Resonance as Pluralism: Toward an Existential-Phenomenological Approach to Relational Plurality, in Dialogue with Rosa and Arendt

Abstract

Discussions on modern pluralism have mainly focused on its socio-political dimension. This article focuses on the existential-phenomenological dimension of plurality, conceiving of pluralism as a responsive relationship between the self and the other. We advance a philosophical reading of Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance in order to further give shape to this existential-phenomenological approach to pluralism. The theory of resonance offers a framework to characterize the responsive relationships at play throughout human life. We argue that Rosa’s account is promising in its contribution to thinking the concept of pluralism as responsive relationship, but we problematize how Rosa tends to reduce resonance to subjective experience rather than taking the relationship itself as a focal point. We strengthen the potential of a philosophy of resonance by further embedding it in Arendt’s philosophy of worldliness; this, we conclude, leads to a conceptualization of pluralism as the responsivity of relationships themselves rather than a function of responding entities.

1. Introduction

1.1. From Diversity to Pluralism

In describing modern societies, the concepts of diversity and pluralism are indispensable; they are related yet distinct notions. As the two tend to be used in the same context, sometimes even interchangeably, this introduction, up until Section 1.3, serves to differentiate between the terms and specify our own understanding of them. Having clarified the terms of the debate, we position our own contribution to pluralism in terms of responsive relationality or resonance in Section 1.4.

Diversity is commonly used to refer to the increasing presence of different ethnic, religious, and social groups in modern societies. Through the interplay of different forces, most notably globalization, societies are increasingly host to a multitude of different groups and diverging cultural identities. Even societies that were once typified by their homogeneity are now confronted with a more diverse population. This form of diversity, however, is not limited to the existence of multiple groups in a society; it also describes increasing heterogeneity within these groups. Steven Vertovec coined the term superdiversity to describe this increasing diversity (Vertovec 2007). As a concept, diversity is fundamentally oriented towards tracing difference; in this sense, we primarily understand it as a descriptive concept that denotes the multiplicity of identities in modern society.

Pluralism, in contrast, is often interpreted as a normative concept that can be understood as not only an acceptance, but also an affirmative response to the existence of this diversity. In a previous issue of Religions that focused on religious diversity, the editors contrasted the “normative framework that rules religious pluralism” with “a descriptive notion of religious diversity” (Pace and Moreira 2018, p. 3). This differentiation applies not only to religious pluralism, but to discussions on modern cultural, social, and political pluralism more broadly.

1.2. Socio-Political Approaches to Pluralism

The normative frameworks that inform the interpretations of pluralism vary. Perhaps the most influential notions of pluralism are informed by the legacy of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. The Rawlsian plea for reasonable pluralism entails the claim that in a democratic society, diverging worldviews not only tolerate each other, but actively recognize the limitations of their own positions. As no comprehensive doctrine can reasonably be expected to be endorsed by all citizens, views cannot be forced upon others; a pluralist society and its institutional arrangements can thus only be grounded on a shared political culture in which some epistemic modesty is practiced (Rawls 1993). In a similar vein, Habermas further sketches out the requirements for pluralism in the public sphere by translating the characteristics of communicative action to the functioning of deliberative democracy (Habermas 1981). Pluralism is not a contingent fact for Habermas: the pluralization of forms of life is one of the significant products of modernity’s process of rationalization, one that necessitates his ‘postmetaphysical’, procedural account of justice. Pluralism can thus be thought of as one of the key challenges of modernity, driving the Habermasian project (Ashenden 1998).

This work is challenged by what may be called agonistic pluralism, proposed by thinkers like Chantal Mouffe (2000) and William Connolly (2005), who see the striving for consensus as a denial of pluralism’s fundamentally political and open-ended character. Though very different in their analyses, the positions of Rawls and Habermas on the one hand, and of Mouffe and Connolly on the other, both focus on the political, institutional, and procedural demands of pluralism. What separates these conceptualizations of pluralism from theory on diversity is that pluralism focuses on the requirements for interaction between different groups and identities, affirming this interaction, whilst the notion of diversity acknowledges the differentiation between identities in a more or less neutral way.

