Hartmut Rosa “The Uncontrollability of the World”

Rosa, Hartmut 2020. The Uncontrollability of the World. Wagner, James C. (trans.). Cambridge; Medford, MA: Polity.

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. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.  (2)

Our lives unfold as the interplay between what we can control and that which remains outside our control, yet “concerns us” in some way. Life happens, as it were, on the borderline. (2)

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. (4)

From this original impression that “ something is present,” I have sought to develop a sociology of our relationship to the world that assumes that subject and world are not the precondition, but the result of our relatedness to this presence. (5)

My theory is that the normalization and naturalization of our aggressive relationship to the world is the result of a social formation, three centuries in the making, that is based on the structural principle of dynamic stabilization and on the cultural principle of relentlessly expanding humanity’s reach. (8)

A modern society, as I define it, is one that can stabilize itself only dynamically, in other words one that requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation in order to maintain its institutional status quo. (9)

Growth, acceleration, and innovation no longer seem to assure us that life will always get better; they have come instead to be seen as an apocalyptic, claustrophobic menace. If we fail to be better, faster, more creative, more efficient, and so on, we will lose our jobs, businesses will close, tax revenues will decline while expenditures increase, there will be budget crises, we won’t be able to maintain our healthcare system, our pension levels, and our cultural institutions, the scope of potential political action will grow even narrower, and in the end the entire political system will appear to have lost its legitimacy. (9)

[…] the categorical imperative of late modernity—Always act in such a way that your share of the world is increased—has become the dominant principle behind our decision-making in all areas of life and across all ages, from toddlers to the elderly. (11)

The idea, or rather the conviction correlated with these processes—that life comes down to bringing the world within reach—is inscribed in our bodies and in our psychological and emotional dispositions. (12-13)

four dimensions of controllability

1. Making the world controllable means, first, making it visible, that is, making it knowable, expanding our knowledge of what is there.
2. Making the world controllable means, furthermore, making it physically reachable or accessible.
3. Inextricably linked with this is the third dimension of bringing the world under control, namely by making it manageable. The history of colonialism offers an illustrative, tangible example of how the production of knowledge (e.g., in the form of cartography) often goes hand in hand with the expansion of technological and political-military control.
4. making it [the world] useful, pressing it into service. Here the point is not simply to bring the world under our control, but to make it into an instrument for our own purposes. (15-17)

my theory is that this institutionally enforced program, this cultural promise of making the world controllable， not only does not “ work” but in fact becomes distorted into its exact opposite. The scientifically, technologically, economically, and politically controllable world mysteriously seems to elude us or to close itself off from us. It withdraws from xis, becoming mute and unreadable. Even more, it proves to be threatened and threatening in equal measure, and thus ultimately constitutively uncontrollable. The fact that, in late modern culture, we encounter the c<worldw predominantly in terms of the environment or as the “global” of politicaleconomic globalization is a manifest symptom of this development. (19)

My hypothesis is that the fundamental fear of modernity is fear of the world’s falling mute, of which burnout and depression are only a timely (and perhaps heightened) expression. (28)

we can note that the individual and institutional efforts of modernity to make the world controllable, in all four dimensions and with an ever wider reach, have yielded paradoxical side effects, which can be described (in the language of Marx) as alienation as opposed to adaptive transformation, as reification rather than revivification (Adorno and Lukacs), as loss of world rather than gaining world (Arendt), as the world’s becoming unreadable as opposed to comprehensible (Blumenberg), and as disenchantment as opposed to ensoulment (Weber). (28)

The basic mode of vibrant human existence consists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them, making them respond to us—thus experiencing self-efficacy—and responding to them in turn. (31)

[resonance] is a mode of relation that can be precisely defined by four exemplary characteristics:

1. Being affected. Resonating with another person, or even with a landscape, a melody, or an idea, means being “inwardly” reached, touched, or moved by them. This circumstance of being affected can well be described as “call” or “appeal”. (32)
2. Self–efficacy. At the same time, we can speak of true resonance only when this call is followed by our own active response. This always manifests itself in a physical reaction that we might describe in everyday language as “getting goosepumps”, “the hair on the back our neck standing on end”, or “a shiver running our spine” and that, in medical terms, may be measured as a change in our skin resistance, breathing rate, heart rate, or blood pressure. Resonance also involves our reacting to the impulse that calls us by reaching out toward that which moves us. The word emotion is well suited to describing this second characteristic, as, etymologically, it denotes a movement outward […], a response. (32-33)
3. Adaptive transformation. Whenever we resonate with another human being, a book, a song, a landscape, an idea, a piece of wood, we are transformed by the encounter, although of course in very different ways. […] a change in how we relate to the world is constitutive of resonant experience. When we resonate with the world, we are no longer the same afterwards. (34) […] resonant experiences also significantly change inanimate objects (if only for us). The mountain I have climbed is different (for me) from the one I only saw from a distance or on television, and in the same way books, music, languages, and ideas also change in the process of adaptive transformation. Indeed, they are not even available to as “things in themselves.” (35)
4. Uncontrollability. The fourth […] aspect of resonant relationships consists in the fact that the “pathological” (or simply unfortunate) conditions described above cannot be changed merely through the act of will, that resonance cannot be manufactured or engineered. 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. (36) 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. It is a peculiar characteristic of resonance that it can be neither forced nor prevented with absolute certainty. (37) Resonance is inherently uncontrollable also in a second, more important sense. Whenever it occurs, we are transformed; but it is impossible for us to predict how exactly we will be changed and what the end result of this transformation will be. (37)

Five theses on the controllability of things

THESIS 1. The inherent uncontrollability of resonance and the fundamental controllability of things do not constitute a contradiction per se. (41)

[…] 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. (42)

THESIS 2. Things we can completely control in all four dimensions lose their resonant quality. Resonance thus implies semicontrollability. (44)

When we have completely mastered something, it no longer has anything to say to us. We are “done with it.” (45)

[…] the uncontrollability of our counterpart in a resonant relationship is a qualified form of uncontrollability, not a result of mere chance or contingency. We can only resonate with a counterpart that in a way “speaks with its own voice,” that has something like its own will or character, or at least its own inner logic that, as such, remains beyond our control. What is more, we must be able to understand this voice as speaking to us, and thus as being in some sense responsive. (47-48)

THESIS 3. Resonance demands a form of uncontrollability that “speaks”, that is more than just contingency.

