Dark resonance: On the possibility of resonance with death

Abstract

The concept of resonance, introduced by Hartmut Rosa, denotes a vital relationship to the world and offers a starting point for discussing meaningfulness in peoples’ lives by serving as an antithesis to alienation. An unexplored aspect of the concept is the potential for resonance with death, which Rosa dismisses as an impossibility. This article challenges this view by introducing the term dark resonance, based on the ‘dark turn’ in the philosophy of nature. Dark resonance comes in (at least) two variants, both implying a transcendence of the self: (1) as reunion, an implosion of the self and an inwards movement, and (2) as release, an explosion of the self and an outwards movement. For both variants, the borders between self and environment and between life and death, becomes fuzzy, which also challenges the idea that resonance demands an experiencing subject. These variants are explored through examples from black metal, palliative care and near-death experiences. An implication is that we may need to broaden the scope of what can be seen as desirable ways of connecting to the world and acknowledge that there is potential for resonance also in dark thoughts, or, in some cases, even in death.

Introduction

Can we relate to our own death in a meaningful way, or even experience it as something positive? In sociology, as in Western thought more generally, this question has been answered in the negative; death is commonly seen as an ultimate end which can never be experienced. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman describes death as ‘the final void’, and the ‘cessation of the very “acting subject”, and with it, the end of all perception’ (Bauman, 1992: 2). Becker (2020) argued that we are terrified of death; it is a primary fear which nobody is immune to, and it is the basis of all our other fears. We cope with it either by tranquilizing ourselves through drugs or mundane activities or dissolving in the social ‘religions’ of ideology or culture. Most of us are confined to the options laid out for us by society, which serves as a protection against the reality of death. When we fail, as the average person is not unlikely to do, we risk falling into depression, grieving our failure and guilt. While death remains fundamentally outside our grasp, our mortality is notably present in our lives and in our culture. It forces us to find a meaning in order to deal with life's finality, either by trying to prevent death or to strive for immortality: Bauman (1992) sees culture as an attempt at permanence since it offers a medium for transcending the limits of our biological existence.

In this article, I will offer an alternative idea of how we can relate to death in a meaningful way, by critically discussing Rosa's (2019a) theory of resonance. More precisely, I will explore the potential for being in resonance with death, an issue only briefly discussed (and dismissed) in Rosa's work. His argument is that resonance with death is fundamentally impossible since death ends the possibility for any type of experience. I wish to challenge this view by arguing that such a resonance is indeed possible, albeit uncommon. Through what I will call dark resonance, I aim to contribute with an extension of Rosa's resonance theory across one of its borders, namely the border of the living experiencing subject.

I will first introduce Rosa's resonance theory, focusing on how it considers the relationship between a subject and the world, and how he discusses the (im-)possibility of having a resonant relationship to death. Second, I outline the concept of dark resonance based on the ‘dark turn’ in the philosophy of nature. Third, I suggest two distinct variants of it, illustrated through examples from the music genre black metal and the use of psychedelic drugs in palliative care. Finally, I discuss the implications of this contribution for resonance theory.

Resonance, the subject and death

The impetus for Rosa to develop his resonance theory was the bleak conclusions from his previous work, Social Acceleration (2013), in which he describes how modern societies have gone into an increased spiral of acceleration which threatens the psychological, political and ecological systems. He argues in his subsequent work (Rosa, 2019b) that modernity is built around an antagonistic social ontology which creates a fundamentally aggressive stance to the world and how we relate to it. In Resonance (2019a: 1), the first sentence reads: ‘If acceleration is the problem, then resonance may well be the solution’. He describes resonance as a vital relationship to the world in which we may find meaning, and that this is created through a mutual interaction with the world (Rosa, 2019a), that is, built on a relational ontology (Rosa, 2019b). Resonance is thereby Rosa's way of trying to offer an alternative to a society gone haywire. He notes how resonance, acceleration and alienation are ‘huge’ concepts, spanning the micro and the macro, and that their point is not to offer a once-and-for-all definition to explain social reality but to ‘open up debate in social theory and to produce fruitful questions and inspiration for social research’, and resonance theory is therefore ‘far from exhaustive completion’ (Rosa, 2023a: 1).