1.3. Toward an Existential Approach to Pluralism: Arendt and Levinas

There is, however, reason to approach pluralism not just as a relevant concept for addressing the socio-political dynamics in modern society, but to understand it from a phenomenological, relational perspective. Whilst the dominant socio-political approach to pluralism does sketch the structural requirements for interactivity, its focus does not lay with understanding how individuals encounter each other within pluralist societies nor with conceptualizing the resulting relationships. A phenomenological approach, on the other hand, focuses on the encounter between the self and the other and the resulting relationship. We can discern such impetus in the works of contemporary thinkers who are critical of subject-centrism and who approach human existence as being situated in the world, only properly understood through lived experience. The potential of thinking plurality in this way becomes especially pronounced in the wake of Heideggerian existential-phenomenology.1

Hannah Arendt’s notion of plurality, for example, does not just refer to the co-existence of multiple people within societies, but concerns plurality as a precondition for action, a form of activity she understands as a key characteristic of the human condition (Arendt 1958). Humans live, act, and speak in the plural; the public space, as Arendt holds, is the space in which people appear to each other. Understood in this way, pluralism is not only a modern socio-political challenge, but the encounter with human plurality opens up the possibility of acting itself: plurality is not a problem, but a precondition. Sophie Loidolt (2018) argues that Arendt, in prioritizing this approach to plurality, has thus laid the groundwork for enriching existential phenomenology with political theory and vice versa.

Similarly, Emmanuel Levinas coined a notion of plurality in which its existential significance is emphasized. He emphasizes the primacy of the face-to-face encounter in plurality. For Levinas, one first encounters the other as wholly other; this event is an invitation towards responsibility, to recognize the other as someone who transcends one’s own horizon (Levinas 1961, p. 220). Both Arendt and Levinas thus claim that, before any political arrangements, humans encounter plurality in relation to each other: relationships that are informed by a fundamental difference to the other, to which one’s response is key. In taking up this phenomenological approach to plurality, Arendt and Levinas draw attention to its existential and relational dimensions. From these sketches of encounters with plurality, we can tentatively conceptualize pluralism as the striving towards responsive relationships between the self and the other.

This approach to pluralism, understanding it in terms of striving towards responsive relationships, deserves to be explored beyond these sketches, as it seems foundational to understand the primary experience people have with plurality before reflecting upon its socio-political and institutional requirements. Prior to any political arrangements concerning pluralism, one experiences plurality in relationship to the other; understanding this is, in a Levinasian vein, a form of “first philosophy” (Levinas 1984). This perspective on pluralism does not invalidate socio-political work, but rather serves to enrich our understanding of the challenges of contemporary pluralism.

1.4. Pluralism as Resonance: Rosa

In the present study, we aim to contribute to this understanding of pluralism as a responsive relationship between the self and the other, using the framework developed by German sociologist Hartmut Rosa in his work on Resonance (Rosa [2016] 2019). Rosa’s work delineates “a sociology of our relationship to the world”. The relationships he investigates are typified by an interplay between affection and emotion: being spoken to by the other and being able to respond to them.2 Although this work gives a thorough and structural account of what characterizes these relationships, Rosa himself has claimed that the philosophical investigation of these relationships is ultimately not the ambition of his project, as he rather favours the sociological analysis of how these relationships are given shape in contemporary society (Rosa [2016] 2019, p. 38). This current investigation takes up some of the philosophical lacuna’s in resonance and, in doing so, contributes to the further delineation of a phenomenological approach to pluralism. The question we want to address here is: How can Rosa’s work on resonance help in specifying an understanding of pluralism in terms of responsive relationships between the self and the other?

This article opens by describing the framework of resonance developed by Rosa in Resonance (Rosa [2016] 2019) and The Uncontrollability of the World (Rosa [2018] 2020) and expanding upon it. Having examined its value for understanding pluralism in our second section, we open the third section by signalling a theoretical ambiguity between resonance as the subjective experience of a responsive relationship and an understanding of the relationship itself as a responsive entity. We argue that the value of resonance for understanding pluralism is dependent on the exploration and development of the latter position and find philosophical precedent in Arendt’s notion of ‘world’. In our conclusion, we take stock of some key implications for understanding pluralism and reflect on a further development of the philosophy of resonance.

2. Pluralism as Resonance

In this section, we examine Rosa’s work on resonance as a philosophical account of responsive relationships. We start with an introduction Rosa’s theoretical project, and examination of the core characteristics of resonant relationships: emotion, affection, transformation and uncontrollability. Next, we show that social acceleration—another key thematic researched by Rosa in his works preceding Resonance—seemingly leads to increasing diversity of encounters with the world yet thwarts the formation of responsive relationships. Finally, we take preliminary stock of the implications for understanding pluralism in terms of responsive relationships.

2.1. The Theory of Resonance as a Relation to the World

Rosa’s work Resonance bears the subtitle A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. On a descriptive level, its aim is to develop a theory that delineates a host of different relationships between humans and their relations to the world.

The exact meaning of the term world here is kept deliberately ambiguous, as Rosa draws from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in understanding the world as “everything that can be experienced” (Rosa [2016] 2019, p. 34). Rosa analytically differentiates between relations to the social, material, and existential worlds, envisioning these three relations as horizontal, diagonal, and vertical axes of resonance, respectively. In this first section, we focus on the term ‘the other’ as functionally equivalent to the term ‘world’ within the horizontal axis, but acknowledge that there is more to the term, a point we touch upon in Section 3.

