"Roland Barthes makes at east two crucial points in his lecture series How We Live Together. The first is that while we have thought and written much about the individual qua mass society, and vice versa, we have historically paid scant attention to the important scale of the medium-size group. The school, the office, the monastery, the commune. Perhaps this blind-spot - which, after all, is where most of us spend our quotidian lives - is also an opportunity, when it comes to rethinking sociality as the basis for rethinking society itself. Bathe's other point is that those in power always begin by imposing a rhythm. There is thus a certain tyranny, albeit to different degrees, expressed in our motions and movements, our thoughts and actions, What if - together - we started at the level of the 'idiorhythmy': the singular counter-rhythm tailored to our own will and purpose? What if we consciously sought to recompose social relations according to a far less controlling, less relentless, and more imaginative logic, choreography and time signature?"
Dominic Pettman, Peak Libido - Sex, Ecology and the Collapse of Desire (2021)