Luca Pattaroni
Choreopolitics. Rhythms as Emancipation
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We live in an increasingly saturated world. Saturated with signs, norms, objects, and obligations that all contribute to our daily alienation. The Manifesto for a Politics of Rhythms that Luca Pattaroni recently co-authored argues that the answer to this saturation lies in regaining political control over our rhythms, whether they are individual or collective. This call for rhythmic emancipation implies much more than simply slowing down. It is an attempt to understand the profound intertwining between time and space—for, as harshly experienced during confinement, once deprived of space we become prisoners of time. More than cadences, rhythms must be understood as ways of fluctuating, interlinking the intimate experience of the self and the structural organization of territories. The composition of the common is therefore a matter of choreopolitics, a politics that would give each individual and collective mastery over its times and spaces, making societies hospitable to the multitude of our ways of living.
Luca Pattaroni is Maître d’Enseignement et de Recherche at the Urban Sociology Laboratory of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, where he leads the research group City, Habitat and Collective Action. Tackling the urban margins and situations of resistance (squats, counterculture, urban struggles, precarious migration, homelessness), but also the broader spatial conditions of emancipation and oppression, his work is concerned with the expression of differences and the making of the common in contemporary capitalist cities. His talk is based on the 2021 Manifeste pour une politique des rythmes that he co-authored with Manola Antonioli, Guillaume Drevon, Luc Gwiazdzinski and Vincent Kaufmann.
Hartmut Rosa is Professor of General and Theoretical Sociology at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.