Rosa describes resonance using musical metaphors: we have a string to the world, which will vibrate and sing when we enter into resonant relationships. For resonance to occur, Rosa identifies four criteria: affection, self-efficacy, transformation and uncontrollability (Rosa, 2019a). For affection, resonance involves an inwards movement where we are touched by someone or something, which does something to us, calling us and makes us want to reach out to it (Rosa, 2019a: 174). This could be another person, a work of art, nature or even our work. We respond to this through an outwards movement – emotion – a self-efficacious action where we connect with the world using our own voice. As a result, both we and the world will transform through this mutual exchange. However, resonance is something unpredictable which we cannot plan or control: we can never expect it or order it into existence.

The other of resonance is alienation, characterized by indifference or repulsion, meaning that the string to the world is mute (Rosa, 2019a: 184). Rosa borrows Jaeggi (2014) term of a ‘relation of relationlessness’ which indicates that the world cannot be ‘adaptively transformed’; it appears ‘cold, rigid, repulsive, and non-responsive’, exemplified with depression and burnout (Rosa, 2019a: 184). He devotes much attention to various bodily, mental and social aspects of our relationship to the world, where the bodily aspects are related to our encounters with the physical world and deals with topics such as breathing, eating, defecating, walking, laughing and crying (Rosa, 2019a: 47–82). Being situated in the world is both a bodily and a mental experience, and such relationships may be more or less resonant. While resonance with the world is not a given, this is true also for the resonance with our own bodies; we may be in an alienated relationship to our physical selves and consider the body as our enemy – a form of self-alienation (Rosa, 2019a: 104–109).

Resonance and alienation, Rosa claims, are antithetical towards one another and therefore engaged in a constant dialectic, through which we develop our identities and relationships to the world via feelings of alienation and resonance (Rosa, 2019a: 184–191). Puberty is a phase in life where most of us discover the types of social contexts where we feel alienated and where we start developing an idea of where to find resonance. This dialectic is however not limited to our formative years but is an ongoing process. Feelings of alienation may spur life-changing decisions in search for new social connections which allow for resonance. It reflects a need for a meaningful resistance in relation to the world, of letting our voice meet the other. This is emphasized by Rosa in his claim that resonance does not equal consonance or harmony; rather, dissonance is often necessary, since it expresses difference and contradiction (Rosa, 2019a: 184). A longing for something else is a strong driver for resonance, since it implies a call for change, a ‘flash of hope for adaptive transformation and response in a silent world’ (Rosa, 2019a: 187).

While resonance is most strongly felt in the moment – through intense emotional experiences as falling in love or hearing a mind-blowing piece of music – we will over time strive to construct ‘axes of resonance’, that is, more stable sources for where we tend to be in resonance with the world by constructing our lives in certain ways (Rosa, 2019a: 195–304). Rosa describes such axes as horizontal (comprising social relationships and political commitment); vertical (spiritual, religious, aesthetic or ecological experiences of being connected to the world); or diagonal (related to the material world, including work and objects). Since this article deals with existential and spiritual issues, it is primarily vertical resonance which is relevant to discuss here.

One source of vertical resonance, according to Rosa, is religion, where ‘deep resonance’ may be arrived at through practices such as prayer (Rosa, 2019a: 267). Similar resonant experiences can be found through nature. While pre-modern civilizations lived closer to nature and its rhythms, modern people live their lives independent of daylight or the natural environment; nature becomes something we visit rather than live in, something other from civilization, the human body and the mind (Rosa, 2019a: 270). We may even form a resonant relationship to it because nature is an entity separated from ourselves. But it is also possible to form a resonant relationship to nature by choosing a more environmentally conscious lifestyle, which can be seen as a response to nature's increasingly loud voice following climate change.

Another source for vertical resonance is art (Rosa, 2019a: 280–296), which Rosa argues has taken the place of religion in modern society as the primary source through which we make sense of life. Art is, like nature, an entity that has a voice and which we therefore can enter into a resonant relationship with. It is a meaningful voice of an other we can engage with and contribute to in various ways. We can have epiphanies in meeting a work of art, or experience near-religious experiences at concerts. It transforms our lives, and, especially in a live performance, we also transform the piece of art through our participation in the performance – a horizontal resonance between artist and audience. In a book on heavy metal (2023b), Rosa argues that music evokes questions about the foundations of our existence. Heavy metal is a musical genre which deals with them directly, through the sonic experience: the screams and growls express a dramatic disapproval of existence, and results in a deep resonance among the fans. Heavy metal manages to ‘fearlessly endure the dance on the existential rift’ (Rosa, 2023b: 108, my translation), which is possible through an involved, dispositional and open listening, an existential listening that demands preparation – it is not only something we do for fun. The intensity of the experience can create a ‘resonance bridge for the relationship between the self and the world: body, mind and world are connected in sound and vibration’ (Rosa, 2023b: 118, my translation).

