Rhythms of endurance,the practice of care and the peripheral political

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 represent ‘a localized time, or, if one prefers, temporalized spaces’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 89). In Simone’s exploration of the livelihood strategies of the poor, who live in circumstances of extreme volatility, rhythm-making is 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…’ (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 mechanisms 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). In turn, Simone conceptualizes this rhythm-making as ‘ensemble work’: ‘composing the conditions that facilitate improvisation and dialogue among the players’ (p. 20). Ensemble work relies on the discovery of materials, connections, and their potentials in different temporalities and spatialities. In Simone's words, ensemble work relies upon ‘the physicality of instruments and instrumentation for the players to address each other’ (p. 29). ‘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 nonhuman, 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 in the context of the ‘inhabitable’ 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 enable 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 achieve one’s purpose, while at the same time not disturbing the equilibrium of the whole as this 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’ (pp. 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 conceptualize the city; and processes of peripheralization can be said to illustrate the erosion of the very concept of the city as a site of diversity and tolerance, ‘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 cues into 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 communities, rhythm-making is about redefining space, time, materiality, habitation, 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.