“From any point on the surface of existence … one may drop a sounding into the depths of the soul” (Simmel, 1950)
Our salon with Hartmut Rosa on Resonance was hosted in the parlour of No 63 Merrion Square, Dublin, on 8 March 2019, at an auspicious time and in an auratic space that has strong and deep resonances. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses on Merrion Square were originally family homes of Enlightenment and Modern Dublin, and their parlours, which means the rooms designated for parler – speaking, conversation, discourse – have hosted many salons before ours. The parlour in No. 63 is in the house of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland; from this room we can drop a sounding into the depths, finding resonance with our collective heritage of archaeology, mythology, and anthropology, deep grounds that may provide an anchoring for the present. W.B. Yeats, to whom we owe the quintessential metaphor of Modernity’s dissonance, ‘Things fall apart/the centre cannot hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’, lived at No 82. Charismatic leader of the Radical Party and exemplar of the public use of reason, Daniel O’Connell, lived at No. 58. Violet Gibson who lived at No.22 went to Rome where ‘Europe’s great hope’ was addressing an adoring crowd. Mussolini arrogantly cocked his head, a shot rang out, and Gibson’s bullet grazed the tip of his nose.
Jane Speranza Wilde lived at No. 1, where she hosted a famous salon. Speranza Wilde – her name means ‘Hope’- was a linguist, translator, and political activist; she claimed descent from Dante. Her weekly ‘conversazione’ were on Saturday afternoons. Gavin Duffy, editor of The Nation was on trial for treason until Speranza identified herself as author of the offending newspaper column. Home Rule party leader Isaac Butt was a regular guest; so was Suffragette leader Millicent Fawcett; and so too was Bram Stoker. As a child, Oscar Wilde served refreshments to his mother’s guests-writers, musicians, actors, politicians, students and intellectuals, of whom there were so many they spilled out onto the adjoining staircase. Speranza’s salon was filled with flowers, and was candlelit even on sunny days. James Joyce and Nora Barnacle had agreed to meet in front of Wilde’s house; but Nora stood him up, and re-arranged to meet the next day instead, 16 June 1904, which became ‘Bloomsday’, the day on which Joyce ‘entered into relation with the world around him and left behind him the loneliness he had felt since his mother’s death’ (Ellmann, 1982).
Our salon on Resonance convened on 8 March 2019, International Women’s Day, as it was usually women who convened the salon, women who were otherwise marginalized from public and intellectual life. The modern salon resonates with the deeper history of the Greek symposium as a sociable and convivial gathering where literary and artistic currents, and circles of philosophy and social and political thought overlap and mutually influence one another; an institution dedicated to discourse, to humanistic ideals and intellectual enlightenment that have been essential to democratic, debate-driven public life in Europe. Sociology emerged in the salons of Gertrude and Georg Simmel and Marianne and Max Weber, and with this event, we hope to conserve and re-invent a new tradition, a sociology salon in Ireland.
Dublin, and Ireland generally, is commonly imagined to be an oasis of deceleration in the late modern waste land; a place where people still enjoy relations to the world that are meaningful and resonant; where people enjoy ‘a sense of place’, a feeling of ‘groundedness’, of inter-subjective ‘realness’, where a relatively un-alienated life can still be lived. The evening before our salon Mark Huagaard and I visited Toner’s pub nearby, and sitting at a table next to us were a former Taoiseach [Prime Minister], a Minister for Finance, and the Leader of a rival political party. They had no security detail, as far as we could see; they were just three colleagues on their way home from work; friends, enjoying a conversation, sharing a drink in a public house. Everyone recognized them of course, and some glances and nods were exchanged, acknowledged and reciprocated with civility and casual informality. And these men were three horsemen of the post-2008 EU Troika’s austerity apocalypse!
But the seemingly easy horizontal, diagonal, and even to some extent vertical resonance in this vignette of contemporary Dublin life is a mask and distraction from the presence of a deep and dangerous dissonance; a dissonance that we need to listen to first, before we attune to resonance as a response to it; for here in Dublin, close to our salon, there are two great siege engines of the global neoliberal revolution: the IFSC (International Financial Services Centre), and the European headquarters of GAFA – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, the ‘big four’ tech giants, the fastest growing and the driving powers of global social acceleration.