Music and art can even become a source for overcoming the dialectic between resonance and alienation, if only for a moment, through intense aesthetic experiences of works representing deep existential alienation:

One is touched, gripped, moved precisely by the forms of existential alienation that are aesthetically generated and negotiated here. One thus experiences both resonance and alienation, not blended into some hybrid form, but in a relation of mutual escalation. The deeper, more ‘authentic’, more believable, and more compelling is the alienation here depicted or, better yet, modeled – the greater is the resonant effect. (Rosa, 2019a: 287, emphasis added)

Rosa (2019a) is explicit in describing resonance as a normative concept directed towards the good life (Rosa, 2019a: 451). He is therefore unwilling to include in it any experiences that could be considered destructive (Rosa, 2019a: 446–449). Such ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ resonance, for example, the feeling of exhilaration that a violent person could feel while assaulting somebody is a contradiction in terms since it requires a victim. Similarly, the allure of violent organizations on the political far right is based on the promise of community and in-group solidarity, but since this imply a subsequent muting of other groups, it does not fulfil the criteria for resonance. This, Rosa claims, is merely an ‘echo’, not resonance: it silences the voice of the other and the only response the oppressor hears is its own voice. While this normative stance is theoretically valid and commendable given his definition of resonance, it is noteworthy that Rosa neglects voluntary submission to pain in this discussion, which is not an uncommon practice, and which may reasonably be a mutual source for resonance, for example, in a sado-masochistic relationship. Most mentions of pain in Resonance are related to suffering, or the need to block out resonance with the world in order to manage pain.

Resonance as transcending the subject?

Rosa considers resonance with nature and art as a form of self-transcendence: it is concerned with our existence as a whole and an encounter with a force which goes beyond the subject: ‘what is at stake here is our relationship to the totality of what confronts us. What encompasses us – as subjects’ (Rosa, 2019a: 297). Self-transcendence therefore does not imply any dissolution of the subject. The subject (or the self, he uses the terms interchangeably) and the world, in Rosa's perspective, are mutually defined and the subject therefore cannot be separated from the world in which it resides and to which it is interconnected. The world is defined as ‘everything that is encountered (or that can be encountered)’ (Rosa, 2019a: 34). Rosa claims that self and world need to be retained as separate entities, where subjects are defined by two essential characteristics: (1) that they have experiences, and (2) being the sites where motivated psychic energies materialize, that is, giving impulses to action. The intentional actions of subjects are therefore central for his theory: without a subject, there can be no resonance.

Rosa's notion of the self as an independent entity which can experience and act is an example of what has been labelled a substantialist view, which can be contrasted with non-substantialist and non-self-theories (Siderits et al., 2010). Non-substantialist theories consider the self as consciousness, which is not necessarily equal to an independent acting subject: the self, in this view, is momentary, going in and out of existence. The non-self-view is represented in the Buddhist tradition, which disqualifies the very identification of a self. The fleeting nature of a person's mind does not presuppose a singular subject – just as a row of ants might seem like an entity when seen from afar, once we look closer we realize that it is made up of many (Siderits et al., 2010). Similarly, what constitutes a human self is not an independent and isolated entity, and the self is fundamentally an illusion.

This view on the self comes with another form of relationship to the world. Rosa (2019a) describes this difference, drawing on Weber and Habermas, in terms of the Western focus on an active relation to the world, either affirming it (through adaptation) or renouncing it (through domination), while Eastern thought embrace a more passive relationship to the world, through affirmation via contemplation, or renunciation via withdrawal (Rosa, 2019a: 130–131). Rosa argues that the affirmative stances are open for resonance, while the renouncing ones are not. Given Rosa's focus on self-efficacy, his theory primarily focuses on the active/affirmative combination, that is, the more Western approach.

