An Incomplete Dialectics? Rosa on the Good Life

I

‘A better world is possible, and it can be recognized by the fact that its central yardstick is no longer domination and possession but listening and responding’ (p. 762, original emphases), writes Hartmut Rosa in closing his recent effort to fathom the ‘other’ of alienation: modernity’s promise to realize a yearning for deep connections to self and others, things, nature, history, God – to ‘world’. It is a culturally and institutionally enabled mode of being-in-the-world whose relational dynamism is focused in its key concept and acoustic metaphor – resonance. The book can be read as Rosa’s endeavour to think through the consequences of modernity’s accelerating growth logic first fielded in book form in Social Acceleration (2013). In Resonanz, whose publication in English should not be too far off, Rosa turns to the potentials for a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ life; the chances of its actualization are said to depend on the quality of our relationship to the world. The crucial difference to other critical analyses of modern life – from social philosophy to happiness research – is Rosa’s departure from a resource-focused approach.

Modernity depends on ‘dynamic stabilization’, the reproduction of the ‘status quo’ by means of escalating growth, itself dependent on an accelerating and competitive run on resources. A ‘good life’ can no longer be envisaged beyond an extension of our ‘reach’ into the world, a grab for material, social, cultural and corporeal goods. Even when underpinned by emancipatory hope, a prevalent social science focus on resources is for Rosa yet another sign that we find it difficult at best to transcend a mind-set bent on having, on possessing, that renders our collective relationship to the world mute, silent, reified – and stokes a modern yearning for resonance, for relationships that are responsive, alive. But the promise for resonance is held out to us chiefly in commodified form: ‘oases of resonance’, mere simulacra – the concert hall, holiday retreats, gyms – cash in on our longing and thus thicken the silence between subject and world. Society nurtures alienation – ‘relations of non-relatedness’ (Jaeggi) (p. 302), whose principal manifestations are depression and burn-out – through the very mechanisms that promise its prevention or at least amelioration. The fear of alienation and the desire to assuage it mark the central dialectic of the late-modern human condition in Rosa’s vision. The remit of his sociology of relationships to the world is to analyse its workings under conditions of dynamic stabilization, ‘whose unrelenting, escalating logic of accumulation results in an almost inescapable coercion to reification, that is, in the establishment of mute relationships to the world in whose light the crisis tendencies of late modern societies can be understood as all-encompassing crises of resonance’ (p. 634). The central thesis of the book is that a ‘successful life is positively definable as a resonant relationship to the world’ (p. 734, original emphasis).

‘World’ describes our horizon of possibilities, the contingent and complex totality in historically and culturally specific form. World and subject are mutually constitutive. Our stance to the world is either conducive to vibrant relationality or silent. Ideal-typical characters illustrate the notion: artists Gustav and Vincent are resource and process oriented, respectively; Anna and Hannah bring negative and positive dispositions to family and work; Adrian confronts the world in instrumental-rational mode, seeks mastery of self and circumstances, while creative, socially aware Dorian is all about an assimilation (as opposed to usurpation) of the world. The ‘basic elements of human relationships to the world’ are corporeal, emotional and cognitive-evaluative. Here Honneth’s contention that recognition is fundamental to relations to self is empirically fleshed out and serves as a first indication that ‘resonance’ incorporates but also goes beyond recognition. Rosa reminds us that our bodies signal the quality of our world relations by the way we are grounded (stand), breathe, eat, gaze at others, laugh, cry and love. Agents of modernity’s usurping, alienating and reifying logic, our attempts at assimilation invariably turn into modes of domination with self-objectification a logical extension.

