Resonance and critical theory

Critical theory is rooted in the values of a Left that draws its motivation from agency. The focus on agency in modernity has however tended to obliterate another equally essential dimension of the relationship to the world, ‘patiency’ or the ‘capacity to be affected’. A return to 18th-century Romantic thought brings out the key theme – albeit one that is often neglected in Enlightenment thinking – of resonance with the world. Resonance makes room for the sensible by grounding reasoning in feeling and, above all, by enabling language to ‘reveal’ the world and the self. For the Romantics, the very form of expression of this quest for harmony with the world was poetry, the interstice between the individual and the cosmos that makes sense and links spatial and temporal dimensions into a meaningful whole. Poetic resonance is thus the antithesis of the alienating experience of fragmented time and space characteristic of contemporary capitalist societies – an alienation that Baudelaire perfectly described with his concept of ‘spleen’.