Dublin’s International Financial Services Centre has been called the ‘wild west’ of global finance: lawless; limitless; a virtual island that from a fiscal regulatory point of view exists-but-does-not-exist; a Tax-Free-Zone. The IFSC is a syphon that global corporates use to pump away the fiscal foundations, sapping and undermining the collective household of society. As one of the siege engines of the neoliberal revolution, the function of the IFSC is ‘aggressive tax minimization’ and its effect is ‘BEPS’ – Base Erosion and Profit Shifting: pillaging and hollowing out the mundus, the store of common wealth on which Europe’s ancient cities have been founded, accelerating wealth transfer to the 0.01% of global ‘ultra high net worth individuals’ while deepening inequality and poverty for everyone else, opening a seismic fault-line of social conflict. And the other source of dissonance is the accelerating, envy-driven schismatic machine that is Facebook. These two machines are now resonating with one another, reciprocally and recursively accelerating and amplifying one another. Dublin is a Hellmouth opened by these infernal machines, machines that have generated the cacophony and dissonance of Trump and Brexit, and not by accident but by design.
This is the historical backdrop and contemporary context in which we invited Prof. Dr Hartmut Rosa to visit us in Ireland and to talk with us about his work. Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena. He is a leading figure in the present generation of critical theory, the world-renowned ‘Frankfurt School’. Grounded in classical and contemporary sociology, working in the best traditions of interdisciplinary social and political thought, in a series of important books, published in several languages, the most well known of which are Social Acceleration: a New Theory of Modernity, and Resonance: a Sociology of the Relationship to the World, Hartmut Rosa provides us with a deep and comprehensive sociological diagnostics of the malaises of late-modern society in terms of acceleration and its social, economic, political, cultural, and existential ramifications; followed by a sociological therapeutics addressed to the dysrhythmia and cacophony so characteristic of our present age.
Our salon with Hartmut Rosa was in two parts. In the morning a colloquium, consisting of a panel (Hartmut Rosa, plus interlocutors); plus an attendance of some fifteen others who contributed to the discussion. The participants in the morning were people already familiar with Rosa’s work, so Professor Rossa’s presentation was followed by contributions from the panellists, and questions and discussion from the attendees. Some draft papers were pre-circulated, and we had asked that contributions would not be the typical form, i.e. ‘critiques’ of Rosa’s work but rather that they should take the form of positive engagement, elaborating on Rosa’s themes and ideas, with the aim of a generative and inspiring discussion. Panellists included Mark Haugaard (Sociology & Politics, NUI Galway) Michael Cronin (French, Trinity College Dublin) John O’Brien (Sociological Association of Ireland), Anne Fuchs (Humanities Institute of Ireland, UCD), Andreas Hess (Sociology UCD), Maeve Cooke (Philosophy UCD). After an informal lunch and conversation, we reconvened in the afternoon for a Symposium, with a larger audience that included people from a wide variety of backgrounds across the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences. In this session, chaired by Professor Maeve Cooke, UCD, Professor Rosa spoke to a more general theme: ‘Social Acceleration, Resonance, and Restoring Society’, tracing the arc of his work, locating it with reference to classical and contemporary social theory.
From the discourse, discussion and conversation of the salon there emerged the papers that are collected in this special section of this issue of the Journal of Political Power. Hartmut Rosa’s work is trans-disciplinary. The papers collected here reflect the scope Professor Rosa’s interests, and how his work speaks to a wide range of themes and topics across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, embracing also more applied fields of Economics and Social Policy. Five themes emerge and re-occur and resonate throughout the papers collected here as problematic domains and modalities of our relationship to the world: the first theme relates to questions of ‘power, authoritarianism and fascism; then and now’. A second theme is a tension between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ domains of human experience and our relationship to the world: needs of the body and needs of the soul; ‘horizontal and diagonal’, and ‘vertical’ resonance relations. A third theme concerns the relationship between levels of ‘individual and collective life’; dialectical tensions, intersections and syntheses between the biographical-psychological and historical-political; the intersection of private troubles and public issues; which is the essence of the relationship between agency and structure. A fourth theme concerns the practices, social institutions, and individual and collective configurations of action in which these problems and tensions reside, and through which they are simultaneously reconciled, and reproduced. The fifth theme concerns the relationship between the universal and particular aspects of the social construction of the social subject. Are there certain universal experiences of alienation or resonance, or is all agency particular to specific social orders, thus not generalizable? Following from that, is the attempt to universalize class-, ethno- or Euro-centric?