Resonance theory operates under the assumption that the self and the world are not fundamentally separated, but that both are mutually constituted through their relatedness (p. 32). This responsive relationship between the self and the world, Rosa claims, is the most fundamental form of relationship; throughout his work, he finds evidence of this in various spheres of life, from schooling to music, friendship, or the prenatal relationship between mother and child.

As a specific type of responsive relationship between the self and the world, resonance is defined through (1) affection, (2) emotion, (3) transformation, and (4) uncontrollability. Firstly, in a resonant relationship, the self feels spoken to; it is moved by something that concerns them.3 Although this being moved is not necessarily physical, Rosa deems the body the primary resonant medium: when one feels moved by Mozart’s 25th piano concerto, the body responds (firstly, through the vibration of eardrums; next, an unconscious holding of breath, the hairs on the skin rising). In this context, Rosa tentatively uses the terminology of being spoken to by the world, although noting that this does not have to concern a literal voice: a mountain can seemingly speak, regardless of the extent to which it can factually communicate.

Secondly, the self is not merely moved within resonant relationships; it still has some degree of self-efficacy. They experience emotion; that is to say, the self is able to act in relation to the world. In his more recent work, Rosa uses the terminology of the experience of semi-controllability to describe a form of efficacy distinct from full control, claiming that a world fully controlled by humans would be dead or mute (Rosa [2018] 2020, p. 3). Imagine the experience of a novice being challenged to expand her knowledge compared to the experience of a student present at the same lecture yet being well-versed in the topic. The latter is far less likely to be spoken to or to experience a resonant relation because the topic is something she understands as being fully under her control. The characteristic of emotion thus denotes a form of self-efficacy not aimed at control or mastery, but one understood as a curious reaching out to the world.

Thirdly, resonant relationships are transformative; they significantly change something at both ends of the self-world spectrum. Having heard a lecture on protestant themes in Bach, something changes in our listening of it; after helping to clean up our neighbourhood, not only has the city itself physically changed, but so too has our perception of the world around us and, moreover, our relationship to it. The type of transformation is, however, unpredictable.

Resonant relationships, finally, are unpredictable and uncontrollable in a twofold sense: in their outcome and occurrence. Firstly, because it is impossible to say what will happen once one has entered a resonant relationship. Resonant relationships are open-ended; their outcome is impossible to anticipate and manage. A devote Christian partaking in interreligious dialogue might discover profound truths in Buddhism. Secondly, because it is impossible to manufacture a resonant relationship, it is impossible to predict with certainty when it might occur. One might create the conditions for resonance to occur, but expecting it to happen can be counterproductive. If one expects Christmas to be a night of familial coming together, it might very well not happen and, in fact, turn out to be an alienating experience.

The fact that resonance can be recognized in a plethora of human affairs might lead one to think that it is loosely defined and conceptually conflated (e.g., Susen 2020; Fuchs 2020). In a reply to his critics, Rosa stresses that one can only understand and apply resonance as a form of relation defined by these four characteristics (Rosa 2020). Its applicability to a wide range of phenomena is not because of conceptual opacity, but because it is coherent with the claim that resonance is a fundamental form of human relationship to the world. The status of resonance can be further clarified, however, if one makes explicit two preconditions: the existence of a resonant medium, and the difference between resonance and echo. First, for resonant relationships to occur, there has to be a space, or accommodating context, within which the connections can be facilitated. Some media are better suited to this than others; contrast the experience of standing in a crowded elevator (in which one is expected to be fundamentally closed off from others) to students on their first day of school (where the conditions are aimed towards the opening up of the self towards others and forming responsive relationships with them). Whilst resonance can occur at unexpected times, spaces can be created in which relationships are more likely to occur. The enduring quality of the medium and its responsive properties are thus of particular note for thinking plurality.

More importantly, resonance should be distinguished from an echo (Rosa 2020). Whilst an echo can seemingly speak, it has no voice of its own. It is a repetition, perhaps with a slight modification, of what has been previously said. It cannot affect or transform the self precisely because one is not touched by something sufficiently differentiated from the self. If one finds out their conversational partner is just telling them what they want to hear, one feels cheated: what was expected to be resonance with the voice of the other was in fact an echo. Resonance thus requires a fundamental differentiation between the two entities in the relationship; this difference is a condition for resonance to occur.

