Resonance as a response to alienation

Communities of resonance: a response to pressure and exhaustion

Only few people face more expectations than leaders. They are expected to create results in ambiguous contexts, to translate strategies in ways that are meaningful for staff, and to navigate situations with competing needs and ideals with authenticity and loyalty. Leaders are expected to provide clear direction, to be change agents and role models. On top of that, all of the above is obviously to be done with engagement, energy and belief that the future will be better than the past.

Leadership literature describes an overwhelming number of ideals, which influence the standards for the expectations that are directed towards leaders. As is implicitly demonstrated in the sentences above, a powerful sense of individualism flows through the descriptions of what leaders are supposed to be doing. This individualism is confirmed by public processes of praising when things go well and shaming when things don’t. Leaders are often portrayed as either heroes or villains, and it is often the simple causal relationships, which seem to resonate in media and literature despite the absence of the nuances that we all know exist.

Exhaustion, loss of meaning and resignation

Individualism and the gap between the ideals and the everyday experience of leading can easily manifest itself as an enormous pressure, which can be experienced as conditions of exhaustion, loss of meaning and resignation; conditions that can escalate to stress and burnout.

Reflecting on this dynamic, it is striking how easily a sense of loneliness becomes a companion when taking on the role as a leader. The pressure arising from the socially produced expectations can become internalized in ways where the absence of the ideal conditions described in the literature is turned inward as signposts of one’s own inadequacy, lack of competence or energy. Many leaders don’t feel sufficiently confident with their colleagues and/or bosses to talk openly about the issues that play into the pressure[i]. This is not so surprising since conversations about these experiences can be accompanied by a degree of uncertainty about the response, or perhaps a degree of shame related to not living up to the ideals. Perhaps a sense of pride can constrain one from initiating such conversations.

In a way, we are fooling ourselves when we collectively collude with ideals that we all know none of us can fulfil. When we restrain from questioning these ideals publicly, then we increase the chances of turning the pressure inward. What easily emerges then, is a pattern of everyone being on one’s own, leading to fragmentation and a loss of coherence and social bonds – all arising while the phenomenological experience of loneliness is intact.

But how did we get here? And what can we do about it?

Hartmut Rosa

A few years ago, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa wrote the important book: Resonance[ii]. In it, Rosa offers an explanation of the rise of burnout, stress and anxiety in modern high-speed society. Furthermore, he offered a frame of reference within which the following important question can be raised: What is the good life that our society must enable?

The book Resonance was partly a response to the critique that hit Rosa after publishing the book Alienation and acceleration – towards a critical theory of late-modern temporality in 2010. This book was a diagnosis of the alienation that arose out of the high-speed society and this made some commentators call him the “slow down guru”. It wasn’t Rosa’s argument, however, that we should slow down; slowness is not inherently valuable, just like speed is only a problem in so far as it leads to alienation. This made him reflect carefully about the question: What is the opposite of alienation?

Alienation

Rosa understands alienation as a mode of relating characterized by indifference or hostility, and thus with no inner connection. Rosa uses the idea of a metaphorical wire connecting us all to suggest that such relationships are mute; the wire between the self and the world is not vibrating, there is nothing that speaks to us or which moves us. It is a relation of relationlessness.

In order for us to understand how this alienation has become so pervasive a phenomenon, we have to take a look at human development through modernity, where institutional spheres like technology, economy, science and even politics have been characterized by deaf, mute and numb relationships. This is not necessarily bad in itself, and these can be thought of as characterized by instrumentalism. Through modernity we learnt to approach the world as a series of ‘points of aggression’ – points that must dealt with, mastered, handled, worked through, controlled, finished[iii]. Exams to be passed, mountains – or career ladders – to be climbed, to-do lists to be ticked off etc. We are socialized to strive for visible or tangible results, for effectiveness or for control. According to Rosa, alienation arises out of this instrumental way of being in the world. One goes to work every day and does what needs to be done, yet we feel mute and numb. One has colleagues but doesn’t necessarily feel a sense of connection to them.

Resonance: Affect and emotion

Rosa arrived at the conclusion that if alienation is characterized by mute relationships, then the opposite must be vibrating relationships, that is to say, relationships characterized by resonance. It may be easiest to grasp what Rosa is getting at by understanding it as a physical or embodied experience. An obvious image is that of eyes that light up, indicating something vibrating, resonating. If one observes people in a cinema, in the theatre or in intense conversation, resonance is visible through the embodied expressions which signifies a vibrating wire, something which moves the body to respond.

Resonance involves a double embodied movement, which Rosa describes as affect and emotion. Affect, for Rosa, is when we are affected or moved by our encounter with the world around us. We experience affect as sensation – heat or cold, something pleasant or something disturbing, waves of emotions that flow through the body and move us. Affect calls out emotion, which is the outward responsive expression of resonance – bodies straightening up or collapsing, laughter or tears flowing. Affect is when we are moved, and emotion is our embodied response to that movement, which bear the potential of calling out affect in others.

