it has undermined the very promises of reflexivity and autonomy that humanity has held since the Enlightenment. The potential for acceleration to liberate has been exhausted, turning into a new force of servitude.
In the stage of hypermodern society, it seems that no country can escape the collective frenzy for speed. This frenzied concept of acceleration has almost become a "totalitarian force" in modern society. First, the fanatical demand for acceleration not only "disembeds" humans from immediate, local space but also causes a distorted alienation in the relationship between the human self and the world. According to Virilio, human beings have changed from "present beings" to "non-present" beings characterized by "tele-presence." The intimacy of social relations and the proximity of geographical space have become decoupled to the point where people lose their sense of local identity. Second, the accelerated process of automation has caused us to lose cultural and practical knowledge. Bernard Stiegler even claimed in hyperbolic terms that generalized automation has led to massive unemployment and the de-valorization of the human brain, resulting in "systematic stupidity." All knowledge of work, life, and theory is transformed into the automated operation of machines without the involvement of a subject in decision-making, leading to a more severe crisis of identity. Third, the acceleration of social rhythm causes human experience to detach from the course of life and become instantaneous; human memory is continuously abstracted from concrete living environments into fleeting, short-term memory, further leading to self-alienation.
Faced with the various alienating consequences of temporal acceleration, "Accelerationism" is, to some extent, the theoretical representation of the dynamics of hypermodernity. The strategies proposed by the former are questionable; they believe that only by continuously liberating and promoting the acceleration of the productive potential of science and technology can capitalism be transcended. They presuppose that the future of the acceleration process will be benign and orderly, which is a new variant of technological determinism. Accelerationism does not reflect from the perspective of a revolutionary replacement of the structure of capitalist relations of production: what matters is no longer developing more and faster productive forces, but seeking social relations for the fair sharing of the fruits of those productive forces.
In other words, the goal is not acceleration but deceleration. Some believe that the strategy of slowing down is actually pathetic and impossible. That is because their understanding of "deceleration" is narrow. "Deceleration" is relative; it is not a return to a primitive past, nor does it mean social stagnation. All reasonably balanced social machines require a well-functioning "braking device," and human existence has its natural rhythmic limits; once social speed transcends these limits, serious consequences ensue. So-called "deceleration" is intended to achieve the harmonious synchronization of science and technology, social institutions, and the pace of life. Thus, "deceleration" is ultimately offset by continuous acceleration, and acceleration balances itself relatively through "deceleration."
Does this mean completely abandoning the linear machine-rhythms of modernity to return to the cyclical rhythms of pre-modern agricultural society? The answer is no. In fact, in Lefebvre’s view, the eternal, repetitive, cyclical rhythm inherent to daily life can never be replaced by the linear process of historical progress—just as the qualitative essence of life's autonomous difference cannot be completely reduced to mere quantity, and just as use-value cannot be replaced by exchange-value.
Just as "things" cannot be purely replaced by "relations," there exists a multifaceted relationship of both conflict and coordination between natural rhythms and social rhythms. Everyday life is the interleaving of rhythms from the human body, cosmic space-time, culture, and society; in essence, the human being is the harmonious alignment of the rhythms of everyday life with the rhythms of nature. Humans and their bodies must integrate with the cyclical rhythms of the natural world, using the recurrence of natural rhythms to resist the monotonous rhythms of society—that is, to break the opposition between the cyclical rhythms of the world of life and the repetitive rhythms of the mechanical world, and to construct an ideal social form where rhythms coexist in harmony [11]. This involves striving to seek a new balance between mechanized, homogenized linear time and the accidental quality of nature’s "impermanence of life." In other words, it must not only restore natural rhythms but also refrain from a total abandonment of linearity; rather, it must break human routines and fixed, invariant patterns to establish a brand-new complementary relationship between the habituation and continuity of everyday life and its variability and rupture. This new complementary relationship "can liberate man from all mechanical necessity and rigid regularity, and free man from the shackles of enclosed passivity."
This perspective finds resonance within traditional Chinese philosophical wisdom. For example, as stated in the "Wenyan" commentary on the "Qian" hexagram in the Book of Changes [12]: "The great man is he whose virtues are in harmony with heaven and earth; whose brightness is in harmony with the sun and moon; whose orderly procedure is in harmony with the four seasons; and whose relation to what is fortunate and what is calamitous is in harmony with the spirit-like powers. He may precede Heaven, and Heaven will not actວຍ in opposition to him; he may follow Heaven, but will act [only] as Heaven at the time would do." [13] Or as in the saying, "Heaven and Earth were born together with me, and the myriad things and I are one" [14].
Distinguished from the aforementioned future path characterized by aesthetic qualities, within the scientific horizon of Marx’s historical dialectics, the time of capital accumulation in capitalist society dominates life-time and steals the labor-time of others. There is an irreconcilable internal contradiction between socially necessary labor-time and surplus value [15] labor-time. Capital itself "is its own contradiction-in-process, [in that] it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth." Capital necessarily possesses the tendency to create "disposable time" on one hand, while on the other hand converting this disposable time into surplus labor. The inherent, insurmountable time-space limits of capital lead to the internal historical negation of capital's society; this is Marx’s immanent critique of capital’s society, where an irreconcilable contradiction grows between the advanced potential of the productive forces and their existing social forms. Only when the value-form of the private ownership of capital is exploded will it be that "the measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labor time, but rather disposable time." After social relations are liberated, people will possess more free time, and science and technology—divested of the "capitalist application system"—will promote the universal development of social combination and social interaction. Consequently, the life-time of humanity will truly become the space for human development. Human society will achieve the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom; people will freely associate and share the means of life and spiritual wealth, achieving the harmonious coexistence of man and nature, and thereby realizing the free and well-rounded development of every individual. This necessarily represents a new form of human civilization.