2.2. Modernity: The World as a Point of Aggression

Most analyses of the work Resonance (Rosa [2016] 2019) approach the concept in tandem with alienation and understand resonance as the positive counterpart of alienation, itself a central concept within critical theory from Adorno to Honneth (e.g., Susen 2020). What the precise function of alienation is within the overall framework of resonance remains contested, with different meanings implicitly attributed to the term (Haugard 2020). At points, Rosa resorts to a definition of alienation as “non-relation” (Rosa [2016] 2019, p. 178). Other times, alienation seems to be functionally equivalent to being in a relationship defined by control (Rosa [2018] 2020, p. 27). This issue is outside the scope of our research, as we primarily aim to explore responsive relationships. Clarification of what impedes them is relevant to this article, and we thus focus on the structural necessity of control in modern societies.

For Rosa, modern societies are defined by processes of social acceleration—a global systematic change on a temporal level underlying all modern societies and differentiating them from their premodern counterparts. At the root of this escalatory tendency in modern societies lies a dynamic stabilisation (Rosa 2013, p. 115). Only through continuous expansion, acceleration, and growth can modern societies remain stable. In order to satisfy this structural dependency on expansion and acceleration, modern societies are driven to bring more of the world under control. Of especial interest for this investigation is how this shapes late-modern subjects and the encounters they have with others. They live in constant fear that, by not continually looking for ways to become more productive and increase control, they are losing their place in the world. Rosa theorizes that this expansive motion was originally motivated by a desire for resonance, since the implicit promise is that more of the world coming into their reach means more possibilities for resonance; paradoxically, this focus on control causes the world to fall mute (Rosa [2016] 2019). The fundamental uncontrollability of resonance conflicts with the structural drive to make the world an object of control.

This makes the dominant way of encountering the world a point of aggression (Rosa [2018] 2020, p. 4). This is a drive to understand the world and others in it as objects or instruments to be controlled, conquered, and mastered. This primarily means the self closes off from others and thus loses the possibility of being affected. Furthermore, this encounter of the world as a point of aggression means that, on a phenomenological level, the other appears first and foremost as a competitor, primarily met with hostility because they are potentially vying for the same share of the world. The voice of the competitor cannot reach the self and is seen as identical with the masses of others that potentially threaten the self’s place in the world. The late-modern subject’s openness towards the other is reserved for specific domains: expecting resonance to occur in demarcated, stable spheres of resonance. One expects it during the weekend’s ‘quality time’ with members of their family, on holiday, or within ritualized gatherings such as the sports stadium or event hall, whilst closing oneself off to the countless encounters one has in everyday life.

It is important to note that whilst modernity culturally propagates the ideal that more control increases the possibility of resonance, resonant relationships themselves are defined by a limitation of control. There is thus a subtle but fundamental difference between reaching out to the world as emotion or self-efficacy defines resonant relationships on the one hand and the type of control late-modern subjects are increasingly driven towards on the other hand.

2.3. First Implications for Pluralism

The theory of resonance thus describes a responsive relationship in terms of affection, emotion, transformation, and uncontrollability. A key insight regards the aforementioned uncontrollability of resonant relationships. Attempting to fully control the relationships Rosa describes, to definitively predict them, leads to a facsimile or reification of resonance and ultimately dooms the endeavour (Rosa [2016] 2019, p. 440). Resonance is an event; it happens and is not created. Whilst Rosa describes somewhat stable axes of resonance, where resonance is more likely to occur than others (e.g., the familial sphere or a religious ritual), he does note that the expectation of resonance is sure to inhibit its potential of occurring. Resonant encounters are typified by limitations in control and predictability.

This conceptual impossibility of definitively creating resonance, however, does not mean that the existential-relational account of plurality is fundamentally incommensurable with socio-political discourse on pluralism. The latter, as we have discussed in the introduction, focuses on theorizing the institutional requirements for responsivity. Whilst Rosa has expressed doubt on whether resonance can be institutionalized, it is certainly true that certain spaces can be made more sensitive to resonance (Rosa 2020, p. 16). This does entail accepting the risk that resonance does not take place and, furthermore, that identity is transformed within these spaces. The transformation inherent to the resonant relationship means that there is the possibility that something fundamentally changes, for both the self and the other. Taking this account of responsivity seriously thus means creating space for transformation with all its unpredictable potential.

3. A Philosophy of Resonance

3.1. Limitations of the Phenomenology of Resonance

Up until this point, we have examined the possible contribution of resonance to relational plurality and, in doing so, defined resonance as the responsive relationship between the self and the other. In exploring the possibility of understanding plurality in terms of responsive relationships, a key question is what precisely the notion of responsivity entails.