Rosa adds layers to his concept: the neuronal bases for empathy are grounded in our irreducible sociality; all basic forms of relationality are prior to cognitive operations, and these determine whether we feel carried in the world or thrown into it; whether we experience world as responsive or repellent (pp. 235–6). Class and milieu structure our ‘normal existential definition of problems’ (Schulze). We might see the world as threat, as providing stimulation, challenges, as environment for self-discovery or something to adapt to, and hence we might see ourselves as shaping, or subject to being shaped by, the world (p. 245). ‘Expectations of self-efficacy’ are central to the world-affirming stance, and so are our orientations to ‘strong evaluations’ (Taylor), although their normative content is, for Rosa, indeterminate. Resonance is, above all, a mode of relating. More than passively experienced rapture, it is a mutual, active affecting of subject and object (in the broadest possible sense). As experience it is marked by a ‘constitutive elusiveness’ unreachable by instrumental-rational means (p. 298).

Social-philosophical engagements with alienation have championed other conceptual ‘candidates’ for the description of non-alienated world relations, and foremost amongst them, for Rosa, is ‘autonomy’. Autonomy does not adequately describe non-alienated relations because of its emphasis on agentic control in ‘the sense of self-determination’ and a one-sided focus on the ‘subjective end’ of resonant connections. Resonance can, on this view, ‘integrate theories’ of autonomy as the adequate ‘key concept for the determination of the successful life’ (pp. 302–3, 315).

Rosa identifies three ‘axes of resonance’. The horizontal axis is comprised of family, friendship and politics. Family constitutes a shelter of authentic care and affection, however besieged it is by systemic logics; friendship provides intimacy because it is a non-institutionalized relationship that also functions as a window into the world. But public, political relationships too hold resonant potentials: democracy, like music, rather than aiming at rationally achieved will formation, should aim to make ‘audible the single individual so that the politically formed world becomes an expression of its productive polyphony’ (p. 366). For all its whipping up of frenzied collective identification, totalitarianism relies on the denigration and destruction of others and is therefore disqualified as ‘resonance pathology’ (p. 371, original emphasis).

The diagonal axis denotes relationships to ‘things’ that are resonant when our creative energies are mustered in intrinsically motivated interactions with materials. In education – the field of ‘the structural production of dispositional resonance’ as well as alienation (p. 418) – the relationship to knowledge qua material is crucial, along with the general classroom atmosphere. Good teachers function as a ‘tuning fork’ causing secondary vibrations of curiosity and interest in students (p. 414). Sports is singled out as a domain of consumption whose experience in the viewing of events can charge experiences with ‘collective effervescence’ on a global scale (p. 426). But while sporting articles can connect us to nature (snow, water, etc.), there is today an apotheosis of the purchasing act over and above the creative engagement with the things we buy (pp. 429–34).

Turning to vertical axes of resonance and beginning with religion, for Rosa prayer is a medium of communication aimed at the establishment of a deep resonance forged in subjects’ simultaneous turning to the inside and outside replete with horizontal (community) and diagonal connections (e.g. via religious icons). Vis-à-vis nature, we constantly oscillate between intimacy and degradation: we seek its nurturing power and beauty, while we consume its vistas in ‘resonance simulacra’ (p. 469) and aspire to a whole new level of mastery with gene manipulation. Can our relationship to Art recoup what we have lost in nature? Music emerges as a prime example of a particular relationship to the world in those listening moments when we seem to take leave of the present, or, when making it, we experience the momentary bliss of connection to music’s intangible something that deletes any cognitive attention to the act of performance. Here, and in the experience of Art generally, lies a social-critical moment that Adorno especially elaborated: it raises ‘the possibility of a relationship of resonance that does not correlate with real relationships to the world’ (p. 485). And then there is History: if depression severs the continuum past-present-future, our ability to embed biography in history is another vertical axis that belongs to Rosa’s register of the good life.

