Interview with sociologist Hartmut Rosa | Learn to resonate

Have you ever been secretly disappointed after returning from an expensive trip that was supposed to be perfect? And have you, on the contrary, been moved by a banal piece of sky glimpsed through your windshield?

Hartmut Rosa thinks he knows why.

“The more we try to control the world, the more it escapes us”, summarizes the German sociologist.

Winner of the Erich Fromm Prize, sponsor of the UNESCO Chair on Philosophy with Children, Rosa was among the “21 thinkers to read in 2021” of Philosophy Magazine.

For a German sociologist, Rosa is very approachable. He is wary of theoreticians who elucubrate concepts that do not ignite any flame, even in them. He prefers the big questions experienced by all. Like the relationship to time, to work, to life.

For 30 years, he has been criticizing the frenetic agitation of everyday life and the loss of interiority. The pandemic has reinforced his theses. It is a mature thought for its time.

I read some of his books last winter. To my surprise, he agreed to talk to me by Zoom from his office at Friedrich-Schiller University. The appointment had to be made a month in advance. The man is faithful to his theories: he does not overload his schedule.

His diction is slow and precise. He is always looking for the exact word, with an embarrassed pleasure when the formula satisfies him.

“The pandemic made me think a lot. Time has slowed down. We could do whatever we promised ourselves to do. For example, finally reading Shakespeare. Then we realized we found it boring, so we went back to YouTube…”

Rosa has been interested in accelerating the pace of life for several decades. He accuses capitalism which encourages us to always innovate, produce and consume more. This incessant competition is like an escalator descending against us. You have to move forward to stay put. Otherwise, we step back and fall.

This dictate of speed and growth is the foundation of our society. We accept it, as if it were self-evident. It is “invisible, depoliticized, undiscussed, under-theorized and inarticulate,” Rosa laments.

Psychopop reacts with a recipe. Tips for accessing greater happiness. Mindfulness with cut-out abs and an LED chalet…

Rosa does the opposite. He is not looking for a solution. He is interested in the social causes of this imbalance. The source, according to him: technology. She broke her promises.

Not so long ago, we dreamed of the advent of a leisure society, where work would only occupy a secondary place in our lives. And yet…

We sleep less and do more things at the same time.

At the beginning of the XX^e century, Georg Simmel found that city dwellers interacted with more people, but formed less deep relationships. Rosa believes that this also applies today to our relationship to nature, objects and experiences.

The present is constantly compressed. As a good German sociologist, he has an unpronounceable word to say it: “Gegenwartsschrumpfung”.

Rosa pauses. He adds with a small worried smile: “Why do we live like this, exactly? »

For a woman, a gay man or a person who had a toothache, the XVIII^e century was not ideal.

Rosa agrees. “I’m not nostalgic,” he insists. But that does not dispense with criticizing his time.

Heir to the Frankfurt School, he dismantles our social mechanisms to expose their failings. The planet has never been so small. We have access to all the experiences, all the knowledge, all the culture. To more possibilities than our imagination can conceive.

This “broadening of the available world” is not neutral. It increases our cravings. This quest leads further and further. To orbit.

But not everyone has the luxury of time. The ordinary citizen can only dream of this idleness. He will fall back on the purchase of a telescope, satisfied to know that he could, in theory, observe the cosmos. Even if he will barely use it.

According to Rosa, we seek to expand our capacity to have experiences. We accumulate them, we store them. It becomes fetishism. We come to desire the object itself, to enjoy its mere possession. To tell ourselves that we will be able to take advantage of it, one day, perhaps…

Another example: you open your computer. Every album imaginable is online. You browse for 10 minutes before making the right choice. Then after a few seconds of listening, dissatisfied, you try to find something better.

We are both frustrated by what we lack and disappointed by what we have. By all these quickly digested pleasures that do not satiate.

Rosa quotes the German playwright von Horvath: “You end up feeling that we are actually someone very different. We just don’t have time to be that someone…”

Which brings us back to the departure example of the traveller. Anyone who has bought the luxurious stay has expectations. If it rains, he will feel cheated. As if happiness was a product, a clause of the contract he had paid for.

This desire to “enlarge our access to the world” is also an attempt to put it at our service.

Everything must be useful to us. We are no longer surprised. We become deaf to the beauty of what surrounds us.

Rosa is not the first thinker to diagnose a crisis of meaning. Marx spoke of alienation, Weber of disenchantment, Camus of the absurd and Lukács of reification.

But Rosa goes one step further. He points to the emergency exit.

This is his other big idea: “resonance”. Consider the experience at the beginning of the text of someone who lets himself be moved by a seemingly banal landscape that presents itself without warning.

A relationship with no desire for control or possession. A pure availability to his environment.

“We have all experienced something similar before,” he says. It’s universal, but hard to describe. I will give you a personal example. I was skiing in the Swiss Alps, near Bern. I felt the physical presence of the mountain, it almost undulated. Seeing its peaks, I had an immediate attachment, as if I was connected to them. It’s not logical. It was a deep sense of belonging. »

Rosa lists some conditions for resonance: entering into a relationship with something, without trying to control it, and accepting to be affected.

Slow is not necessarily good, he says. The resonance can be experienced while riding down a slope on a bicycle or during a rock concert at 100 decibels.

Nor is Resonance a one-week yoga retreat, to “work on yourself” in order to return to the office with charged batteries, ready to perform.

Rosa does not say to look within. Rather, it invites us to open our eyes. Because life is elsewhere.

I tell him about Charles Taylor, on whom he did his doctorate and who has become his friend. “I could discuss it for hours,” he enthuses. For him, we are animals that interpret their own lives. »

Rosa took the idea further. Meaning does not come only from relationships with humans. It also stems from the relationship with nature and everything that surrounds us.

This is what has made the pandemic so painful. It was the slowness without the resonance. And we had to get used to interacting with others again.

“Social interactions are a vital need. But paradoxically, the less we see people, the less we want to see them. We forced ourselves to go out again with friends to the restaurant or the theater. Then once there, we were full of energy. »

At the start of the pandemic, he was optimistic. He hoped that we would learn lessons. If we were able to ground the planes, we should curb the pollution that warms the planet and impoverishes biodiversity.

“But I now see that people were very eager to return to normality, he says. At least, on a personal level, we may have evolved. »

Suggested reading to discover Hartmut Rosa:

For a short and clear introduction.

For a slightly longer and very accessible version.