The subject’s experience of responsivity as key to understanding resonance is common in secondary literature (e.g., Fuchs 2020; Susen 2020), and Rosa himself frequently resorts to defining resonance in these terms (Rosa [2018] 2020, p. 3). In his preliminary treatment of the concepts of self and world, Rosa defines self as “entities that have experiences” and world as “everything that can be encountered” (Rosa [2016] 2019, p. 34). Rosa articulates that he is more interested in the sociological analysis of how the formation of these relationships is impacted by the dynamics of modern society than in grounding the concepts in philosophy (Rosa [2016] 2019, pp. 32–39). Within the context of a sociological project, this philosophical modesty is laudable; we argue that these preliminary definitions of self and world, however, impede the philosophical potential of his framework. Rosa’s definition of the self and the world fundamentally takes the experiences of the subject as a point of departure: responsivity is understood from the perspective of the self that perceives the world, or the other, speaking to them. This conceptual dependence on subjective experience thus seems to potentially fall back into the precise subject-centric pitfall the sociology of relationships attempts to avoid (p. 32).

At other points, however, Rosa seems to be advocating towards a more fundamental and radical understanding of resonance, focusing on the relationship itself as a qualified object of analysis. This ambiguity plays out throughout the work on resonance, at some points articulating responsivity as an experience of the subject, at others as a quality of the relationship itself. The latter is especially pronounced in Rosa’s reflections on music, which “negotiates the quality of the relationship itself” (Rosa [2016] 2019, p. 94). Think, furthermore, of the tentative reflections on the nature of the self and the world as two poles of a continuum, between which resonance is imagined as a vibrating wire that connects the entities (p. 48). In this analogy of the vibrating wire, we can discern the contours of a way of thinking of the relationship as more than a connective medium between entities, but instead as an entity of itself that operates between the two subjects. This more radical philosophical understanding of resonance shifts from the subject’s experience of response and focuses on the relationship itself. Exploring the potential of resonance in this way, taking it as a philosophy of relation rather than an account of individual experience, has implications for our understanding of pluralism.

In this last section, we first take up the impetus that is discernable in Rosa’s work to sketch out the contours of a philosophy of responsive relationality. We start by engaging Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of worldliness, first and foremost because it is an excellent example of existential-phenomenology that takes relationality as a focal point. Secondly, because her work The Human Condition (Arendt 1958) is extensively referenced as a notable inspiration for Resonance, and because revisiting Arendt strengthens our argument that the relational philosophy we are developing is not only commensurable with resonance, but latent in it.

3.2. Arendt, Action, and the World

Hannah Arendt plays a significant role in Resonance (Rosa [2016] 2019) and is often invoked as exemplary in thinking about the role human activity plays in shaping the social world (e.g., p. 181). These explicit references correspond to the popular reception of Arendt as primarily a political thinker on the vita activa, and its tripartition of activity in labour, work, and action. One could question the commensurability between this emphasis on human activity and resonance, as an encounter that happens to us at the intersection of control and uncontrollability. Contemporary scholarship on Arendt, however, emphasizes that it is not the active agency of the subject, but rather the engagement of the subject’s wordliness and the relationality it presumes that is key to Arendt’s thought (Villa 1996; Topolski 2015).

The Human Condition opens with a reflection on plurality invoked in our introduction, noting that “Men, not Man live on the earth and inhabit the world” (Arendt 1958, p. 7). The twofold reference to earth and world is not incidental, as she further differentiates the term earth, as the totality of our physical planet, from world, which is made by the interaction between humans. The world indicates a public, shared space in which it becomes possible to act. To act within this space means to appear, speak, and relate to others. This presumes there are others to relate to; there is no meaningful speech without the plurality, qua multiplicity, of humans. Action, as a specific form of activity, contrary to labour and work, is primarily nonproductive. Action does not have a concrete end or goal in sight, in the same way that sustenance is the telos of labour. A core feature of action is its indefinite nature; it is not defined by direct results, but by the potential it opens up. It is open-ended; it involves speaking up and letting oneself be seen in common spaces without pursuing a certain goal. Action thus always entails appearing to others and, in doing so, a disclosure of oneself; in this form of activity, the distinction between actor and action blurs.

The possibility to act is dependent on the maintenance of common spaces in which humans can appear to each other. The lack of such common shared spaces proper to action is central to Arendt’s critical discussion of modernity, as she argues that “World alienation, and not self-alienation as Marx thought, has been the hallmark of the modern age” (Arendt 1958, p. 254). Her analysis does not depart from the individual subject whose relationship to themselves has become troubled; she localizes alienation as arising from a frustrated relationship to the common world. Modernity’s increasing activity, in the form of labour and work, means that human dominion over the world has increased. The possibility of a common world, however, has been simultaneously withdrawn. The dominance of productivity goes hand in hand with the inhibition of action. And, because action is central to what it means to be human, alienation from the common world is given primacy; other forms of alienation are secondary.

