Resonance: a normative category or figure of uncertainty? On reading Hartmut Rosa with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical reading of Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social resonance in dialogue with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The article shows that the notion of resonance is meant to correct the inherent determinism which characterized Rosa's earlier work on acceleration. As a responsive mode of being in the world, resonance stands in a dialectical relationship to alienation, redressing the Cartesian split between mind and body. Exploring the inherent tension between resonance as a normative social category and as an aesthetic concept, resonance emerges as a figure of uncertainty which, for good reasons, resists integration into the social world.

KEYWORDS:

• Resonance as aesthetic experience
• mediation
• second Romanticism
• German imperialism
• death

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Theories of acceleration in response to globalization and the age of the internet abound in contemporary discourse. See for example Borscheid (2004); Bauman (2007); Virilio (2005); Han (2009); Gumbrecht (2010). In contrast to the prevailing dystopian view expressed in these studies, John Tomlinson (2007) and Judy Wajcman (2015) offer a more nuanced account.

2. For alternative accounts of modernity and modernism that foreground cultural interventions in the modern discourse of time and analyse entangled temporalities see Berman (1982, 2010); Koepnick (2014); Fuchs and Long (2016); Goettsche (2016).

3. The vertical axis reveals the Romantic underpinning of Rosa’s theory: his understanding of art as a vertical or transcendent sphere of resonance does not sufficiently reflect the fact that transcendence is a historically embedded notion. Modern and postmodern art can hardly be placed on a vertical axis.

4. A further aspect is the emergence of a new posthuman condition which has challenged the dualisms of subject/object, the human/non-human, nature/culture, nature/techne, life/matter and so on. Advances in AI, nano and bio technologies are engendering entangled system states which are generating new levels of interconnectivity and complexity. On this issue see Allenby and Sarewitz (2011). In the age of the Anthropocene, they argue, earth system states ‘integrate, environmental, cultural, theological, institutional, financial, managerial, technological and psychological dimensions’ which give rise to contingency (p. 84). For a critical debate on posthumanism see also Whitehead and Wesch (2012); More and Vita-More (2013).

5. Rosa defines alienation ‘as a mode of relating to the world in which the subject encounters the (subjective, objective and/or social) world as either indifferent or repulsive. Alienation thus denotes a situation in which the subject experiences his or her own body or feelings, material and natural environment or social interactions as external, unconnected, non-responsive, in a word: mute’ (Rosa 2019, pp. 178–179).

6. For an alternative reading of recognition in response to Rosa that draws on and ultimately reinstates Axel Honneth’s notion of a struggle for recognition in the public domain see Bandelin (2017).

7. Up to a point, Rosa’s resonance chimes with Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht’s notion of Präsenzkultur: Gumbrecht argues that modern historical consciousness has been irretrievably replaced by the new chronotope of a broad and ultimately timeless present. On the one hand, the broad present is closed off from the future as an open horizon; on the other, it is flooded by pasts that we can no longer shed in our hyper-mediated world. As a point of convergence between a multitude of electronically mediated pasts and a threatening future, the present expands ever more into a time of intransitive simultaneity. See Gumbrecht (2010, 2012).

8. The music chapter has attracted much controversy in Thomas Mann scholarship. On the connection between Music, Romanticism, irrationalism and German nationalism see Gutmann (1974) and John S. King (1996).

9. Sebastian D. Knowles (2003) shows that from its infancy, the gramophone was associated with both immortality and death. He tracks the role of the gramophone in modernist writers from T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce (who recorded himself on the gramophone) to Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett.

10. Castorp’s other favorites are Bizet’s Carmen and Gounod’s Faust which features prominently in the following chapter: the record is played during a séance in which Castorp’s dead cousin Joachim Ziemssen is conjured up in the uniform of a WWI soldier. On this central chapter see Pfitzner (1974) and Bub (2008, pp. 64–65).

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Notes on contributors

Anne Fuchs

Anne Fuchs (MRIA, FBA) is a Professor and Director of the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin. Recent publications (with J.J. Long, eds), Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900 – 2015: between Acceleration and Slowness (Palgrave 2016); (with Ines Detmers) Ästhetische Eigenzeit in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2 vols Oxford German Studies (2017); Precarious Times. Temporality and History in Modern German Culture (Cornell UP 2019).