Grate Meaning

As I walked by the creek looking for something to create I was stopped by this grate seemingly built into the small hill running down to the creek. The grate didn’t look meaningful but it had a non-visual value, it was a rusted old grate with a concrete foundation and it disrupted the natural rhythm of the river, as some water flowed away from the river into the grate. As you can see most people at first glance would simply disregard the grate but I sat and watched it for a while and found a much deeper meaning behind this simple grate. This grate caught my eye because as Bennett talks about in her writing on assemblage this grate felt like it had the power in my eyes, even though it wasn’t a living thing. Bennett said the world is filled “with all sorts of animate beings, some human, some not, some organic, some not.”(Bennett, 2005, Agency of Assemblage, p.1) So even though the grate wasn’t technically alive it …show more content…
Lefebvre talked about how in order to see a rhythm you must be outside of it, and that it’s because of this we often don’t see our own rhythms “Exteriority is necessary. And yet to grasp a rhythm you must yourself have been grabbed by it”.(Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 1992, p.2) So the grate even though it has “thing power” that Bennett was talking about and spoke to me catching my eye, it can’t view its rhythm because it’s not outside of its situation. From the grate’s perspective it could see I was breaking my rhythm because I never come down to that creek so it could tell I was disrupting my own personal rhythm. Meanwhile I could tell I disrupted the local areas rhythm by walking around, gathering leaves, and placing them onto the grate; overall these rhythms led me to a deeper understanding of this seemingly unimpressive