Core to the notion of acting is the condition of being born: natality. With this concept, Arendt makes the interaction between relationality and potentiality explicit. The condition of natality is at the root of our capacity to create and begin anew with our actions. Action does not entail the planned manipulation of what currently is (as for labour and work), but is defined by its potential to create something new and unexpected. In this notion of natality, the primacy of the relational in Arendt’s thought explicitly shows itself, as natality is described as the “Entering of newcomers into the web of human relationships” (Arendt 1958, p. 16). It is this web of human relationships, of interlinked potential, that is identified as core of being together with others and being in a common world. The place where the network of actions finds its beginning is what Arendt understands as the world: not as the factual environment in which humans live, but as the precarious and temporary coming together of people, the opening up of new possibilities.

World is thus the name Arendt gives to the common space in which humans can appear and relationships unfold. This space should not just be merely understood as concrete locations (e.g., by stressing the agora and polis), but from a more broad topological perspective, as the emergence of spaces in which relating becomes possible (Arendt 1977). The spaces in which relating becomes possible are themselves created through human interaction. The world is thus not only the consequence of human relationships but, paradoxically, what makes it possible for humanity to emerge. In this context, natality not only articulates the relationality implied in action, but furthermore emphasizes the persistent embodied care that has sustained the continuity of the world and the indefinite potential of the common. In thinking the world this way, Arendt’s phenomenology transcends the experience of the individual, but rather focuses on what takes shape between subjects. Her approach to plurality is that of an intersubjective phenomenology of the world.

3.3. The World between Rosa and Arendt

What, then, are the implications of this brief discussion of Arendtian thought for our philosophical interpretation of resonance and subsequent attempt to think of pluralism in terms of responsive relationships? We have shown that the notion of ‘world’ in Resonance is primarily approached as an experiential object. This approach is congruent with Husserlian phenomenology, which focuses on the appearance of phenomena to the consciousness and analyses their transcendental requirements. If resonance is understood as a phenomenology of experience in this sense, it approaches the binary of self-and-world through the lens of the self, the subject: the world becomes everything that can be experienced by the individual and is thus everything but the self. The analytical focus is driven towards the one who experiences, and all the rest is relegated to possible experience; the other is reduced to an experience of the self. Arendt’s phenomenology of the world, as that which is created in between humans, rather draws attention to the relational space itself. Wordliness, the condition of (be)longing to intersubjective space, is Arendt’s attempt to capture the movement between the experience of being an individual subject that acts and being embedded into a larger web of relations. Moreover, the emphasis on wordliness should be understood as an articulation of the ontological predisposition towards relation, giving primacy to the space in which the dynamic of relating to and being related to others can manifest. In contrast with Husserlian phenomenology of consciousness, Arendt’s philosophy can be situated in the development of post-Heideggerian existential phenomenology in the sense that it engages with individual experience as a disclosure of the ontological dimension of the world (Marder 2012). The Human Condition does not just pertain to the phenomenological analysis of action but also makes ontological claims about the nature of the public world.

The philosophical profundity of resonance lies in its ambition to describe the responsive relationship as a vibrating wire that exceeds the two entities responding; the relationship is more than a function of the entities. We argue that this description of the responsive intermediate is foreshadowed in Arendt’s work, and against this backdrop, it becomes possible to think through the responsive intermediate. Understanding resonance as existential-phenomenology means to not just analyse the relationship in experiential terms, but also to see the experience of relating as revealing something about the ontological level of relationships. In Arendt, this ontological dimension of relationality is defined by interactivity: the activity in the inter, that which unfolds between subjects. If responsive relationships are thought of through the image of the vibrating wire, the inter itself becomes active: between the two entities, the relational intermediate becomes an active partner and is itself responsive. Both Arendt and Rosa seem concerned with thinking of relational activity as escaping the grasp of the subject; they describe moments in which subjects feel called towards something that exceeds their understanding, are drawn to a nebulous zone of inbetweenness. Neither the self nor the other is in control within this zone; they are caught up in the interplay of responses. Resonance transcends the control of both partners, not because of the transcendence of the Other in the relationship, but rather because the relationship itself transcends the grasp of both partners. The partners are not just affected by their counterparts; they are caught up in and spoken to in their relation. A responsive relationship, then, is not a sum of individual responses, but a specific type of relationality in which subjects are caught up: to be responded to, not only by the other, but by their relationship.