Haugaard’s paper is structured around the individual and collective, exploring what it means for social structures to resonate with agents. This thread allows him to link with the other themes, including the spiritual aspects and the biographical-psychological. In the article Haugaard re-tells the story of Bernard Moitessier, who sailed in the first solo non-stop around the world race. Once, in the deep Southern Ocean, he was transformed as a social subject through resonance with the spirit of the sea. Moitessier discovered that ‘winning’ was an entirely pointless exercise. He suddenly saw it as a social construction symptomatic of a disenchanted modern world. Haugaard interprets this story as a transgression of resonance, while Rosa, in his masterly Reply, explains how resonance is an encounter with something that is not entirely captured by the standard interpretative frames, so not a perfect fit. Resonance is transformative of the social ontology of the social subject. The discord that Moitessier feels with the modern world, encapsulated by his rejection of the concept of ‘winning’ is a resonant experience that deconstructs the mute alienating aspects of modernity. Perceiving the muteness of ‘winning’ constitutes a rejection of social relations based upon alienating, ever-accelerating, competition.
Eschewing the disenchanted world of modernity, Keohane’s paper is an evocative, poetic and lyrical paper. The style of writing is in itself an exercise in resonance, which deals with the contemporary other of resonance, including the dissonance of Facebook, Brexit and the disintegration of the EU. To create the feel of resonance, Keohane invokes musical themes, in particular Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This is characterized as an Enlightenment work that has implicit in it the paradox of the modern project, whereby reason is both the condition of possibility for liberation, yet also closure to other, leading to alienation. The closing of the Ninth Symphony is, of course, the anthem of the EU. However, the words of Schiller’s lyrics, which echo Kant’s perpetual peace and the ideals of freedom, have been removed. This excising of the human voice is symbolic of the muting of a chord of resonance between the individual and collective life. Once that link is lost, once the EU no longer resonates at a socio-ontological level, this creates an opportunity for the machines of alienation (including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube ‘fake news’) to make totalitarian nationalist visions attractive. The Enlightenment cosmopolitan vision underpinning the EU is socially constructed as mute. The EU is presented as a disenchanted world of faceless, distant, self-serving, bureaucratic elites. In contrast, nationalism and authoritarianism appear full of spirit. Part of the resonance-deficit problem of the EU is that it was originally conceived as an economic block (the EEC), without sufficient attention to the social construction of this new union, as a collective social body politic with deep historical roots. As observed by Durkheim, a flag is not simply a cloth: it is an emblem of social belonging and meaning for the social subject. Ultimately, this is the spiritual dimension that gives meaning beyond the mundane, which makes the flag sacred. For most EU citizens the EU flag is not sacred, as it does not evoke any deep feeling of resonance relative to their being-in-the-world. There is a dissonance between ‘private troubles’ of EU citizens and ‘public issues’ of the EU institutions.
In his reply Rosa pays tribute to Keohane’s reading of the current malaise, while adding a note of optimism. Following Arendt, Rosa points out that structural forces are never determinate, as human agency always has the possibility of natality, whereby agents can begin anew, changing their future path. The concept of natality has a non-material spiritual element. While invoking such idealist-cum-spiritual elements, Rosa emphasizes that ‘spirit’ should always be conceptualized in a sociological manner, not a theological one.
The spiritual dimension of resonance, relates to another concern, raised by Fuchs. Relative to the opposition between idealism and materialism, is the concept of resonance not overly idealist, harking back to nineteenth-century Romanticism? Is the individual’s relationship to the collective life really solely mediated by resonance? Is there not a sense that this concept reflects the particular narrative selves of a rather privileged elite, for whom material concerns, such as food and housing, are no longer central preoccupations? Using the image of Mann’s The Magic Mountain as a foil, Fuchs explores how the nineteenth Century Romantic movement was a form of nostalgia that was opposed to the future, which had a dark side that manifests itself as a lust for war, ultimately contributing to the rise of Nazism.
In his response to Fuchs, Rosa distances himself from the characterization of resonance as an idealist product of Romanticism. Rather, these ideals are rooted in social subjects as interpretative beings, who impose meaning upon the world. Even in the material form, such as economic exchanges, interpretation is key. As observed by Marx, fundamental to the materialism of modern capitalism is an interpretative act whereby all material things are socially constructed as ‘commodities’. Interpretative acts can be alienating, or give resonance. In the case of interpretative act of things-as-commodities, this conceptualization contributes to alienation.