Enter the history of modernity as ‘resonance catastrophe’ (p. 517). Writers, philosophers and sociologists have expressed modernity’s constitutive fear that the world might fall silent. Here Kafka’s ‘K’, forever denied access to and lost in the labyrinth of modern bureaucracy, meets Musil’s voiceless Ulrich. While Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger and Lukács describe our homelessness, the rift that has opened up between the modern subject and world, Nietzsche marshals ‘superhuman powers’ to veritably ‘force resonance…from a silent world’ (p. 540). Marx’s alienation, Weber’s disenchantment ushered in by the intellectualization of life, Durkheim’s anomie and Simmel’s anonymity and rising aversion between modern individuals serve Rosa as the foundational sociological foil for his thinking. Fromm, Benjamin, Marcuse, Habermas, Honneth and Adorno speak to the Frankfurt School’s appraisal of alienation and reification. Rosa excavates the various degrees to which anything akin to resonance is to be gleaned in these writers. There are no surprises here, and he concludes: ‘it is not for Critical Theory to once again prove reification or alienation, but to develop the concept of a non-reified form of existence, which can in consistent fashion salvage or even assimilate the intimated and hoped-for potentials of mimetic, auratic, erotic or charismatic relationships’ (p. 598).

Then Rosa turns to ‘contextual factors’ of subject-world relations – moods, landscapes, architectural spaces, the presence of friends, a sense of wellbeing – and the ‘structural factors’ of religious affiliation, gender and age. Catholicism emerges as better able to provide vertical resonance when compared to Protestantism with its persisting inner-worldly asceticism pace Weber. Since puberty marks a universal period of alienation in developmental-psychological mode (p. 295), pre-pubescent children are paragons of resonance; for them time passes slowly as a result of ever new experiences, although age alone cannot account for experiences of resonance because in their openness to the world the young are still seeking their own voice (pp. 657–9). Rosa does not merely recognize prevailing masculine and feminine stereotypes that posit men as emotionally non-expressive and women as caring and emotive, but gives some credence to them: he thinks that the ‘feminization’ (Verweiblichung) of reified world-relations might force men to adapt: ‘femininity would then appear to be the preferable quality’ (p. 656). A brief return to education precedes the conclusion that material and educational resources – the accumulation of various forms of capital – enable resonance, but that this requires the acquisition of an ‘urban-masculine-protestant’ habitus which, in turn, feeds into late-modern alienation (p. 661) since resonance by definition cannot be acquired but merely institutionally enabled. Mute institutions stifle its authentic realization. The treatment of patients as clients and the curtailment of employees’ autonomous creativity are examples (pp. 666–8). Again, Rosa returns to commodified oases of resonance and argues that industry can merely conjure sentimental responses to artistic-aesthetic products, but their ‘recipients, customers or clients’ (p. 705) cannot enter into responsive, dialogical relationships of resonance. And then there is the contemporary political disconnection between values and actions: (German) Greens have the largest ecological footprint, and heterosexual couples seem to end up going along with the traditional domestic division of labour despite the best of intentions (pp. 718–20).

But there is hope. A ‘post-growth society’ could offer a concrete step towards better world relations: the introduction of unconditional, universal basic income. Once introduced, it would undermine the logic of struggle over resources by transforming the ‘basic mode of being-in-the-world from ‘struggle to security’, thus ushering in ‘a new orientation even of life conduct’ (pp. 730–31, original emphases). Rosa glimpses promising developments in the emergence of urban community gardens and the ‘share economy’, authentic ‘oases and small islands in a sea of growth events’ (p. 735). What we need most of all, however, is not another political program but ‘a vision of another form of relationship to the world’, given shape by ‘a concept for a yearning that has lost its name’ (p. 737). Instead of a conclusion, Rosa offers a response to his critics (actual and presumed). It contains the promise of a book on power, reference to the research-productivity a queer perspective might add, and a reiteration of his dedication to a ‘normative monism’ marked by resonance as the ‘meta-criterion for the successful life’ (p. 749).

II

Rosa’s analysis is wide-ranging and truly impressive in scope and depth: biology and literature, Pink Floyd and Schubert, phenomenology, psychology, main proponents of the Frankfurt School, Goethe, Schiller and more are marshalled to elaborate his sociology and the fulcrum concept on which it hinges. Issues remain, however; and they are mostly found in the detail.