To think of the responsive relationship in this way means to grant it an ontological status. This is not to say that the relationship exists independent of human interactivity; an encounter between subjects is a prerequisite for a responsive relationship. Our claim is, however, that we cannot describe this encounter through the sum of individual responses or their experiences; even after taking stock of all the individual activity, a certain dimension of the relationship remains uncontrollable. The Unverfügbarkeit of human interactivity points at the relation itself as an active element, as something that is simultaneously between the subjects and beyond their immediate grasp. This insight is evident in relational goods like friendship: even with the best of intentions, individuals find themselves incapable of working things out. This is because the dysfunctionality is not just located in the activities of the individual partners, but is rooted in the relationship itself.4 The ontological consideration of relation might go beyond the ambitions of resonance as an empirical sociology of relationships to the world, but it seems critical for a coherent philosophy of resonance. As an onto-phenomenological approach, resonance is able to move beyond the conceptual boundaries of classical phenomenology, which is limited to describing experiences of the relationship. In committing to the existence of relationships beyond descriptive categories, an ontology of resonance grants the relationships themselves a degree of responsivity.

If the conception of the world as an object of experience is problematic, should we do away with any binary partner opposed to the self? As our emphatic reading of worldliness in Arendt suggests, we think the notion of the world is indispensable in understanding human existence and plurality in particular. ‘World’ articulates the shared possibility of human difference appearing in the space where responsivity can manifest. We thus take up the concept of the world not as a static totality, as opposed to the self, but understand it as an intermediate and indeterminate zone: the world is the realm of the between. From the ontological conception of relational responsivity, this zone of possible relationships is more temporary and unstable than Arendt’s socio-political demarcation of the world; it appears wherever the web of human relationships shows itself. World, then, in the grammatical sense of the word, becomes plural: worlds are created by subjects relating, and in turn, worlds are what create subjects. Worlds are what appear between humans, arising out of their encounters and giving shape to their lives. Neither one of the two partners in a resonant relationship is, by themselves, in complete control of the world they create—that which arises between them has a logic, a sense, of its own. We are mindful of the fact that these tentative reflections risk presenting relations and worlds as interchangeable concepts; there is indeed much overlap between worlds as relationships and relationships as worlds. This subtle differentiation deserves further elucidation, which will be our objective in philosophical explorations to come. As it stands—and fitting the theme of this special issue—we propose to think of worlds as the spatial, imagined articulations of (potential) relations.

3.4. Resonance, World, and Plurality

Whilst this philosophy of resonance as an understanding of responsivity in the relationship has a multitude of implications, we limit ourselves to three key points for thinking pluralism.

First and foremost, we have argued that relationships should not be understood as descriptors or functions of subjects, but that the relationship that emerges between subjects becomes a third, responsive party that shapes their interactivity. Understanding pluralism as responsive relationality is then not understood as the collective activity of differentiated subjects, but as something that escapes their grasp, a description of the moment the logic of their differentiation is troubled. To stress the responsivity of the relationship in this way is thus less concerned with the responses of vocal subjects that are actively engaged with each other, but rather focuses on the moment of mutual receptivity. This entails a decentering of the discourse on pluralism; it calls into question those forms of thought that take the individual subject as a point of departure. We do not plead for approaching pluralism from an opposed communitarian perspective; the relational approach we have explored implies venturing beyond models of pluralism grounded in individual or social identity. Plurality, as we have characterized it, concerns precisely the event that transforms identity. This evasive, open-ended character of plurality problematizes attempts to structurally capture it, as the dominant proceduralist approaches we described in the introduction attempt to. It seems more productive to understand it through process-oriented modes of thought; Bruno Latour’s work on the entanglement of human and non-human lifeforms is exemplary in this regard (Latour 2017). Although not explicitly framed in terms of plurality, his work on the modes of existence articulates a way of understanding the relationality between entities in line with the approach we’ve developed here, but expands its scope to nonhuman entities.

To emphasize this decentering of the discourse on pluralism is not to say that individual activity is irrelevant in further analysis. The sensitivity for resonance and the capacity to respond are key to the emergence of responsive relationships. But, this concerns a specific way of understanding action: our characterization of relational plurality does not pertain to a dyadic transactional model in which interchangeable entities exchange information. The emergence of plurality is not the result of individual activity, and overemphasizing human actorship might even be counterproductive in facilitating the emergence of the plural. Whilst the subject does act in a responsive relationship, the form of action is defined by reciprocity—touching and being touched by the other. Thinking of pluralism in this way means we conceive of activity as interactivity, of action as inseparable from reaction. Whilst both the self and the other are engaged in the activity of the responsive relationship, the modality of action is defined by mutual engagement, or medio-passivity, rather than productive, controlled, or goal-oriented action. Plurality happens to individuals rather than being their active doing, and fostering responsivity entails openness and receptivity on the part of the subject. Pluralism, as the striving towards relational plurality, depends more on the capacity to attentively concern oneself with what happens in the in-between than on the subject’s capacity to vocally affirm their response.