Rosa's resonance theory has been criticized from a Confucian standpoint, which similarly to the non-substantialist perspective considers the subject in a non-atomistic way, where it is always part of the world (Sigurðsson and D’Ambrosio, 2023). Correspondingly, Sigurðsson and D’Ambrosio critique Rosa for depending on a subject-object dichotomy, which effectively limits the types of interactions with the world that are possible: since the subject is outside the world in Rosa's theory, it is already ‘full’ when encountering the world. Confucianism sees the individual as constitued by the world through its contingencies, and that individuality and agency are cultivated through these, which allows for ‘distinctiveness without distinction’ (2023: 14). Since agency is dispersed, we essentially only ‘intra-act’ with the world, rather than responding to it as separate entities. In this view, resonance is something we allow to happen rather than something we do or seek. The subject is ‘empty’. In Rosa's theory, they argue, the individual is destined to encounter alienation, since this occurs through the difference between self and world. The resonance that Rosa's theory allow for is what they call ‘big moment resonance’ (2023: 16), that is, transformative experiences where the subject is fundamentally changed, while Confucianism focuses on mundane resonance where we are constantly ‘becoming’, through continuous change. While Rosa's type of resonance is hard to reach, Confucian resonance is abundant.

In a response to this critique (2023a), Rosa argues that one ambition with resonance theory has been to escape Eurocentric theorizing. He places it in the same category as the strand of theories in natural and social sciences (e.g., Karen Barad and Bruno Latour) which ‘assumes that “reality” is a co-construction between human subjects and something other ‘out there’, and hence the ‘truth’ lies exactly in between those two options’ (Rosa, 2023a: 3). Rosa wants to avoid an atomistic perspective of the subject and agency, since it tends to make a divide between an active subject (or perpetrator) and a passive receiver (or victim); he does this by introducing the notion of medio-passivity (Rosa, 2023a; Rosa, 2019b). The term is neither active nor passive voice, but an example of an in-between, found in ancient Greek or Sanskrit; it shifts focus from the separate entities to what is between them:

Medio-passive is a way of being involved in an event which is not active and passive in turns, and not half active and half passive, but fully active and fully passive at the same time. Thus, it is just as much medio-active. In agreement with Sigurðsson and D’Ambrosio, I think that resonance shifts the center of agency from the entities involved in a relationship towards the interspace between them. (Rosa, 2023a: 9)

This development of his theory is an admission that the strict division between active and passive, found in Resonance (Rosa, 2019a), was misleading, and that medio-passivity offers another way of conceptualizing the subject. By doing this, Rosa manages to keep elements from the Western tradition while incorporating new dimensions to resonance. A part of the Western tradition he is unwilling to give up is that resonance involves transgression and transformation, that is, focusing on ‘big moment resonance’ over the mundane resonance of Confucianism. Resonance is not just going with the flow, and thereby relinquishing autonomy; it rather involves being able to offer resistance and saying no (Rosa, 2023a).

Resonance with death?

Given his thorough review of the multitude of ways in which we encounter the world, it is striking how little Rosa deals with death. In Resonance (2019a: 52), death shows up in a discussion of stigmatization as a form of ‘social death’, for example, through how certain tribes punish their outcasts by denying them human interaction or acknowledgement of their existence, which exhausts their will to live. Death is also mentioned as a threat to resonant friendship relations: he discusses how a character in Schiller's poem The Hostage is willing to ‘submit to a kind of Liebestod and die with his friend, rather than sever the bond of friendship’ (Rosa, 2019a: 211). He also mentions death in relation to the death penalty, as ‘resonance-free killing’ through an administrated process where the killing is performed ‘correctly and with bureaucratic precision’ (Rosa, 2019a: 399).

The relationship between resonance and death is slightly more elaborated in a subsequent book, where Rosa (2020) discusses resonance in relation to the term Unverfügbarkeit, translated as ‘uncontrollability’, which does not fully describe the German term. Something marked by unverfügbarkeit is not just uncontrollable but out of reach; it is not something we may develop a direct relationship to. He argues in the book that resonance is always something semi-uncontrollable: it is that which we can never be sure to achieve. There is a possibility for resonance in relation to social situations, nature, people and cultural artefacts, but we cannot count on it as a promise – even when we listen to a song which usually resonates with us, we may at a particular time be unable to form such a connection. Modernity is marked by an increased wish to control the uncontrollable, which risks transforming potentially resonant experiences into mute ones, since this stance is an aggressive one. Resonance is built on the mutual relationship between a subject and the person, thing or experience this subject resonates with – it demands a call and a response. An aggressive relationship is not built on mutuality, but on the urge to control our environment.

Based on this discussion, Rosa (2020) argues that death is fundamentally, categorically and existentially uncontrollable: we can never reach a resonant relationship to it. This does not prevent us from trying, but it is futile, especially since we tend to try through the aggressive strategy of attempting to control it. Suicide or euthanasia, for instance, is attempts at controlling the conditions of death: it certainly involves an element of self-efficacious action. But the action to terminate life remains an aggressive act, a task to complete, which is not consistent with resonance.

