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This is the accepted version of a paper published in Dialogues in Human Geography. This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination.
Citation for the original published paper (version of record): Tran, H A. (2019)
Rhythms of endurance, the practice of care and the peripheral political Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(1): 85-88
https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820619895891
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Rhythms of endurance, the practice of care and the peripheral political
This is an author-created that incorporates referee comments and is accepted for publication. Hoai Anh Tran, Malmö University
hoai.anh.tran@mau.se
Improvised lives is a sorely needed book about the survival mechanisms of the urban poor in
the Global South, the majority of whom dwell in “uninhabitable” peripheral urban districts. It is a moving text, showing deep understanding and care for the precarious lives of those who live in “circumstances of intense volatility and uncertainty” (Simone, 2018: 16). Importantly, the book serves to challenge existing ideas of what it means to inhabit a place. Simone’s work describes the complex and elusive mechanisms of the survival, connectivity and productivity of the poor, taking “what they can get” using “the dispossession they experience in the uncertainty of urban life” to make the best of their situations (p. 30). Beautifully written, the book offers no easy reading, as some of the arguments are embedded in rich and seemingly meandering narratives. In the end, however, it is a moving and rewarding read.
The book offers helpful notions to explore and understand the survival mechanisms of the urban poor: the notion of the ‘rhythms of endurance’, relation-making’ and the ‘practice of care’, as well as the notion of peripheral politics and that of a ‘politics of care’.
Rhythms of endurance
Many authors have examined rhythm-making as a way to explore and understand everyday life. ‘Rhythm’ refers to a combination of routines (repetitive activities) as well as
contingencies and differences (Marcu, 2017). Rhythms connect time and space, and are “a localized time, or, if one prefers, temporalized spaces” (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 89). In Simone’s exploration of the livelihoodstrategies of the poor, who live in circumstances of extreme volatility, rhythm-making is argued to be key to survival. Rhythm-making by people who are denied a place in the city and who have little control over time and space is a more complex mechanism that involves not only a localized time and a temporalized space but also being “in the right place at the right time” (p. 38) and significantly, being enmeshed in multiple
interactions and circumventions. Rhythms are not “spontaneous flows” but are born out of “calibration and measure” (p. 18), as people strike a balance between refusal and
appropriation, convergence and detachment, trying to find a small niche of operation without attracting too much attention. Rhythm-making is about turning dispossession into
opportunity: “finding the means to keep the flow going, of knowing how to improvise when itineraries are inevitably interrupted, of making the most of the detours and downtime, of converting downtime into opportunities to interact with unknown others…” (Ibid, p. 132). In these contexts, rhythm-making is not separable from place and livelihood-making: “finding the right rhythms of circulation, circumvention and interaction is the key to actually finding a place to ‘live’, to generate livelihood” (p. 132). Simone terms these “rhythms of endurance” which is “not an endurance attached to particular conditions or place”, but a “floating topography” (p. 93). These mechanism are born out of the dire circumstances of the
peripheral urban districts where the majority of the poor live, where they have to find means to inhabit the “inhabitable” (p. 20).
Simone calls this rhythm-making ‘ensemble work’: “composing the conditions that facilitate improvisation and dialogue among the players” (p 20). Ensemble work relies upon “the
physicality of instruments and instrumentation for the players to address each other” (p. 29). It relies on the discovery of materials, connections, and their potentials in different
temporalities. “Ensemble” here sounds to me like an assemblage, a contingent whole whose properties emerge from interconnections, interactions, flows and synergies between different heterogenous elements that may be human and non-human, technical and natural (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011). However, while assemblage emphasizes the absence of hierarchies, of an overall organizing principle (Müller, 2015), ensemble may be understood to indicate some kind of order, which may not be the author’s intention. I wonder whether the term ‘ensemble work’ has some additional connotation which is productive for analysis beyond the scope of ‘assemblage’? Maybe the answer lies in the relation-making that is part of the ensemble work that produces the rhythms of endurance.
Relation-making, the practice of care and the peripheral political
According to Simone, an important feature of the rhythms of endurance is relation-making, which is the capacity to create relationships among people, experiences, materials, and things, the capacity “to create conditions in which the disparate might stick together” (p. 32).
