"Harmut Rosa’s topic is Unverfügbarkeit, normally translated as “unpredictability.” After abandoning that term and trying a few others, including “non-availability” and “non-engineerability,” Rosa and his excellent translator James Wagner settled on “uncontrollability.” The book is then about “modernity’s incessant desire to make the world engineerable, predictable, available, accessible, disposable (i.e. verfügbar) in all its aspects.” Uncontrollability, coupled with “dynamic stabilization” — that is, the notion that social systems today can only remain stable through constant growth — characterizes what Rosa means by “modernity.”

Growth means continual expansion of humanity’s reach. We want more of everything, and we want to control it all. Rosa delineates four dimensions of control: rendering things visible, reachable, manageable, and useful. From nature and time to our own sleep habits and step counts, we must know, master, conquer, or make useful whatever we can. The world, and even our own bodies, then, become points of aggression — their Unverfügbarkeit aggravates us. The result is, curiously enough, a “paradoxical flipside” where the world mysteriously withdraws.

If we reflect honestly on Rosa’s description, we find that life includes less and less “unexpected gifts,” and that the world is steadily withdrawing...“Alienation denotes a relation of relationlessness in which subject and world find themselves inwardly unconnected from, indifferent toward, and even hostile to each other.” Although not completely scientifically evidenced (or “controlled”), Rosa’s hypothesis seems more than worth serious consideration: “[T]he 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.” The way out, and the subject of Rosa’s last book, is resonance.

According to Rosa, resonance involves four characteristics. 1) Something outside of us touches or calls us in some way...2) We must then respond by reaching out, by actively engaging with the other. 3) Transformation then occurs. Both ourselves and the other we are responding to are no longer the same. 4) Rosa stresses the need to recognize the “uncontrollability” of what goes on. It “can be neither forced nor prevented with absolute certainty.” It is open-ended, and, despite commodity capitalism, resonance “cannot be accumulated, saved, or instrumentally enhanced.”

Diving into the relationship between resonance and uncontrollability, Rosa presents “five theses on the controllability of things and the uncontrollability of experience.” First, there is no contradiction between the controllability of things and uncontrollability of resonance. Second, things we can completely control “lose their resonant quality.” They must be “semi-controllable.” The third thesis is about the uncontrollability of a thing “speaking” having its own “independent (counter)force.” In other words, it is “more than just contingency.” The fourth is that an “attitude aimed at taking hold of a segment of [the] world, mastering it, and making it controllable is incompatible with an orientation toward resonance.” However, reachability “is not a matter of pure contingency. We can of course try to create the dispositional and situational conditions necessary for us to be capable of being moved.” One major problem with modernity is that it mistakes reachability for controllability. The fifth thesis addresses this issue: “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.”

The world becomes silent, and we are alienated because of the “modern rejection of the idea that there is anything beyond the control of the subject.” As we seek to control more and more things, they increasingly become points of aggression, and our mastery must be broader''.

Paul J. D’Ambrosio