Rhythms, Routines and the Ordinary
How daily life is organised by repetition, rhythm and habit, and how the texture of the ordinary becomes available to cultural analysis.
Definition
Rhythms and routines are the recurrent temporal patterns and habitual practices that structure everyday life; the ordinary is the unremarkable, taken-for-granted texture of daily existence that these patterns produce and sustain.
Scope
This topic examines the temporal and habitual dimensions of everyday life: the rhythms that pattern days and seasons, the routines and habits that carry social life, and the affective texture of the ordinary. It draws on Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis, practice theory's account of how routines form and change, and recent work on ordinary affect. It complements the spatial and tactical topics by foregrounding time, repetition and the felt quality of ordinary experience.
Core questions
- How do rhythms of time structure everyday experience?
- How do routines and habits form, persist and change?
- What does it mean to attend to the affective texture of the ordinary?
- How can the unremarkable be made into an object of cultural analysis?
Key concepts
- rhythm
- routine
- habit
- repetition
- social practice
- ordinary affect
- the texture of the everyday
Key theories
- Rhythmanalysis
- Lefebvre proposes analysing everyday life through its rhythms — biological, social and mechanical — attending to how they layer, harmonise or clash in the experience of time and place.
- Social practice theory
- Shove and colleagues theorise everyday routines as practices made of linked materials, competences and meanings, explaining how habits such as showering or commuting form, spread and change.
- Ordinary affect
- Stewart attends ethnographically to the small intensities and feelings that animate ordinary life, treating the everyday as a field of affective force rather than mere background.
History
Lefebvre's late, posthumously published Rhythmanalysis (French 1992, English 2004) crowned his lifelong study of the everyday by attending to its temporal patterns. In parallel, practice theory (Shove and others) developed a robust account of routine, while affect-oriented scholars such as Stewart and Highmore turned in the 2000s to the felt, ordinary textures of daily life, broadening everyday-life studies beyond its earlier focus on resistance and ideology.
Debates
- Habit as conservative or generative
- Whether routine and habit primarily lock in social conventions and inertia, or are also the medium through which everyday change and adaptation occur.
Key figures
- Henri Lefebvre
- Ben Highmore
- Kathleen Stewart
- Elizabeth Shove
Related topics
Seminal works
- lefebvre2004
- stewart2007
- shove2012
Frequently asked questions
- What is rhythmanalysis?
- It is Lefebvre's proposed method for studying everyday life by listening to its rhythms — the cycles of the body, of work, of the city and of nature — and analysing how these overlapping rhythms produce the experience of ordinary time and space.