Prison(m)s of Rhythm

            In Michel Foucault’s elaboration of disciplines in the everyday, he briefly describes their appearance as an infra-law. “They appear,” Foucault clarifies, “as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these demands [the formal demands of law].” [i]  Although he subsequently discounts this statement arguing that “the disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law,” the concept of the infra-law as a formal appearance of discipline remains as a spectre, the infrastructure of discipline. When the panopticon becomes obsolete, the schemas of Panopticism, “the infinitely minute web of panoptic techniques,” linger on in the disciplined individual. The infra-law becomes indefinitely postponed in its appearance, a virtual law. [ii]

            Building off Foucault, Gilles Deleuze charts a movement from discipline to methods of control through modulations, “a sieve” through which laws become metastable training guides and contests. Integration has become perpetual training.[iii] His desire to diagram a new historical period, from one regime of power relation to a more intensive form, lies in an attention to duration. The discrete techniques of discipline reached a crisis in reproducibility. Foucault explains that “we must not be misled, these techniques refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in a concentrated or formalized form, the schema of power-knowledge proper to each discipline.”[iv] Control injects itself as the binding power relation when punitive discipline encounters a crisis in strategies of visibility, becoming diffuse. “In the societies of control, one is never finished with anything,” Deleuze remarks. Whereas discipline is measured, control is constant. 

Spaces of enclosure have given over to never-ending thresholds, but I assert that the infra-law lingers on, control’s debt to discipline. If the salary has taken the place of the wage, to use Deleuze’s example, then the deferment of a raise becomes both a mechanism of control and a mechanism of discipline in or as duration: the duration between raises, between requests for raises, between new training regimes designed to promote employees. Indefinite discipline remains as a passive reinforcement, often through the mediator of “Human Resources”: verbal and written warnings, performance reviews and improvement plans, demotion, and termination. Mediation, as a strategy, becomes a mobile site revealing that disciplinary methods unevenly distribute alongside control mechanisms. The problem mediation poses is: what occurs when power itself jams, skips a beat, becomes a broken record? Thus, it is necessary to turn to rhythm, the rhythm of mediation. Rhythm emerges as the integration of the differential power relations, the only diagram that matters, the actualization of power. Diagramming these power relations via rhythm makes sensible, in the everyday, the secret – the virtual – infra-law of the everyday. Utilizing Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, rhythm emerges as a prism through which to render these diagrams of power.

            Wim Wenders’ exploration of Hirayama’s everyday routine in Perfect Days (2023) is a profound meditation on how we embody the process of life. Long meditative takes; and extended sequences; of Hirayama waking, grooming, bathing, working, those cyclical rhythms of the modern laborer, are fragmented by him watering tree saplings, reading, partaking in weekly rituals of drinking at his favorite bar, and, most importantly, his daily lunch ritual of taking pictures of tree leaves. Wenders diagrams Hirayama’s body in equilibrium. The body becomes a metronome. Work and care neutralize each other in a never-ending cycle. Grooming into nurturing into methodical cleaning into nightly rituals of release. Internal rhythms of the body and the external rhythms of rational time superimpose such that his labor, cleaning artisan public toilets, becomes an undifferentiated motion towards his weekly visit at the public bathhouse. Public and private become blurred as care becomes labor and labor becomes care. Wenders diagrams an informal schema of power relations between these, tenuously stratified by time. Any deviation from his disciplined routine incurs informal penalties.

            A diagram lies between, but also outside of, two stratas of power and expresses the relation between them. Furthermore, as Deleuze says, it constitutes both the site (a non-place) where energy passes (mutates) between two strata and is the “strategy of forces on which the stratum itself depends.”[v] The relationship between forces in each strata passes through the diagram as a curve, regularizing and aligning two nodal points. For Wenders, regularization occurs via rhythm. 

Henri Lefebvre remarks that “the external measure [that of the clock, the metronome, measures which attempt to regulate reality] can and must superimpose itself on the internal measure [bodily measures, psychic measures], but they cannot be conflated. They have neither the same beginning, nor the same end or final cause.”[vi] With each disruption of Hirayama’s routine and workday/week, these polyrhythmic valences unfold to reveal that the relations of power have traversed the membrane mediating work life and personal life. Both internal and external measures of time are now codependent on a greater infrastructure of control and discipline.

