Alienation and Resonance on the Seoul Subway

The Seoul subway. Paradigm of alienation?

When I look at my fellow Seoul subway passengers, the word that comes to mind is ‘alienation.’ In the photo above everyone’s eyes are downcast to their smartphones, and their mouths are masked.  Isn’t this almost a caricature  of what being alienated is like?

But its not quite so simple. These people may be alienated from their immediate physical environment, but they are massively compensating for this sad situation by transferring their attention to the world within their smartphones where they can get some kind of resonance – the antidote to alienation.  When I surreptitiously glance at what they’re looking at, it seems to be mostly social media feeds, shopping feeds, on-line games,  webtoons   - online comic strips, YouTube pop videos (mostly K-Pop), and  tv shows.  These days, there are many places for your mind to be rather than on a horrible subway train deep underground in the company of total strangers.

The lure of the smartphone is obviously in part compensatory, and it works, insofar as people obviously find a modicum of sustenance from whatever it is they are attending to. But there’s a vicious cycle at work, because the more alienating the immediate environment, the more people  need  to, and can, escape to a digital one. Since facemasks became mandatory in public spaces, the conditions for generating social contexts of acute alienation have skyrocketed. As many sociologists and psychologists have pointed out, it is via the expressions conveyed by the mouth - especially the smile - that many resonant social cues are communicated. Hide the mouth, and you hide a vital source of empathetic communication. The other locus of empathy is the eyes, and as these are now downcast, the alienating effect is much exacerbated.. But into this affective desert of the three-dmeinsional world in which are bodies are located flows the sustaining river of the internet.

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but its hard not to think that the ‘rulers’ of the internet have a vested interest in maintaining and even enhancing alienation in the real world so that we will seek out some kind of resonance in a virtual one.

These terms, ‘alienation’ and ‘resonance’ derive from  the writings of the contemporary German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, and what he says helps us understand the dynamics of an especially alienating environment like the subway, but also much more generally, the alienating dynamics of modernity as a whole. Rosa’s thesis is presented in depth in Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Polity, 2019), where he employs the physio-musical metaphor of ‘resonance’ to describe the most cherished relationship desired by humans across time and space, which, he says,  is to feel that the world is somehow benignly responsive.  We all want to live in an oasis, but we fear that the world is a desert – mute, arid……alienating.  Rosa emphasises that these two poles of our relationship to the world are enacted through socially learned systems of belief and rituals that serve to define our basic hopes and fears in specific ways. Thus, he emphasizes, a “key question is then in what contexts, under what conditions, and through what praxes a subject has experienced being borne up in life, where they search for oases – and in what other contexts they have experienced the desert.”  In this sense: “Resonance can be understood as both descriptive and a normative concept, one that helps us to understand social reality on two levels at once. First, the human subject and human consciousness necessarily evolve in and from resonant relationships between and experiencing centre and something that it encounters…..Second, because this is the case, human activity can also be understood as being motivated, in its deep structure, by the longing and quest for resonance as well as the fear of being exposed to a cold, hostile world.”

Crucial to Rosa’s argument is the fact that in order for resonance to occur it is necessary to be in a state of consciousness that combines control and lack of control, a fluid sense of both separation from and fusion with the world. Resonance is only possible when there is “a relation between two bodies that are at once open enough for a relationship while at the same time remaining sufficiently stable and closed so as to ‘sound’ at their own frequency or ‘speak with their own voice’.” This means “resonance is possible only by accepting, or rather affirming, an inaccessible, irreducible Other that can never be completely adaptively transformed and always contains within itself the possibility of contradiction.”

Following earlier theorists of modernity, Rosa argues that modernity in toto – but especially late modernity -  is culturally oriented toward alienation because it is structurally driven toward controlling the world through appropriation and domination, making existence seem manageable, calculable, and predictable.  In The Uncontrollability of the World (Polity, 2020), Rosa writes: “We are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things – segments of world – within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controlled.”  But resonance “ultimately cannot be reconciled with the idea of intellectual, technological, moral, and economic mastery of the world.”  As a result, we exist in a condition of profound alienation, inwardly disconnected from each other and the world” “Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself.”

