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138 Michael Wedelin opposition” between different spatio-temporal logics. 6 Within thiscontradictory unity, “Time and space, the cyclical and the linear, exert areciprocal action: they measure themselves against one another; eachone makes itself and is made a measuring-measure; everything is cyclicalrepetition through linear repetitions” (Lefebvre 2004, p. 8).It is Lefebvre’s idea of “rhythmanalysis” that can provide a model forconceptualizing this intertwinement of different temporalities, where onetemporal layer simultaneously brings forth and contests the other. 7 ForLefebvre, the concept of rhythm is the key to any understanding oftime, especially non-linear temporalities such as repetition. The heuristicframework of his rhythmanalytical project is provided by the everyday workingsof urban life and its orchestration of movements through space, thecollision between natural biological and social timescales, the coordinationof the rhythms of our bodies and the rhythms produced by society.Following on from his earlier analysis of spatial organization, and in particularurban environments, in The Production of Space (1991) and his threevolumeCritique of Everyday Life (1992, 2002, 2006), the question of thebody under the conditions of capitalism has remained a central concernright through to his late undertaking of the rhythmanalytical project. 8 Inthis respect close to Foucault, the body here figures as the point of contactin a field where the social meets the biological, where the workings ofnatural, corporeal, and mechanistic machine rhythms coexist and interferewith each other: in the modern experience of the object world the bodyserves the subject as a metronome (Lefebvre 2004, p. 19). 9Already in the late 1920s, Lefebvre had challenged the then dominantphilosophical theorization of time along Bergson’s notion of durée (duration),and set out to develop what he himself referred to as a “theory ofmoments,” privileging the importance of the instant. In Lefebvre’s understandingthe single instant as potentially non-calculable, as a criticalmoment of virtual openness, as a contingent unit of temporal resistanceencapsulates both the difference between linear and cyclical time, and thecontrast between clock time and “lived” time.The main source of inspiration for Lefebvre’s re-conception of time was musicwhich he thought could be theorized in relation to three basic concepts:• melody as a linear sequence of notes in temporal succession;• harmony as the simultaneous sounding of notes;• and, finally and most importantly, rhythm as the placement of notesand their relative length, that is: the instant of the single beat as the