Living in the Workroom. Elements for a (rhythm) analysis of the everyday during a lockdown

Abstract

This paper sets out to offer an analysis of the specific context of remote working from a domestic space during the lockdown imposed by the Covid-19 crisis. Referring to the works of Henri Lefebvre on rhythms and spaces, this article develops a critical account of the impact that the intrusion of labour rhythms from workplaces to domestic spaces, especially through the mediation of information and communication technologies. Furthermore, the argument brings rhythmanalysis in dialogue with other theories that highlight the affordances of digital technologies to act as powerful pharmaka that take part in the process of individuation, and de facto its destruction. Finally, the essay reminds the call for theorists such as Bernard Stiegler to be more careful in the way they study and describe the non-human. When technophobic ideas cannot help to warn us about the ideological domination of technologies, that may act as instruments of alienation in those troubled times, when the quotidian is being locked in limited spaces with digital devices, there is more than even a need for a radical immanent critique that help us to think with and not despite the assemblage of beings, things, and rhythms that compose our everyday life.