The Uncontrollability of the World

by Hartmut Rosa

Unverfügbarkeit: what does it mean? It is a term that is well established in German, although it is not very widespread. For me, Unverfügbarkeit is one of the key elements of every experience of being in resonance with someone or something.

On the borderline between philosophy and literature, Albert Camus defines the basic experience of modernity as one of constitutive hostility between human beings and the world, in and from which is born the absurd. This hostility bordering on hatred rests on our inability to either know or reach the world—and thus on a fundamental lack of control. For Camus, perceiving the absurd means “perceiving that the world is ‘dense,’ sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. […] The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia.”11 The absurd here lies neither in the attitude of the subject nor in the constitution of the world alone, but rather in the relationship between the two. “[T]hat absurdity that determines my relationship with life,” Camus writes, “depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together.”

The fact that there must be some interplay among all three of these aspects makes it clear that—like a violin or guitar—we must be open enough to be affected or changed, while at the same time we must also be closed off enough to respond effectively with our own voice. A person who, for example, has experienced traumatic violence may henceforth resist or balk at any form of touch or contact, while, conversely, someone who is affected by everyone and everything will lose their ability to hear and develop their own voice.

I describe this as the uncontrollability of resonance, which means, first, that there is no method, no seven- or nine-step guide that can guarantee that we will be able to resonate with people or things. Even if we attempt to adjust and arrange all subjective, social, spatial, temporal, and atmospheric background conditions so as to facilitate an experience of resonance, it may yet turn out that our romantic date, the view of the mountains at first light, the music heard from the most expensive seats in the house, all leave us “completely cold,” that we will find ourselves unaffected and unable to make a connection. We experience this on Christmas Eve, for example, when we try to shake off the pre-holiday stress, to flip the switch, to be entirely there for our loved ones, to let ourselves be moved by the biblical story, the solemn carols, the Christmas spirit—in short, when we try to listen and respond. The risk of alienation is never so great as on this night, although we may have a very similar experience at that candlelight dinner with our beloved or at that concert by our favorite star. We can never predict whether or not resonance will transpire and, if it does, how long it will last. Resonance is inherently uncontrollable. Just as with falling asleep, the harder we try to make it happen, the less we succeed.

Conversely, however, uncontrollability also means that (again as with falling asleep) having a resonant experience can never be ruled out entirely. Resonance can emerge even under adverse or radically alienating conditions, even if this is, of course, unlikely.

Until the process of adaptive transformation is completed, we fundamentally cannot know in what way or how deeply we will be changed when we really get involved with another person, another form of life, an idea, a book, or a landscape. This means, however, that the transformative effects of a resonant relationship always and inevitably elude any planning on the part of subjects. They can be neither predicted nor controlled, and this makes them particularly important to a critique of controllability such as the one I am elaborating here. Because resonance is inherently open-ended in terms of its results, it is fundamentally in tension both with the social logic of relentless escalation and optimization and with the corresponding attitude of constantly perceiving the world as a point of aggression.

The uncontrollability of resonance further means that it cannot be accumulated, saved, or instrumentally enhanced. Anyone who has tried playing their favorite song ten times in a row day after day knows this well, as does anyone who has attempted to preserve the resonant potential of an intense moment in a digital photo. Uncontrollability implies, moreover, that we cannot fight or compete for resonance. As soon as we enter into a combative relationship or switch to an aggressive mode, we close ourselves off, dampening the possibility of resonance. We no longer want to be reached, but rather to assert ourselves; we aim to experience self-efficacy not by affecting and being affected, but by instrumentalizing and manipulating other people and things.

Advertising and commodity capitalism in general work by translating our existential need for resonance, our desire for relationships, into a desire for objects. We purchase commodities (cruises, safaris) and hope to experience resonance with nature, but while the former can be guaranteed, the latter cannot, and may even become more unlikely the more we strive to engineer it.

If I want to speak with you, I don’t have to wait until our paths happen to cross again, I can just call you. If I want to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, I don’t have to wait until it is being performed in concert, or even until I’m at home with my music collection; I can immediately download to my smartphone a recording that features masterful playing in the highest audio quality. And if I long to visit Egypt, I can book a flight in the middle of the night, for this very weekend. Thus 24/7 appears to be a logical response to the uncontrollability of resonance. The supposedly fundamental contradiction of modernity would thus seem simply to be resolved. But is there something not quite right with this story? The theoretical answer to this difficult question, which requires analyzing the form of a resonant relationship, is that resonance always implies bilateral movement. It is not enough that I have access to and can take hold of the world. Resonance demands that I allow myself to be called, that I be affected, that something reach me from the outside.

As I have argued elsewhere in multiple publications,6 education is, at best, a semicontrollable process of establishing resonance between subject and world or between child and a certain segment of world. Education occurs not when a particular skill has been acquired, but when a socially relevant segment of world “begins to speak,” that is, when a child or an adolescent suddenly realizes: Oh! History—or politics, or physics, or music—says something to me. It concerns me in some way, and I can engage with it self-efficaciously. When exactly this “spark” occurs is effectively uncontrollable. Mostly it happens at unplanned, unexpected, often incidental moments, and just as uncontrollable is what a young person then makes of or does with the segment of world in question (a poem, the Thirty Years War, Kepler’s laws, etc.), what it says to him or her. Education is thus a process of continual transformation in which the subject develops into a person with his or her “own voice,” a voice that is itself also uncontrollable.

The social and legal institution of marriage sets a kind of institutional limit on the uncontrollability of love, one intended to guarantee that both partners are available to, and in a way can be controlled by, each other, even if, as Elisabeth von Thadden points out, this form of control has heretofore been thoroughly defined by patriarchy and gender inequality.

Vacation has become a critical mental and libidinal “anchor point” of everyday life for many modern subjects, who think constantly about where their next trip should take them and which segments of world it should “reveal” to them in what ways. Tourism derives its meaning and importance primarily from the fact that we necessarily live our normal professional and family lives in a mode of desperation at the prospect of managing our everyday affairs.

Thus what vacation promises us is the ability to actually encounter an accommodating world in which there are no tasks we need to accomplish or problems we need to deal with —we can simply let ourselves be genuinely moved. The only problem is that, given the limited time at our disposal and the high costs involved, not only in paying for the trip itself but in living our everyday lives, we expect this experience to be both guaranteed and as intense as possible. As a result, we along with the purveyors of resonance have to use all available means to try to ensure that resonance actually occurs. What is fundamentally uncontrollable should—nay, must—be made available as a commodity, ideally in the form of an “allinclusive package” that precludes from the outset any possibility of injury or unwelcome self-transformation. By no means do we want to be so affected by Cuba, or Thailand, or the Himalayas that we decide to stay there and give up our job, or lose a fortune, or fall ill, or get mugged. All this should be out of the question. The goal of the vacationer is to return from his or her trip not unpredictably transformed, or possibly even unsettled, but relaxed and reinvigorated. Hence it is no surprise that the cruise industry—which promises travelers that they will encounter faraway lands and people under completely controllable conditions, without having to actually engage with them—is booming.