Relation-making is about discovering possibilities for collaboration in the context of scarcity and constraints. It involves sociability and entrepreneurship. It is about exploring the
unknown, about finding out “ways of being together” and “feeling out” collaborations that are not visible (p. 59) and discovering unconventional connections. It requires ingenuity, the capacity to cultivate and communicate “new needs, desires, and practices” that enables people to inhabit the ‘uninhabitable’ and, by doing so, redefine the meaning of habitat and what it means to inhabit.
At the core of this relation-making is what Simone terms “a practice of care”, which above all refers to the need for people to adjust and “recalibrate” their functioning in terms of each other, even though it also includes manifestations of “likeness” for each other (p. 26). It also refers to the high-tuned attention to the surrounding, to the tangible and intangible, both materials and people. It involves constant “looking out for” multiple potentials, “being
attentive to” useful information, possible collaborations as well as potential threats. It requires finding ways to achive one’s purpose at the same time not to disturb the equilibrium of the whole as it can also means one’s demise. It is through these practices of care that the
assemblages of disparate bodies and things generate the effect of a collective effort, a form of ‘ensemble work’: “This is the ecological relationship where differences turn to each other, translate themselves in terms of the other, and over which hangs the specter of an inclusive “we” (p. 26). The practice of care thus means to “taking care of the capacities of all to endure” (p. 82). The making of rhythms of endurance is thus not only an individual survival mechanism, but a “political practice”, as it involves operations and actions that enable the poor to care for and endure “with each other” (p. 136-137). Simone terms this political practice the “peripheral political” (p. 130), a manifestation of the poor’s contestations against the system that excludes them.
A politics of care
With planetary urbanization being a process in which the majority of residents are pushed to the periphery to the benefit of the few who can remain in the city proper, contemporary urban politics can be termed peripheral politics, a politics of the periphery to which urban majorities are increasingly consigned (p. 30). The periphery is thus not only a location, a spatial entity, but a way to conceptualizing the city; and processes of peripheralization can be said to illustrate the erosion of the very concept of the city as “the great synthesizer, as a locus of
cosmopolitan attainment” (p. 130). The making of rhythms of endurance as a political practice against this development can be seen to relate to what has been discussed earlier as “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary”, a type of quiet and gradual activism (Bayat, 2000: 545) by the urban poor against this development.
Simone suggests that cities need “a politics of care” (p. 128), one that is grounded in the
practices of care and focuses on the people at the periphery. The politics of care means
supporting the rhythms of endurance by learning from the ways they work instead of
imposing new systems and structures on them. It means allowing the people at the periphery the “right of way”, and “some space of operation” (p. 134). It means supporting their
mechanisms of improvisation and collaboration, balancing between providing security without destroying their informal structure of operations. It is about drawing “the energies generated in this process to consolidate infrastructure and urban services” (p. 133). It is about acknowledging the rhythms of endurance as a political practice, one that provides us with insights and cures on how to support the poor and their struggles for survival and becoming. I have been conducting research on the everyday rhythms of street vendors in Hanoi and
Improvised lives has been a timely read. Going beyond the exploration of time and space,
materialities and movements that are dealt with by previous studies of rhythms, the book provides additional analytical tools to explore and describe rhythm-making in circumstances of dispossession and constraints. For many urban poor, rhythm-making is about redefining space, time, materiality, habitatation, and connectivity, as well as what it means to move and inhabit. It is about the capacity to discover and create relationships among people, materials and places and the ways they relate to each other. It is a political practice that demonstrates the poor’s struggle for a place in the city.
References
Bayat, A., 2000. From `Dangerous Classes’ to `Quiet Rebels’: Politics of the Urban Subaltern in the Global South. International Sociology 15, 533–557.
https://doi.org/10.1177/026858000015003005
Ben Anderson, Colin McFarlane, 2011. Assemblage and geography. Area 43, 124. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01004.x
Lefebvre, H., 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. A&C Black.
Marcu, S., 2017. Tears of time : a Lefebvrian rhythmanalysis approach to explore the mobility experiences of young Eastern Europeans in Spain. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42, 405–416. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12174
Müller, M., 2015. Assemblages and Actor-networks: Rethinking Socio-material Power, Politics and Space: Assemblages and Actor-networks. Geography Compass 9, 27–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12192
Simone, A., 2018. Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.