Finally, our understanding of responsive relationships characterizes the paradoxical nature of pluralism. On the one hand, modernity seems to primarily stimulate mute relationships between the self and the other yet the very appearance of the subject is dependent on them. Whilst Rosa stresses that the desire for resonance underpins most conceptions of the good life, a life consisting of permanent responsivity would be a disorienting cacophony (Rosa [2016] 2019, p. 452). The human condition, to echo Arendt’s terminology, is a paradox: arising from, striving towards, but never fully coinciding with the plural. To permanently live in the plural is a conceptual impossibility; to be able to respond necessitates a distance towards the other, one that is blurred in the momentary flash of responsivity but which must be ultimately regained in order to respond anew. There is no definitive state in which pluralism can be achieved, and its potential is exhausted. The theoretical impossibility of its permanent realization does not, however, release institutions, groups, or individuals from the obligation of facilitating the social spheres in which plurality can be pursued. Following Arendt, we emphasize the need to nurture the common spaces in which responsivity can manifest. These spaces can be understood from a topological perspective, as Arendt did with her emphasis on the agora, but, fitting the theme of this special issue, perhaps also from the perspective of imaginaries: as virtual or imagined spaces. Any space that facilitates interactivity—be it institutionally sustained, such as a local assembly, or the spontaneous emergence of an imagined community through online protest—is one of potential relational plurality. Regardless of their temporal sustainability, pluralist societies are sustained through the nurturing of these spaces.

4. Concluding Remarks

This article has sought to contribute to the understanding of pluralism as striving towards responsive relations between self and other, by exploring the framework of resonance and addressing some of its philosophical lacunae. We have characterized resonance as a mode of relationship typified by the interplay of being spoken to and responding to the other. We concluded the second section by stressing that the transformative dimension of resonance means that the institutionalization of plurality necessitates a certain open-endedness. To create space for plurality means to acknowledge the possible transformation of identity. We then explored the ambiguity found in the reception of resonance, which reduced resonance to the subjective experience of feeling moved. The philosophical potential of resonance, as we argued in the third section, is dependent on its potential to focus not just on the subjective experience of response, but rather on the relationship itself as an intersubjective force. To develop this point, we reconstructed Arendt’s philosophy of world, and argued that her notion of world as intersubjective space supports the interpretation of resonance as a relational philosophy, a framework that grants ontological status to the relationship. This onto-phenomenological understanding of resonance necessitates a reconsideration of the notion of world—abandoning the definition of world as ‘all that can be experienced’, and understanding world as an in-between, shaping and given shape through human interaction; the world as relation. Understanding plurality from this perspective entails a further rethinking of the position of the subject and their activity; furthermore, it pleads for the care of common spaces in which responsivity can manifest, whilst acknowledging that it can never be definitively realized.

The aforementioned reframing of world raises a host of philosophical questions. The first set of questions concerns the internal logic of resonance: what is to become of both poles of the self/world binary if we revise the notion of the world? Can the relationship between the two still function, and to what extent is the Arendtian revision of the world relevant for other aspects of Rosa’s thought, such as the diagonal axis of the material world? And, for that matter, what does this reframing of the world mean for the notion of self?

A second set of questions concerns the necessity of further specifying the underlying ontology of resonance. How are we to think of a relational ontology of resonance that gives primacy to the interrelatedness of entities whilst taking into account their capacity to resonate? How can we do justice to the precarious field of intersubjectivity without falling back onto a flat ontology, which would be, as Jarrett Zigon put it, “such that (…) there is no difference between a human and a stone” (Zigon 2021)? We see the contours of this debate taking shape in conversations between critical theorists and new materialist thinkers—but whilst Rosa acknowledges the Latourian ontology as potentially fruitful to engage with, it still has not been systematically brought into conversation with the work on resonance (Rosa et al. 2022).

Our exploration of the philosophy of resonance started by retracing the legacy of Arendtian existential-phenomenology, as Resonance explicitly develops Arendtian themes (Rosa [2016] 2019). In further developing resonance as an onto-phenomenological approach, engagement with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy seems particularly fruitful. Nancy’s work on relational ontology, understood as an “ontology of being-with” (Nancy 2002, p. 74), is specifically developed in tandem with a further conceptualization of Arendt’s notion of the world, a concept further radicalized in Le Sense du Monde (Nancy 1998). Worlds, grammatically plural, Nancy theorizes, “are spaces in which a certain tonality resonates” (Nancy 2002, p. 42). An investigation of this relational ontology to which Nancy invites us will enable us to fine-tune the notion of resonance, opening up the phenomenology of plurality to a philosophy of Weltbeziehung: an understanding of ‘world’ as relation.