In a YouTube video (Denkkollektiv, 2020), Rosa discusses whether resonance with death is possible, alongside philosopher and theologian Simone Kotva. The two lectures also relate the theme to Simone Weil's writings, particularly her idea of attention (Weil, 1951). In Kotva's lecture, resonance is compared with the notion of attention as a passive form of resonance, or what Rosa calls a dispositional resonance, that is, being open and responsive to what the world conveys. Resonance with death, Kotva argues, would imply such a passive resonance, a sort of performed passivity. She argues that the point where life ends and death begins is unclear. Death is a loss of selfhood, but losing oneself is not confined to dying; rather, we tend to get overwhelmed in life, absorbed by what is other to us, what Kotva calls ‘deathlike experiences, minor mortalities, intimations of fatality’. It is a temporary abandonment of the will. Kotva refers to Weil as arguing that spontaneity is a passivity of the will, a passive awareness of the other, or a ‘mystical absorption’. It is self-forgetting. In this sense, dying can be said to be an art of noticing, an attentiveness to the end. In Rosa's lecture, he points out that we can experience resonance with just about everything, with death as the exception. It is beyond all experience, and when we touch it, we cease resonating. Resonance is in Rosa's theory deeply connected to life, so it necessarily ends with death, at which point there is no longer any self-efficacy, no transformation, only annihilation. Weil points out that we are part of a greater whole, and that upon death, the atom is transformed into a new relationship with the universe. This could imply that our string to the world keeps vibrating; death simply changes its meaning. With this point, Rosa begs to differ, since this does not mean that we are in resonance with death, it is merely a consolation. Since we end as persons, death remains definitive and mute. He concludes that as a sociologist, philosopher and rational being, he cannot acknowledge any resonance with death, but as a person with aesthetic sensibilities and mystical leanings, Weil might have a point.

Dark resonance

Starting from the above discussion, I wish to offer an alternative interpretation of the possibility for resonance with death through what I will call dark resonance. I envisage this as a form of resonance which allows us to experience another type of relation to death. In this discussion, I am mainly interested in the relationship to one's own death, rather than to our mortality, or towards the already dead.

Sociological theories generally share the assumption that the line between life and death can be drawn very sharply, based on the notion of a singular subject within the physical existence of a particular individual. But this border is not as obvious as it may seem, and neither are the borders of the subject. By taking the recent ‘dark turn’ in the philosophy of nature (Van Ooijen, 2019) as a starting point, I will argue that resonance with death is indeed possible, through a transcendence of the experiencing subject. I suggest that the notion of dark resonance could be theoretically arrived at through extending Rosa's resonance theory by relating it to concepts developed in this philosophical dark turn.

Over the last decade, various suggestions have been put forward on how to theorize the relationship between humans and nature from a radical anti-anthropocentric perspective (Van Ooijen, 2019). It dissolves the separation between humans and nature and considers us as an ecological force among others. This perspective spans from the microbiological to the cosmic, with humans somewhere in between, and leads to a radical dissolvement of human values. It further blurs the borders between life and death, since life is seen as emerging from death and destruction. The dark turn, Erik van Ooijen argues, also ‘finds its prevalent mood in the depressive’ and its inspiration ‘in body horror and the monstrous, the gothic, the Lovecratftian weird and […] depressive, melancholic, nihilistic and suicidal art’ (Van Ooijen, 2019: 111).

One scholar who has developed this ‘dark’ perspective is eco-philosopher Timothy Morton, who introduces the concept of dark ecology to describe a specific form of ecological awareness (Morton, 2016). It can be considered dark since ‘its essence is unspeakable […], because it compels us to recognize the melancholic wounds that make us up’, a ‘crushing, humiliating reason out of human domination of Earth’; it is an ‘ecognosis’ based on a holistic perspective where we are deeply connected to nonhuman beings (Morton, 2016: 110). This ecological awareness dissolves the borders between the subject and its surroundings, as well as between life and death. It makes temporality fuzzy and questions whether human beings can even be considered to be individuals. Overall, Morton argues, humanistic thought has been flooded by anthropocentrism, to the point where nature as such becomes a human concept: Marxism's perspective on nature ‘is not actual trees and Arctic foxes but trees and foxes as they are metabolized by human economic relations. Use value is not “what things really are for,” but “what things are for humans”’ (Morton, 2016: 26). Nature as a concept is therefore not only essentially untrue but also the cause for global warming, and the culprit in eco-modernist approaches to managing the climate crisis, approaches he labels ‘[m]odernity once more with feeling’, or ‘happy nihilism’ (Morton, 2016: 52). As such, dark ecology offers a radical critique of modernity that has certain elements in common with Rosa's characteristic of modernity as aggressive, but with the difference that dark ecology goes further in denying the analytic or ontological difference between humans and nature. As such, it also has similarities with Confucian thought in its renouncing of the atomistic subject.