The emergence of communities of resonance

Rosa is interested in the possibilities for resonance arising between people. He relies on neurobiological research into mirror neurons and on cognitive research in empathy. Namely empathetic resonance is generated primarily through the evocation and creation of narrative points of connection. When we tell stories, we establish the conditions, which allow us to take the perspective of others. Rosa derives from this that social communities can become communities of resonance if people inhabit and enact resonant spaces. Communities of resonance can arise if people make use of a shared repertoire of resonance-generating stories.

Points of aggression and business bullshit

These insights are worth bringing back to the context of leadership because it raises an interesting question about what characterizes the kinds of conversation that leaders have with their colleagues, their own managers, their staff.

In my experience, most conversations in management meeting rooms reflect a pattern of approaching the world solely through what Rosa calls points of aggression. The complexity and uncertainty of leading is boiled down to strategic objectives and targets, which are made manageable through action plans and deadlines. Being successful as a leader in this paradigm is very much about increasing the capacity to be effective in this instrumental endeavor.

Rosa says that this, however, is also the kind of practice that can pave the way for the muteness that can lead to alienation experienced as indifference and coldness, because all that had the potential to make the wire to the world vibrate has been eroded in the name of effectiveness.

The potential for alienation is particularly present when the conversation in the management meeting room is characterized by what the critical management scholar André Spicer calls Business Bullshit[iv]. These are forms of speech characterized by degrees of abstraction and detachment from lived experience, which makes it almost impossible to sense any vibration or connection to the embodiment of interaction with others.

Such forms of abstraction are essentially different from conversations that take stories as their starting point. Communicating in abstract and detached terms allows for making oneself in-affectable. The sentient and interpretive individual remains hidden.

Narratives from within: a response to pressure, exhaustion and loneliness

Let’s return to the start of this blogpost and the pressure that leaders experience, which so easily gets internalized and turned inwards either as a self-criticism or as a sense of uncertainty or shame related to not living up to the established ideals.

It is my experience that this internalization of the pressure and the collective collusion with the ideals contribute to the alienation that Rosa draws attention to. When we turn things inwards and keep our doubts or uncertainties to ourselves, we cut ourselves off from the spaces of

resonance, which are there as a potential in so far as we seek them with one another. If we make ourselves mute to the world, the world becomes mute to us.

Rosa offers an alternative with his ideas on resonance and his theorizing about the ‘narrative points of connection’ that can allow for the experience of being moved (affect) and responding accordingly (emotion). If we take seriously the idea that the ways we talk and communicate with each other make a crucial difference, we might begin to think more seriously about the language styles that we rely on and reproduce together. The social constructionist John Shotter[v] made a similar point when arguing for the importance of not solely approaching the world through what he called an ’aboutness’ approach. This is where we talk about the world as if we are not already engaged in the ongoing flow of spontaneous embodied interaction. He advocated a form of language that he called ‘withness thinking’, where we speak from within our responsive relationship to the world and others.

Communicating with each other from within our experience of responsive relationships (Shotter) and conveying more of our thoughts and experience through the medium of stories (Rosa) may hold a lot of potential when it comes to making ourselves available to each other as responsive individuals, thereby allowing for vibration to emerge. It presupposes the will and ability to engage with others in ways that can enable us to overcome fear and the shame and tolerate our own imperfections and fallibility with the tangle of emotions that come along with the practice of leading.

I have found that being open and responsive to one’s own and others’ emotional content holds the potential to show a way out of the loneliness or the pressure that easily arises for leaders. Recognizing that the pressure and loneliness is not a given but arise as a consequence of the prevailing styles of conversation and the patterns of sense-making offers a possibility for imagining a different experience of work. However, it is not a conflict-free endeavor and it can sometimes require considerable effort to keep going on together. No one can bear that responsibility alone but it is by recognizing this that new possibilities may emerge.

Notes

[i] https://www.arbejdsmiljoweb.dk/media/u5ffpa50/artikel-om-lederes-psykiske-arbejdsmiljoe.pdf (Inquiry in Denmark into leaders’ experience of psychological work environment [ii] Rosa, H. (2016). Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity Press [iii] Rosa, H. (2020) The Uncontrollability of the World. Polity Press. [iv] Spicer, A., (2017) Business Bullshit. Taylor & Francis Ltd. [v] Shotter, J. (2012). More than Cool Reason: ‘Withness-Thinking’ or ‘Systemic Thinking’ and ‘Thinking About Systems.’ International Journal of Collaborative Practices, 3(1), pp. 1-13.