What was an equilibrium reveals itself to be a molding of the labor ethic onto the personal ethic, which is always changing via perpetual training. The constant renewal and (re)production of the self.[vii] Thus, cleaning the body and cleaning bathrooms find a mutual origin in the cleansing of deviancy from society. Hirayama’s equilibrium erupts into chaos when his notoriously truant and inept coworker quits unexpectedly. Thrown out of an impersonal rhythm, those bundles unravel and intensify a regime of modulations. Freed, these modulations float to the surface and redistribute in unexpected ways. The diagram does not exhaust forces on the stratas it binds, instead it constantly draws new ones when it meets resistance. Hirayama’s personal rhythm folds into his labor, exhausting his physical body, but produces a doubling within. Just as the prison was created with a double functioning that gives it solidity – “juridico-economic on the one hand, technico-disciplinary on the other” – Hirayama’s personal ethics of labor unfolds as the labor demands of the market, exhausting his slow, meditative moments/thoughts on labor retroactively.[viii] These hygienic toilets, and Hirayama’s attentive care towards them, unfold as a subjectivation. Hirayama’s interiority has been displaced entirely into his labor, enacting affectual feedback between these spaces of enclosure. Hirayama’s personal force flickers intermittently, however, the contact between the two, the inside and outside of Hirayama’s self, present a line of flight in his frustration with his employers; a site of resistance when he comes home late that night to find his runaway niece; a promise of reconfiguration in the following days spent as her informal father figure. As the notion of flickering suggests, though, this flight cannot last.

We see early on, Hirayama’s favorite ritual is the attempt to render, via his photo practice, the fleeting, overlapping shadows of tree leaves. Lefebvre states that the polyrhythmic is avisual, formed by overlapping waves, always superimposing. Hirayama’s obsession with the shadow play invokes a certain madness for knowledge. Is he searching for the moment when these superimposed shadows darken, unify? These photos of leaves accumulate in absurd numbers as stack upon stack of photos line his closet shelves: a search for a hidden archive of the natural world that can account for those modulations in the micropolitics of the everyday. But, as Lefebvre states, every wave/leaf has its own rhythm, its own energy. He continues,

Watching waves, you can easily observe what physicists call the superposition of small movement. Powerful waves crash upon one another, creating jets of spray; they disrupt one another noisily. Small undulations traverse each another, absorbing, fading, rather than crashing, into one another.[ix]

            Inevitably, the polyrhythmic field Hirayama attempts to stabilize and petrify in a photograph is already faded and transformed by the time he clicks. A spectre of the present, the infra-law, perpetually throws Hirayama into a false past, dissimulating the tragic state of his being. The shadow shifts but never darkens. The archive grows but never unifies. The body works but never plays. Perpetually training: a simulation of life.

            Towards the film’s ending, having avoided his usual bar and decided to drink at the edge of the river, Hirayama encounters the former lover of the bar’s hostess. The man reveals his cancer diagnosis and how their marriage fell apart. As the two watch the shifts in light over the rippling waters, the man asks if when shadows overlap, do they become darker? Unable to conclude the matter in an experiment utilizing their own shadows, Hirayama asks the man to play shadow tag with him. The two engage one another as if thrown back into childhood. A superposition of micromovements as their bodies fold into each other and into time. Lines of flight that were previously occluded by an obsession with still photography emerge here out of the cinematic folds, out of the shadows, and become embodied in displaced movements and ephemeral gestures. Each tag becomes a new vector pointing towards the infra-law and beyond, to the Outside of the stratified forms of power.  Freely floating modulations become childlike acts of giddy wonder at the mysterious nature of light and crisscrossing shadows. Hirayama’s dispossessed agency erupts into the chaos of rhythms crashing into one another, a new dis/harmony emerges, what Deleuze might call the unthought, breaking the body open and releasing imprisoned rhythms. Shadows detach and etch in new acts of figuration, redoubling lost interiority into fresh, new waves, beyond control, beyond discipline.

Staging the question of rhythms as a game, Wenders creates a problem of reading. Is this shadow play a release of libidinal energies? Or a liberation from the larger forces of automatism inscribed on the body? Further, does this spontaneity diagram a form of resistance? Or will these moments be washed up and dragged back into the ebbs and flows of the impersonal rhythms and modulations of the normative? In the final scene, Hirayama drives back to work as he listens to Nina Simone’s Feeling Good. A disturbing pulsation of rhythms ripples through the image as Hirayama’s face undergoes intense distortions and tensions. His mouth curls, bends and nearly breaks in a twisted attempt to smile, to keep feeling good, while his brow and cheekbones battle to prevent his face from collapsing into formless despair. His beet red and waterlogged eyes stare straight into the camera, a challenging gaze, a gaze to the cinematic Outside. The shadows of buildings zip across his face interrupted only by flashes of stoplights and reflected sunlight. Finally, the scene ends with two shots of the city, zooming out in two cuts as the viewer takes in Tokyo, the infra-law, immanent yet hidden in the beauty of its image. Can we move onto a new day? Unclear, Hirayama, like the film’s viewers, can only be struck by the magnitude of the outside forces pushing and pulling on his body in and against the infra-law. A life lived as a prism of rhythms.