Murmuring in the Waves: A Rhythmanalysis of the 1970s’ Conjunctural Shift in Britain

ideas, the analyst of rhythmic phenomena seeks to peel off the layers of experience that at times are implicit or glossed over by the abstractions of colloquial expressions. The adjectives we use to describe a situation can be unpicked as temporal-spatial relationships that subsist the polyrhythmic bundle. What is the ‘busyness’ of a street if it is not a heterogeneous bundle of rhythms, of cars, traffic lights, pedestrians each imposing its rhythm upon others, that are discordant to the bodily rhythms of observers. What is it that makes a place ‘relaxed’ and ‘homely’? It could be that how things are arranged induce minimal bodily tension, thus initiating a choreography of the body, which along other materialities produce eurhythmia, a cup, a desk at hand for instance. The method of rhythmanalysis explores a network of material entities to make explicit their active weaving of rhythms. Lefebvre makes note of the architectural features of stairways in its interlinking of rhythms in the city of Venice. Through the nuances and contrasts common aspects come to light...A link between spaces, the stairway also ensures a link between times: between the time of architecture (the house, the enclosure) and urban time (the street, the open space, the square and the monuments). It links particular houses and dwellings back to their distribution in urban space. Now is the stairway not a localised time par excellence? Don’t the steps in Venice rhythm the walk through the city, while serving simultaneously as a transition between different rhythms (Lefebvre 2004: 97)? The human body is a site of materiality which has a bundle of biological rhythms which nevertheless are intersecting with other rhythmic assemblages. A concerning with how the body inhabits the world via rhythms is addressed in the following discussion. 2.2. Sensing Rhythms Without claiming to change life, but by fully reinstating the sensible in consciousness and in thought, he would accomplish a tiny part of the