Sensory segmentation, refrain and rhythm?

What I call ‘sensory segmentation’ is about the ways particular sensations come to dominate the spaces of our lives and how we perceive objects such as monuments. The idea builds on ideas of rhythm, refrain and segmentation. The following snippet from my PHD thesis published in 2023 expands on this and shows the key scholary inspirations behind the idea:

“04.01 Rhythms link spaces and times

Rhythms links space and time. Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre, 2004) points to the rhythmic character of time, which simultaneously occur in space; located and anchored in concrete time and concrete space, and thus links rhythm to the production of space-time: ‘Now, concrete times have rhythms, or rather are rhythms—all rhythms imply the relation of a time to a space, a localised time, or, if one prefers, a temporalised space‘ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 88). For Lefebvre, things, beings, and landscapes are bundles of multiple intersecting rhythms. They are polyrhythmic. Plural, intersecting, and possibly contradicting rhythms are thus linking time and space (Lefebvre, 2004) for humans and non-humans. Everyday life and rhythms are connected as ’concrete modalities of social time’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 72), with rhythms of lived time, cosmic and natural rhythms, and rhythms of quantified time related to clock time, socioeconomic production, and repetitive processes. The everyday is ordered along rhythms associated with use and use value intersecting with and modeled after quantitative rhythms of exchange value, which are homogenizing and functionally dividing time. This is rhythms of abstract space (Lefebvre, 1991).

‘Like all products, like space, time divides and splits itself into use and use-value on the one hand, and exchange and exchange-value on the other. On one hand it is sold and on the other it is lived.’ (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 73).

This makes time a social product with different rhythms offering a temporal or rhythm perceptive on rural spatial justice. With the ordering of rhythmic time and rhythms in everyday life, people acquire certain rhythmic practices, they are ‘rhythmed’, which are personal and internal on the one hand and, on the other, social and external because they are shared and related to the quantitative socioeconomic organization of time. These acquired rhythms are created by habit and can as such be related to remembering with the landscape and to the everyday use of the past. Rhythms are also connected to time and space with Deleuze and Guattari. They locate rhythms in the in-between, between blocs of spacetime: ‘Rhythm is never on the same plane as that which has rhythm’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 365). Rhythm should be understood as the movement itself, or better, the connection itself, of an element belonging to different spacetimes. It is rhythms that make one block of spacetime pass into another through the code of the one moving and affecting how this spacetime block concretely is constituted (Deleuze, 1987). Difference of spacetimes is produced in this way by altering the bloc as well as making the code different affectively, due to its new relationships. The linking of time and space found with both Lefebvre and Deleuze & Guattari can form the basis for how fleeting and different sensations, emotions, memories, and affects are linked in the concrete spacetime of landscape. However, while Lefebvre’s rhythmic thinking is important to understand how landscapes or spaces are produced from multiple rhythms, the ability of rhythms to constitute sensory spatial order on a micropolitical level can be best grasped with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of Refrain (Deleuze, 1987).

04.02 Sense the rhythm: sense segmentation

Rhythms can territorialize landscapes as they pass into refrains. Refrains cut across spacetime, cut out territories and define its functions through combining elements after certain fashion.

The concept of the refrain lends it self well to sensation and the configurations of these. Deleuze & Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) use the examples of music and artistic practices of animals to show how expressive elements become territorializing and coding, respectively, determining the extension and the identity of a milieu: how a bird singing marks a territory and makes the sound territorializing and territorializes the functions of a milieu. This is not so much a matter of excluding from territory as it is about bringing elements into the territory and modifying their identity and affects by this (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987): a three becomes a livelihood of birds; hearing a seagull screaming on the harbour becomes a childhood memory of family leisure; seeing a statue constitutes a visual landscape around it. In this way a particular blocs of spacetimes are created physically, sensory and mentally. What is important here, is that it is the elements that becomes expressive that gain the ability to make refrains. As they write:

‘In a general sense, we call a refrain any aggregate of matters ofexpression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes (they are optical, gestural, motor, ect., refrains).’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 376).