In the pessimistic prognoses of the Left, Rosa notes, “The catastrophe of resonance in the sense of the world falling permanently mute……appears to be not an unfortunate accident, but the very telos of the process of modernization”, and while Rosa concurs with this recognition of the systemically rooted tendency of modernity to drive people toward greater alienation, he also distances himself from earlier theories by incorporating the lessons of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology.Specifically, he draws on the idea central to phenomenology that human relationships with the world involve responsive relationship on both sides, and Rosa’s theory is ultimately founded on the conviction that there is “a fundamental relatedness that precedes the division of subject and object and serves as the very basis both of the presence of the world and of subjective experience.” This means that human relationship to the world “are first established existentially and corporeally, and that the world, as the always already present other side of said relationship, necessarily concerns us in some way  as subjects, that it has significance for us and that we find ourselves intentionally oriented toward it.” As a result, “resonance appears not as something that first develops between a self-conscious subject and a ‘premade’ world, but as the event through which both commence’. It is therefore in relation to a world not of inert things but of ‘affordances’  that the subject negotiates the world. Here, it is recognized that our relations to the world are generated outside the representational regime of any given culture, and emerge very directly from the body

Rosa’s deepening of the basis for social analysis and critique leads him to conclude that “a history of modernity as that of a catastrophe of resonance is one-sided and overly simplistic.”  A situation of total socio-cultural alienation or total control is impossible. Thus, he casts his theory as part of a counter-history “which makes it clear that modernity is both at once: tremendous sensitivity to resonance and catastrophe of resonance simultaneously.” The diagnosis of modernity as only mute and cold fails to adequately gasp the essential paradox that modernity both starves people of resonance while at the same time nurturing the great desire for such resonance, and that it organizes social structures within which genuine forms of resonant relationship to the world can be explored.

In sum, Rosa argues that meaningful human existence requires responsive openness to being affected by the world – being touched, moved, or ‘called’ –  and this in its turn, depends on a culture in which  the world is in some sense capable of  ‘responding’ to our desirous approach.  But while resonant relationships are severely constrained within modernity, this same modernity also contains the outlines of visions of better, more resonant, worlds. For the escalation of the appropriation of the world during the modern period has also produced an escalation of longing for resonance. Modern culture is therefore characterized by the presence of social spaces dedicated to creating the conditions that allow people to temporarily experience visions of better worlds - of oases - and to preserving memories of them.

In this ultimately hopeful prognosis of the fate of modern existence, society is understood to contain social structures aimed at facilitating the goal of recalling, creating, and preserving resonant relationships to the world. We are reminded that a better world is  possible, w a world where  relationships to the world are truly resonant. In turning to the social structures designed to facilitate such relations, Rosa writes: “What drives modern subjects to visit museums and movie theaters, concert halls and opera houses, and to read novels, poems, and plays as if their lives depended on it is the fact that these activities allow them, at last at a pathic level, to test out and rehearse in a playful, exploratory way widely different modes of relating to the world – solitude  and abandonment, melancholy, attachment, exuberance, anger and rage, hate and love – and thereby moderate and modify their own relationships to the world.”

The problem, as Rosa acknowledges, is that the deep craving for resonance has become increasingly commercialized. This is obvious in relation to much popular culture, and the potential for monetizing resonance has been greatly expanded by the internet. Isn’t it in the interests of those in control of social media, for example, to maintain feelings of alienation in the real world so as to maximize the need for resonance in the commercialized digital one?

Which leads me back to the  Seoul subway.  I wouldn’t say the ‘alieneation-effect’ has been masterminded my some malign cabal, but it does seem as though the society in which we are living is becoming more an more alienated ‘off-line’, and as a result, the ‘on-line’ world is gaining ever increasing shares of our deep craving for the resonant oasis through offering us compensatory, but ultimately, all to often trivial, commercialized, exploitative, and fake forms of resonances. But, as Rosa emphasizes, alongside all these manufactured and commercialized forms of ‘resonance at a price’ or ‘resonance-light’  there also exist genuine possibilities of resonance within modernity. But maybe not on the Seoul subway system. And maybe not through your smartphone. After all, one of the main obstacles to having real resonance via the digital is that it leaves your body out, leaves it frozen in real space while you mind roams far away. Another, is that a compelling attraction of the smartphone is the degree of control it confers on the user, and as Rosa emphasizes, seeking and exerting control makes resonance very difficult to experience.

Image sources:

Photo of Seoul subway: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/world/asia/south-korea-coronavirus-shincheonji.html

Hartmut’s Rosa’s Books are available at:

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Resonance%3A+A+Sociology+of+Our+Relationship+to+the+World-p-9781509519927

https://www.wiley.com/en-kr/The+Uncontrollability+of+the+World-p-9781509543175