Hartmut Rosa’s Aesthetic of the Everyday. Can the Concept of Resonance Provide Aesthetic Marxism with a Political Outcome?

According to many of its detractors, the aesthetic approach to capitalism of the ‘first’ Frankfurt School lacks a convincing and politically effective social theory (Slater 1977, Habermas 1987, Cook 1996, Renaud 2021). Even in the cultural area, one could argue, the ideas of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer are unable to provide tools to shape concrete policies. This is due to the fact that their materialist background focuses mainly on the unveiling of a reality hidden under capitalist phantasmagoria (Kracauer 1960, Adorno 1983, Benjamin 1999), which renders them alien to the modern way of interacting with works of art, i.e. by enjoying their content. I contend that Hartmut Rosa’s reflection on “the power of art” as a vertical axe of “resonance” is interesting in this context (Rosa 2019). On the one hand, Rosa offers an aesthetics similar to his predecessors. He relies heavily on Adorno and insists on the utopian and conflictual characters of aesthetic experiences. Additionally, he condemns “overwhelming” entertainment in a manner highly reminiscent of Kracauer’s comment on the “total artwork of effects” (Kracauer 2005). On the other hand, Rosa integrates this argument in a broader framework and, against the latent elitism of the culture industry theoreticians, praises vernacular encounters with common cultural products. Moreover, through the notion of “inaccessibility”, he gets rid of the Marxist focus on objectivity and the pretense to “seize” reality (Kracauer 1960). Starting from this observation, and completing previous readings of Rosa in light of Adorno (Majid & Peters 2022), I suggest to confront Rosa’s philosophy of art with that of the first Frankfurt School to see if it succeeds in maintaining the critical charge of the latter while making it less unidimensional, and therefore more operational. Such presentation will follow three questions: (1) Which elements make “aesthetic Marxism” (Durand-Gasselin 2012) ineffective at the political level? And how does this inefficiency persist even when one restricts the political question to the organization of the “artworld” (Dickie 1974)? (2) To what extent does Rosa’s theory of art as a vertical axe of resonance echoes Adorno’s, Benjamin’s and Kracauer’s critique of propaganda and reactionary myths, and on which points does he distance himself from it? (3) Finally, in light of its debt towards and divergence from the first Frankfurt School, how can Rosa’s understanding of art help us thinking about tangible political outcomes, especially in the cultural domain? Using this method to think about the way the concept of “resonance” can inform cultural policies is even more relevant given the fact that, from the outset, Rosa considers that “resonant relationships (…) vary according to the resonating segment of world involved”, which shows that, if his philosophy of art can be politically used, then it would probably be at the scale of the artworld. In that regard, my hypothesis is that, by acknowledging the modern context in which culture exists as a specific sphere (Williams 1960), Rosa, though still critical of the culture industry, asks less of art than did his predecessors. His main purpose is to advocate for everyday aesthetic practices suited to activate resonance axes. Consequently, Rosa’s theory of art presents an opportunity to overstep some aporias of critical theory and inform the development of concrete cultural policies, especially, I will argue, when it comes to the cultural centers vocation.