THESIS 4. An attitude aimed at taking hold of a segment of world, mastering it, and making it controllable is incompatible with an orientation toward resonance. Such an attitude destroys any experience of resonance by paralyzing its intrinsic dynamism. (52)

[…] it is not enough to focus just on the subject side of experience or on the object side of things (or on both) in defining the relation between controllability and uncontrollability. The uncontrollability constitutive of resonant relationships in fact has a subject dimension, an object dimension, and a process dimension. (53)

Resonance requires giving up control over both what we encounter and the process of encountering it, and at the same time being able—and trusting in our ability—to reach out to this other side and establish responsive contact with it. (57)

The basic conflict of modernity […] consists in mistaking reachability for controllability. (57)

THESIS 5. Resonance requires a world that can be reached, not one that can be limitlessly controlled. The confusion between reachability and controllability lies at the root of the muting of the world in modernity. (58)

The Structural Dimension of the Basic Conflict of Modernity

The structural dimension of the basic conflict of modernity manifests itself in the fact that a society capable only of dynamic stabilization cannot accept uncontrollability, even though it requires it everywhere. The compulsion toward continual escalation inherent in the logics of growth, acceleration, and innovation implies that efficiency and output, or process and result, must constantly be optimized at every level. (87)

Optimization means achieving the best possible result in the shortest possible time, while maintaining constant control over the processes involved. (87)

Anyone who reads the news attentively knows that what comes out of any attempt to implement a political program truly is uncontrollable—even as political campaigns are waged almost exclusively with promises of enhancement and improvement, in other words with promises that the future can be engineered. Yet policies aimed at creating more jobs, higher pensions, better environmental conditions, more affordable housing, more efficient public transportation, more peaceful international relations, and so on not infrequently achieve the opposite of what they promise. The dynamism of sociopolitical life arises precisely from the fact that the latter is not engineerable. (90)

Today nearly all employees and professionals—not only, but particularly in what is called “social” professions—complain that they are scarcely able to get around to their actual work or no longer have time to do it well. This is by no means solely a result of the modern compulsion toward economic growth and acceleration; it is also precisely because of their or their employers’ futile efforts to make all processes and conditions in the workplace fully transparent (dimension 1 of controllability), attributable (dimension 2), manageable (dimension 3), and efficient (dimension 4). (94)

The commodification of nearly every aspect of our relationship to the world—the fact that nearly every object and process is on offer in late modern society as a service or as a commodity—implies a legal right to controllability. (95)

the uncontrollability of desire

This in fact seems to me to be inherent in the basic structure of desire: desire is driven by a longing to bring something as yet unreachable within our reach. And precisely this might provide us with a key to depriving modernity’s boundless game of escalation—its endeavor to make everything and everyone controllable—of the motivating energy it requires, and to doing so by somehow “unplugging” its connection to our libido. My contention is that the basic structure of human desire is a desire for relationships. (105)

Complete control in all four dimensions, however, extinguishes desire. Games become meaningless, music loses its appeal, love grows old. (106)

This confusion of reachability and controllability finds perhaps its most consequential expression in the translation of our fundamental human desire for relationships into a desire for objects. (106-107)

If we no longer saw the world as a point of aggression, but as a point of resonance that we approach, not with an aim of appropriating, dominating, and controlling it but with an attitude of listening and responding, an attitude oriented toward self-efficacious adaptive transformation, toward mutually responsive reachability, modernity’s escalatory game would become meaningless and, more importantly, would be deprived of the psychological energy that drives it. A different world would become possible. (108)

the monstrous return of the uncontrollable

It is not only technological complexity, but also the complexity and speed of social processes that generate uncontrollability, particularly in terms of the shape of the future. […] today it is practically impossible even to keep track of all the vocational training programs at our disposal, let alone predict how our professional life might turn out. A predictable career path that we could plan out and at least partly shape ourselves has become an erratic, uncontrollable ride. And, despite the unpredictability and uncontrollability of our circumstances, we are still held responsible for results that we are supposed to have been able to foresee, which gives rise to anxiety. (111-112)

Controllability in theory thus transforms uncontrollability in practice into a menacing “monster”, the kind of threat that lurks around every corner but that we can neither see nor control. (112)

Our own everyday lives and actions seem to be increasingly beyond our control, and not even the experts who appear to be the guardians of “theoretical” controllability are capable of creating even the impression of control through calculation. The expansion of our technological reach is not increasing our self-efficacy, but undermining it. We feel ourselves powerless or blameworthy in an unresponsive world. Information about our objective body tells us nothing about the state of our phenomenal body (which is categorically uncontrollable, although highly responsive). These are medical and technological parameters that confront us as external data, with which we have no “inner” perceptual relationship. Our own bodies have become practically inaccessible to us. (113)

The uncontrollability generated by processes intended to make the world controllable produces a radical alienation. Modernity’s program of expanding our reach into a world that it has transformed into an accumulation of points of aggression produces fear of a loss of world and of the world falling mute in a double sense. Where “everything is under control”, the world no longer has anything to say to us, and where it has become newly uncontrollable, we can no longer hear it, because we cannot reach it. (116)