This ability lies in the ways rhythms link space and time and their. rhythmic components becoming expressive (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), for example, as signs; sensory color, texture, sound; or heritage practice. Refrains make relatively stable entities of sensory heritage spacetime, of assemblages within spacetime, though its territorialization. ‘Is not consolidation the terrestrial name for consistency? The territorial assemblage is a milieu consolidation, a space-time consolidation, of coexistence and succession. And the refrain operates with these three factors’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 383).

The expressive element within the spatiotemporal order of a refrain forms a relationship, in Deleuze & Guattari’s (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) musical vocabulary, of counterpoint to other elements within the refrain, but in a way in which it has the role of motif, model, or formulas for the other - in short expressive rhythms become able to frame or modify the way other elements have affect.

However, refrains have an ability to open, it is expressive elements’ ability to break from, deterritorialize, the initial order of a spacetime bloc they are part of, of the initial assemblage, which makes them able to form new connections to and include elements from other spacetime blocs and thus being rhythmic reterritorializing (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). With the notion 'Refrain', the active role of rhythms, its forces of power, can begin to be grasped. Rhythms can be understood as forces of micropolitics, actively doing something, somewhat in contrast to Lefebvre (Lefebvre, 2004), where rhythms seem less active, though they do participate in the production of space-time.

Refrains are rhythmic ordering and what refrains appear to do is create rhythmic segmentations in the spacetime landscapes.

04.03 Refrains create rhythmic sensory segmentations

The ways sensory expressive elements (such as rhythms of sensations and heritage performances) of the art work, of the landscape, and the encounter of these are connected rhythmically in time and space, produce landscape refrains, where some sensory elements might work segmentary or as ruptures. Segmentations are ways of ordering and forming the differences of spacetime through forces of power and segmentation is always followed by de-segmentation, which in turn can enable new re-segmentations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The sensory ordering is linked to the processes of territorialization and coding of refrains and be of different degrees and in different ways. Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) distinguish between rigid and supple segmentations, which can pass into each other. Rigid segmentation forms univocal homogenization through the codes of certain sensations or sensory elements that substitutes itself for the codes of the elements to which it connects itself; it 'overcodes' them. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) By this it produces binary order, become reference point or models for the other sensations, sensory experiences, or sensory elements related to heritage practices:

‘When the overcoding line is drawn, it assures the prevalence of one segment, as such, over the other (in the case of binary segmentarity), gives a certain center a power of relative resonance over the others (in the case of circular segmentarity), and underscores the dominant segment through which it itself passes (in the case of linear segmentarity)’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 262).

While there are dualistic ordering and some degree of certain element being resonance points for other in supple segmentations, supple segmentation forms rhizomic order, with multiple codes and independent elements and the ability of deterritorializations to form new connections and independent segmentations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Considering that art resonates and embraces with the landscape, a visual impression of an art work in a landscape can, for example, find its counterpoint in the visuality of that landscape, with the ways of seing the art work forming a model for how to see the landscape, or conversely, a sound of the landscape can become resonance point for perceiving the art work. Such segmentations of sensations can be linked to ideas within sensory studies (Howes, 2022c; Howes & Classen, 2014) of hierarchic configuration of the senses or a more supple configuration of the senses, that sensation in the countryside is contested, and to how multisensory engagement enables landscape belonging and perception of space (that could be enjoyed, wanted, disliked, or disgusted)..”

Reference: Frølund, M. (2023). Sensory segmentation around and with art monuments in rural landscapes: Towards a sensory heritage sensitive rural spatial justice. [Ph.D. thesis, SDU]. University of Southern Denmark. Faculty of Business and Social Sciences. https://doi.org/10.21996/2szz-kc78. Pp.83-88.

References in text:

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.(Same as reference: Deleuze, 1987)

Howes, D. (2022). The sensory studies manifesto: tracking the sensorial revolution in the arts and human sciences. University of Toronto Press.

Howes, D., & Classen, C. (2014). Ways of sensing: Understanding the senses in society. Routledge.

Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday life (S. Elden & G. Moore, Trans.). Bloomsbury.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Basil Blackwell.