Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life is a collection of essays by Marxist sociologist and urbanist philosopher Henri Lefebvre.
The term "rhythmanalysis" was coined by Portuguese philosopher Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos in a lost 1931 manuscript which focused on the physiological dimensions of rhythms.
[3] Other thinkers to consider rhythms before Lefebvre include sociologists/philosophers Emile Durkheim, Roger Caillois, Marcel Mauss, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Gabriel Tarde, dancer Rudolf Laban, as well as architects Alexander Klein and Le Corbusier.
The writer Georges Perec and semiologist Roland Barthes were considering rhythms contemporaneously to Lefebvre, though less dichotomously.
Lefebvre describes presence as the “facts of both nature and culture, at the same time sensible, affective and moral rather than imaginary” (author’s emphasis, trans.
Rhythmanalysis stresses that presence is of an innately temporal character and can never be represented by any simulacrum of the present (people walking down a street, the sun going down), but can only be grasped through the analysis of rhythms (people walking down a street through time, the sun’s movement through time).