The discussion of diagonal axes of resonance describing our relationship to things contains tensions. Resonance requires voices that (metaphorically) speak, listen and respond to each other. But relationships with things result from our interpretation of interactions and experiences which we project into the space of subject-material relationality. If thus the voice of the material is in fact our own, aren’t we then in an ‘echoing’ (and thus ‘silent’) state rather than a resonant relationship? And if fear prohibits resonant relationships, why does the experience of ‘sudden horror’ at the sight of a piece of paper bespeak a relationship of resonance rather than an anxious misapprehension of the connection (p. 391)? Commodities hold out the promise of resonance; marketing urges us to buy the experience, which we cannot actualize since commercial acquisition cannot enable our ‘being touched by the intangible other with which we enter into a responsive relationship’ (p. 621, original emphases). Yet only a few pages later, a decisive – and necessary – qualification: commodification itself cannot curtail the experience of resonance, it is now, some 600 pages into the book, merely ‘made more difficult’ (erschwert) (p. 625). We arrive at a vital distinction: resonance can be authentic or inauthentic, with industry the dominant producer of resonance simulacra that may or may not enable authentic experiences. But how exactly are we to make sense of these? Let’s take a concert hall, an ‘oasis of resonance’, and let’s imagine the performance of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony. More than simply passively affected by a work of Art, we are part of an audience which collectively demands and elicits resonant aesthetic experiences, and by its very presence plays an ‘active’ part in the performance. We are deeply moved, forget ourselves and all that is prosaic, stand for a time in an utterly wondrous relationship to the world whose heart we can feel but never quite grasp. Is this mere sentimentality, evoked by clever marketing, by the performance environment or by our unacknowledged pretensions to elite culture? Or did our strong evaluations of Art as something that truly matters ground the experience, as did a feeling of self-efficacy stemming from our support of the Arts? Surely there are also those invisible strings that resonate between us and the orchestra, the long-dead composer, the work, its aura and the history in which it is embedded. Thus moved we decide to read Shostakovich’s memoir only to find the following statement:

The rejoicing [in the Fifth’s finale] is forced, created under threat…. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing’, and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing’. What kind of apotheosis is this? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that. (1984: 183)

Another perhaps more important question is to what extent ‘resonance’ can live up to being the ‘meta-criterion’ for a good/successful life. From Heller and Fehér’s perspective, for example, the longing for resonance – and especially its experience in fleeting moments of aesthetic, spiritual and collective rapture (they refer to Maslow’s ‘peak experience’ ) – belong to the register of needs that must be met in order to lead a ‘satisfied’ life (as distinct from a ‘good life’, which requires the instantiation of Aristotelian virtues) even though we moderns cannot die ‘satiated with life’ (Weber). It is incumbent on us to turn our fate into self-determined destiny. On that view resonance only becomes sustaining of a satisfied life in the context of self-determination. That absent, it remains ‘the promise of a paradise that never materializes’ (1988: 43). Now, according to Rosa, self-determination (autonomy) is, with its emphasis on control, inadequate as a defining characteristic of the successful life, and thus he subsumes it under the rubric of resonance, ostensibly the more fitting other of alienation. But autonomy is not, as Rosa suggests, the opposite of alienation but of heteronomy. Thus when he disqualifies the criterion of self-determination by stating that a ‘dictator may be totally autonomous, i.e. able to exercise the greatest possible control over his life’s circumstances – and [yet]…feel alienated’ (p. 302), Rosa does no more than raise the possibility of a subjective feeling despite the condition of self-determination. Likewise, conditions of heteronomy do not of themselves exclude resonant connections to others, to God, music, nature, and so on. The real problem is positing an opposition where there is none; we are thus presented with a false dilemma. Reducing self-determination to agentic control also allows Rosa to describe the experience of ‘falling head over heels in love’ as a moment in which we are out of control but ‘not alienated’ (pp. 302–3, original emphases). That reduction distorts a social-philosophical understanding of autonomy as a freely-chosen life that, especially in love and friendship, is also about being oneself in another (Hegel). Thus, the question of resonance’s priority as the criterion for a successful life is not as definitively answered as might be hoped. The elision of heteronomy amounts to an elision of power whose promised elaboration in a future publication blunts the analytic edge of the work.

