The Uncontrollability of the World

by Hartmut Rosa

me, Unverfügbarkeit is one of the key elements of every experience of being in resonance with someone or something.

experiences of resonance are unpredictable in two ways. First, you can try to create a context that makes it likely that you will be deeply touched and transformed by something or someone, and that you will be capable of reaching out and responding to this touch. We buy expensive tickets to a concert, for example, or we arrange a beautiful candlelight dinner with our beloved—but, in both cases, the evening might still turn out to be deeply frustrating and alienating, whereas on other occasions, when we do not expect anything, all of a sudden we experience strong resonance with something or someone. Hence, when or where resonance will happen is unpredictable. More than this, if you enter into resonance with someone or something, it is impossible to predict what this process of being touched and transformed will mean for you or will do to you.

A fully engineerable world eventually would be a “dead world.”

this desire for control produces, behind our backs, a world that in the end is utterly uncontrollable in all the relevant aspects. We cannot control our late modern world in any way: politically, economically, legally, technologically, or individually. The drive and desire toward controllability ultimately creates monstrous, frightening forms of uncontrollability.

The driving cultural force of that form of life we call “modern” is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive.

My hypothesis is this: because we, as late modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable at every level—individual, cultural, institutional, and structural—we invariably encounter the world as a “point of aggressions” or as a series of points of aggression, in other words as a series of objects that we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, “life,” the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us. This in turn leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair, which then manifest themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.