Perspectival Dualism: Resonance As a Subjective Experience and an Institutionalized Relationship

Speaker: Professor Hartmut Rosa, Friedrich-Schiller-University
Series: Sociology Seminar Series

Abstract:

The problem of properly linking micro- and macro-perspectives is one of the key questions in sociology to this very day. On the one hand, sociology needs to identify and analyze the structural logics and functionings of social institutions, but on the other hand, it also seeks to reconstruct and interpret the experiences (and sufferings) of social actors. The lecture will start from here and argue for a perspectival dualism in sociology which systematically links a structural and institutional analysis of modern ‚acceleration societies‘ with a phenomenological account of subjective experiences. After all, it is the subjects‘ hopes, desires and fears that ‚drive‘ the institutional modes of dynamic stabilization – but these hopes and fears, of course, are molded and shaped and sometimes produced by institutions. To this end, the lecture will seek to show that alienation as well as resonance can be simultaneously analyzed as objective forms of relationship (identifiable from a third person perspective) and as subjective forms of experience (identifiable from a first-person perspective only). It will end by outlining the contours of a ‚resonant society‘.

Speaker biography:

Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology and Social Theory at Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany, and Director of the Max-Weber-Kolleg at the University of Erfurt. He has been an Affiliated Professor at the Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, New York, 2001-2006. In 1997, he received his PhD in Political Science from Humboldt-University in Berlin. After that, he held teaching positions at the universities of Mannheim, Jena, Augsburg and Essen. His publications focus on Social Acceleration, Resonance and the Temporal Structures of Modernity and have been translated in more than 25 languages.