XVII.Between the Control of Institutions and the Institutionalization of Control

Rosa’s inquiry into the constitution of control as an institutional necessity is based on the assumption that, paradoxically, a society driven by the principle of dynamic stabilization both rejects and requires uncontrollability. Some matters arising from this proposition need to be carefully examined, notably the following: (1) the extent to which existential tensions can be regarded as sources of human self-fulfilment; (2) the extent to which humans need to exert a certain amount of control over the objective, normative, and subjective conditions of their existence; (3) the extent to which the pursuit of power can be considered a quest for Verfügbarkeit; (4) the extent to which the obsession with controllability in teleological ideologies has resulted in numerous historical tragedies; (5) the extent to which the demand for transparency and documentation is a central feature of all forms of modernity; (6) the extent to which resonance can, or cannot, be commodified; (7) the extent to which modern pathologies govern our lives in a dialectical fashion; (8) the extent to which the fact that entering into a resonant relationship with human, sentient, and/or living entities is fundamentally different from entering into a resonant relationship with nonhuman, non-sentient, and/or non-living entities can be explained by reference to different axes of resonance; (9) the extent to which actors are capable of experiencing the full phenomenological complexity of reality; (10) the extent to which Rosa’s sociology of our relationship to the world would benefit from drawing a distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal realms of our existence.