Rosa overcomes the dichotomy of idealism versus materialism and taps into a universal aspect of social agency. To continue the example, the alienated commodity fetishist is an out-and-out materialist, yet it is an act of interpretation, the construction of ideas as concepts, which makes possible this alienated materialism. Furthermore, Rosa emphasizes that conceptualization of resonance versus alienation does not reflect the particularities and concerns of European middle-class, rather it is common to peoples of economically and culturally diverse backgrounds because they share a commonality as interpretative social beings. While interpretation is universal, the concept of commodities is particular to a very specific structural context – it is a specific from of alienation, reflecting a particular society.
The opposition between resonance versus alienation taps into the core problem of individual agency versus social structure. As argued by Cooke, alienation entails the determinism of structure, while resonance involves agency, as freedom. Agents are social subjects who have the capacity to speak with their own voice. In the above example, the free social subject can transcend the commodity conceptualization of the world. However, while freedom is implicit in the concept of resonance, it is under-theorized. At this point, we see a theoretical disagreement between Cooke and Rosa. For Cooke, the social subject who overcomes alienation is a post-Kantian, self-conscious, critically reflective social subject, along the lines of Taylor’s account of the strongly evaluative social subject. Cooke argues that the social subject of strong evaluation is particular form of self-efficacious social subject, who is critically engaged with their strong evaluations, which entails a form of independent evaluation relative to transcending truths, ethics and principles of justice. Echoing the problem of the universality or lack thereof (pinpointed by Fuchs), this is the type of social subject that underpins the normative ideal of critical theory, as exemplified by the Habermassian reasoning social subject, who is a product of modernity. Rosa counters this by arguing that Taylor’s strong evaluator is not a social subject particular to modernity but a universal social subject. The modern social subject neither chooses to face up to being a strong evaluator (resonance) nor avoids it (alienation). Rather, on Rosa’s read of Taylor, strong evaluation is core to agency in all societies; it is universally applicable.
If the resonant self is a strong evaluator, does this imply a teleological underpinning to the concept of resonance? O’Brien reads Rosa’s normativity in an Aristotelian light, inspired by MacIntyre’s call for a return to virtue. In this interpretation, the error of Enlightenment modernity was the abandonment of the Aristotelian insight that the good life is guided by telos. This error was combined with an over-estimation of rational thought. On that read, the pursuit of resonance represents a significant turn away from the Habermassian attempt to regenerate the Enlightenment project (again, the suggestion of resonance as a return to Romanticism). O’Brien is particularly interested in the institutional reforms that might be needed to actualize greater levels of resonance, and in this context discusses social reforms, such as basic income. In this context, O’Brien suggests that the model involves an implicit endorsement of a form of Rhinish model of Christian democracy – a suggestion that Rosa strongly repudiates. Returning to the theme of resonance as openness to uncontrollability (or natality), Rosa explains that he is reluctant to pinpoint specific institutional changes as ‘operationalizations’ of resonance. Again, Rosa emphasizes particularity, insisting that there is no universal institutional formula for resonance that transcends the particularities of social circumstances. So, while resonance is universal to agency, the particular manifestations of it are always particular specific structural and cultural social relations. Rosa’s insistence that resonance is both universal and particular demonstrates sensitivity to the great classical sociological canon. For Durkheim and Weber social subjects had universal characteristics as interpretative beings, simultaneously both thinkers had deep sensitivity to the fact that these universal characteristics were always particular in their manifestations. This tension between the universal and particular was core to the whole sociological enterprise. To digress marginally from Rosa for a moment, contemporary post-modern and post-colonial critics miss this and misconstrue the universal elements of classical sociology as Euro- or Enlightenment-centric, without understanding that these universals were coupled with an acute sensitivity to the particularity of their manifestation. For instance, the Kantian categories of time and space may be universal aspects of agency but the ‘clock time’ of capitalism is very different from the ‘circular time’ of some traditional societies. Returning to Rosa, it is possible to argue that all interpretative social subjects have the potential for either resonance or alienation, while at the same time being acutely aware that the meanings of these terms will be entirely different depending upon the contingencies of socialisation and material circumstances, either on an historical or anthropological dimension. The indispensability of the sociological lens means that, while there is an undeniably idealist and spiritual aspect to the theory, these elements are not rooted in anti-Enlightenment Romanticism, mysticism or religious belief; they remain sociological categories. As observed by Durkheim in his account of the sacred and Weber in his account of charisma, while these types of phenomena are experienced and described in everyday life using mystic or theological vocabulary, there is a sociological grounding to these ‘spiritual’ aspects of human agency, which the sociologist should always look for in order to understand society. In conclusion, the concept of resonance should always be understood relative to the interpretative horizon of the sociological imagination.