On the Central Activities of Resonance Relationships: Play, Sociability and Co-Creation

In his book Resonance – A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, Hartmut Rosa attempts to develope a sociology of human relationships based on the central idea of resonance. Resonance is defined as an affective or emotional mode of relationship with the world, in which “the subject and the world are mutually affected and transformed” (p. 174). Even though the term resonance indicates that it is a responsive relationship, resonance is not merely an echo, as both sides are to speak with their own voice.

In this paper, I argue that Rosa overlooks the central activities that form resonant relationships. First, play is children’s preferred mode of being and an affective mode of being in which the participants are open towards each other. In play, the social interaction consists of a ping-pong-interaction in which the participants are both responsive to the ideas of the other and voice their own in the mutual play. Not only do children prefer to play with their friends, but friendship – a fundamental human relationship – is formed through playing together (Hammershøj 2022).

Secondly, sociability is adults’ preferred way of being together with their friends and colleagues according to Simmel (1910). In this famous text The Sociology of Sociability, he denies sociability as “the play-form of association” (p. 130), in which people are interacting together for the sake of interacting together. Thirdly, co-creation is a creative process that taps into the collective potential and defined as “a process in which teams and stakeholders are actively engaged in mutually empowering acts of collective creativity with experiential and practical outcomes” (Rill et al. 2018: 22f).

I argue that openness is the key for creating these resonant relationships and demonstrates this point through examples from a project on artistic co-creation.