Take, for example, the approach to gender. Rosa sides with a ‘feminization’ of subject-world relations marked by ‘empathy, sensibility, emotionality’ (p. 754) to which men may have to adapt. Not only are feminine stereotypes strongly constituted by male privilege (whatever the deleterious psychological consequences for men), surely the aim worth aspiring to is the free expression of the full range of emotions appropriate to contexts irrespective of gender and sexual identification. That depending on context women still tend to get criticized for excessively exhibiting one or the other set of ‘traits’ should give pause to think. Also problematic is Rosa’s self-professed surprise regarding the continuing emergence of a traditional, heterosexual household division of labour despite partners’ best intentions. He perceives this as a problem of blocked resonance relations that blind actors to both the possibility of ‘dialogical negotiation’ and ‘the imagination of just distribution [of responsibilities]’. Instead, ‘mute…imperatives’ are said to ‘become effective behind actors’ backs’ and shape the relationship (p. 720, my emphases). Power relations by which benefits accrue to men are ignored while both men and women are left without agency. Instead, hypostatized, alienating modernity seems to be the root of mute relationships tout court.

There are other parts of the book that raise questions and niggling doubts that are never quite allayed. Like the notion of children as ‘resonance beings’ (p. 658) who invariably encounter alienation in puberty, thrown into an alien (extra-familial) world. It seems that Rosa mixes a Sturm und Drang version of adolescence with its biological determinant (puberty) despite a long history of sociological analyses of childhood, youth and the life course. Are archaic religions bereft of (silencing) fear of the unknown? Is film’s language really inadequate so that it needs music to lend ‘pictures emotional quality’ (p. 160)? (Bergman, Hitchcock, Haneke and others have proven that notion wrong, and masterfully so.) Do teachers not need more than dispositional resources to practise resonant pedagogies? What about solitude (as opposed to loneliness) if we accept that it enables self-reflection that might assist us in adjusting our stance to the world? The communicative activity of prayer is the exception here. Is thus the way to cope with social acceleration solely the vita activa? These are some of the open questions and ambiguities a close reading of this extensive work evoked.

Resonanz is a formidable attempt at thinking through the ramifications of the idea that the rich, fulfilling experience of mutuality that chimes between us and the world, that energizes a libidinous life force – momentary and fleeting here, more enduring there – matters because it intimates unfulfilled potentials; and that in the pursuit of its realization modernity’s dynamism has predominantly turned its redemptive energies against that very possibility. Rosa is at his most consistent and convincing on topics that have dogged social and critical theory with their in-built elusiveness, such as his reflections on the reception and making of music, or his take on friendship, which gives life to the relationship in a way other perspectives, including the recognitive turn, simply have not. Despite occasional conceptual overreach, Resonanz is a convincing reflection on our comprehensive relationality and a trenchant critique of quantifying and reifying trends in social research and everyday life. Rosa’s original contribution is ultimately an insightful resuscitation of ‘alienation’ and a defence of its conceptual validity by way of the analysis of its other. But the centrality of that dialectic of opposites exacts a price. Since, for Rosa, any resource focus concerning the good life unwittingly buys into and perpetuates the modern malaise, he avoids that other dialect indispensable to a critique of capitalism: the dialectic resonance-resources. Once resonance is explained as the generalizable criterion for the good life, it scarcely needs constant reiteration in confrontation with alienation. What is required is a conceptual and empirical confrontation with those material, cultural and symbolic realities, and the dynamics of power that play into their distribution, that, after all, also shape the contextual, social and institutional ‘factors’ said to be the conditions for resonant relationships to the world. None of this is to disagree with the call to continue to envisage and set in motion transformative social processes whose aim is the enablement of the rich relationships Rosa’s ‘Romantic concept’ (p. 293) seeks to capture, so that the promise of modernity to still our yearning for resonance can, in the spirit of this book, be turned into more than the vain and potentially perilous hope that the world be redeemed, re-enchanted and re-ordered.