The fact that the "pathological" (or simply unhappy) states cannot be changed by will, that Resonance cannot be instrumentally produced, cannot be made available, is the fourth (and here decisive) moment of a resonance relationship, Hartmut Rosa describes it with the concept of unavailability.
It says, first of all, that there is no method and no seven- or nine-step guidebook that can help ensure that we can resonate with people or things.
Even if we try to control all subjective, social, spatial, temporal and atmospheric background conditions and orient them entirely towards making a resonance experience possible, it may be that the candlelit encounter, the mountain at dawn, the music from the most expensive seat in the best concert hall leaves us "completely cold" after all (or even more so), that we are not touched and are unable to establish a connection.
We experience this on Christmas Eve, for example, when we try to shake off the pre-Christmas stress, flip the switch and be there for our loved ones, to let ourselves be touched by the sacred story, the solemn songs, the atmosphere; in short: to listen and respond. There is never a greater risk of Alienation than on this evening, although we may feel much the same way at a candlelit dinner with our beloved, or in the concert hall with our favourite star.
Whether resonance occurs, and if so, how long it lasts, can never be predicted. Resonance is constitutively unavailable, and it is like falling asleep: the more intensively we want it, the less we succeed.
Conversely, however, unavailability also means that the emergence of resonance (again, comparable to falling asleep) can never be ruled out: It can also occur in radically alienated or adversarial circumstances, although this is of course unlikely. A specific feature of resonance is therefore that it can neither be safely forced nor guaranteed to be prevented.
But resonance is constitutively unavailable in a second, more important sense: when it occurs, we transform ourselves, but it is impossible to predict in which direction we will change or what the result of the transformation will be.
In what way and with what depth we change when we really engage with a person, another form of life, an idea, a book, a landscape, cannot in principle be known until the process of transformation is complete. But this means: the transformative effects of a resonance relationship always and inevitably elude the control and planning of the subjects, they can neither be calculated nor mastered – and this is the reason why they are of crucial importance in the context of a critique of availability as Hartmut Rosa develops it here: Because resonance is constitutively open-ended, it stands in a fundamental tension to the social logic of incessant increase and optimisation, and likewise to a corresponding world-attitude in which the world always appears as a point of aggression.
For the unavailability of resonance also means that it cannot be accumulated, stored or instrumentally increased. Anyone who tries to play their favourite music every day or ten times in a row knows a thing or two about it, and anyone who tries to store the resonance potential of an intense moment in one or even many digital photos knows it too.
Moreover, the characteristic of unavailability ultimately also implies that one cannot fight for it. For as soon as we enter into a fighting relationship (or switch into aggression mode), we are forced into a resonance-dampening closure: Then we don't want to be reached, we want to assert ourselves; then we aim not for affirmative but for instrumental-manipulative self-efficacy.
We can buy the expensive Sahara safari or the cruise, but not the resonance with nature. The functioning of advertising and the capitalist commodity economy in general is based on the fact that it translates our existential need for resonance, and that is: our desire for relationship, into an object desire. We buy the commodity (the safari) and hope for a resonant experience with nature – the former can be guaranteed, the latter not, it perhaps becomes all the more unlikely the more available we strive to make it: Yes, we want to encounter the lion, guaranteed, but it is equally guaranteed not to get too close, it must not take too long (after all, we want to be back in time for dinner) and we don't want to get soaked by the rain or burnt by the sun in the process.
Modernity, according to Hatmut Rosa's sociological thesis developed above, is culturally oriented towards this and structurally forced to do so by its institutional constitution to make the world calculable, controllable, predictable, available in all respects: Through scientific knowledge, technical mastery, political control, economic efficiency, etc.
Resonance, however, cannot be made available: That is the great, constitutive annoyance of this social formation, it is its basic contradiction, that which produces angry citizens (*Wutbürger*) in ever new variations.
To trace this basic contradiction in all its manifold manifestations and with all its social and psychological consequences, even in places where we would not expect it in our everyday actions and in the social fields of conflict in society, is one objective that Hartmut Rosa would now like to pursue in the second part of his Unverfügbarkeit book in the hope that it will shed some illuminating light on the difficulties in which this modernity finds itself in its relationship to nature as well as in its political and subjective relationship to the self and the world. The other aim, however, is to patiently work out the respective lines of tension between the desire for resonance and the demand for availability and to gain ideas on how this contradiction might one day be overcome or resolved.
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