Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and metabolic rifts in the historical framework of the Anthropocene

Abstract

The increasingly urgent calls for sustainability in the Anthropocene point to the pressing need to reengage with theoretical concepts and approaches that take both the historical (temporal) and geographical (spatial) aspects of environmental phenomena into account. Any possibility of a successful resolution of the Anthropocene crisis in favor of human survival depends on a clear understanding of the historical novelty of the capital system and its alienated and totalizing mode of social metabolic control. Building on work that examines how Henri Lefebvre incorporated the theory of metabolic rift into his theorization of the production of space, we approach his rhymanalytical project as a complement to his work on space, and analyze how the mutually constituting production of time and space structures everyday life around the capitalist domination of linear time over rhythms of the body and society. As the place (space and time) where this contradiction becomes most acute, the corporeal rhythms of everyday life also provide the foundations for an alternative mode of social metabolic control, which pursues substantive equality as both an end and a precondition to sustainability.