Good Vibrations

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, the writings of the Frankfurt School have become heavily “sociologized” in form as well as content and no longer register on the radar of literary scholars. Hartmut Rosa’s Resonance (2019) may well reverse this trend. Ranging widely across literature, aesthetics and popular culture as well as sociology and politics, Rosa contends that the idea of resonance can help renew critical theory. Confronting a question that is also exercising literary scholars—Is it possible to orient away from negativity and skepticism without lapsing into dubious universalism or naïve affirmation?—his account of resonance hooks up in suggestive ways with recent literary-critical discussions of attunement, mood, and atmosphere. Rosa’s argument pivots on a contrast between two forms of relation: the world as resonance and the world as resource (material to be exploited in the maximization of profit and the frenetic acceleration of social life). In contrast to the acute pessimism of the early Frankfurt School, however, he stresses the double-sidedness of modernity; rather than simply destroying resonance, modern societies can also heighten or even create new capacities for experiencing resonance.