Morton's solution to amend our alienated relationship to nature is to embrace the darkness, to find the mystery in it and to pierce through the depression to find the ‘sweetness inside’ (Morton, 2016: 117). This can be read as a Weberian re-enchantment of the world, and since dark ecology acknowledges dark feelings, depression is considered an accurate reaction to the human relationship to nature rather than something pathological. Such an approach should, however, not lead to fatalism. Rather, depression should be seen as ‘the inner footprint of coexistence, a highly sensitive attunement to other beings, a feeling of being sensitized to a plenitude of things. De-pressed by them’ (Morton, 2016: 129). Symbiosis and coexistence are hence deeply connected to existence. Death, in this perspective, becomes less of an ending, and more of a cognitive relief, a non-violent social form, which imbues humans to take responsibility for their transformative interactions with the world.

A dark ecological perspective steps out of the human-centered standpoint and focuses on how death leads to a refiguration of biological relationships: life ceases and life is created, new objects come into being. When a tree falls in the forest, light reaches areas which until recently were shaded by the tree's leaves (Van Ooijen, 2021); similarly, a dead swan in a lake or a human buried in a graveyard will be a source for new life. Life and death mingle. Taking this perspective on one's own existence lifts the matter of dying from the cessation of the self to transcending into the biosphere.

Dark ecology is one example of the type of theory Rosa (2023a) describes as placing the ‘truth’ of reality somewhere between the subject and the ‘other’, building on a relational ontology. As such, it is relevant to explore its relationship to resonance theory, which I will do through the concept of dark resonance.

Two variants of dark resonance

The anti-anthropological ideas in the philosophical dark turn challenges several of the foundational concepts within social theory. For example, Bauman claims that ‘[e]ach and any event we know or know of – except death – has a past as well as a future’ (Bauman, 1992: 392). This starts from the anthropocentric notion of the experiencing subject as mandatory for reasoning about death – at least one's own. We cannot imagine existence without thought, Bauman argues, and while we live our lives between the past and the future – implying that neither the beginning nor the end is absolute – the subject does have a terminal end.

Rosa's theory of resonance offers a potentially fruitful way of conceptualizing death (and life) from an anti-anthropological stance, but he is reluctant to take it in this direction. He considers resonance as a fundamental human drive, and he maintains that for resonance to occur, an experiencing subject is necessary. In his response to the Confucian critique (Rosa, 2023a), he acknowledges the validity of the counterargument, but is only willing to meet it halfway: the subject remains ‘outside’ the world. In this sense, not only is resonance a concept limited to humans but it also presupposes a rather sharp division between humans and nature. When Rosa writes about nature as a potential source for resonance, it is nature as an other – which is independent and speaks with its own voice. This is even a requirement for attaining a resonant relationship with it, since resonance is conceptually defined as a relationship and a dialogue between a distinct subject and something in the world, be it nature, people or works of art. Correspondingly, while he in Resonance (2019a: 340) makes a distinction between the modern affliction to wanting to master and control the world (Logos) and the more resonant strive to interact with it (Eros), Thanatos never enters into the conversation. Death remains mute in resonance theory.

In dark ecology, the border between subject and environment is fuzzy, as is the border between life and death. The experiencing subject is here deeply enmeshed in a biological web, and it is not entirely obvious where this subject begins and ends. It challenges resonance theory, which presupposes an individual. However, by embracing this perspective while retaining the notion of an experiencing self as a property, or a form of consciousness, we can develop a middle ground where we may in fact enter into a relationship to our own death – and not merely mortality – through different varieties of radical anti-subjectivism. I will henceforth outline two variants of such a ‘dark’ resonance:

Dark resonance as reunion. This is an implosion of the self, an inwards movement, based on an abyss-deep alienation from the living, and a misanthropic worldview. Death is in this variant an absolution, a reunion with eternity.

Dark resonance as release. This is an explosion of the self, an outwards movement, based on an experience of a deep connection to the universe and the subsequent dissolution of the subject. Death in this variant softens the borders between individual consciousness and the ecological system.

These two variants offer different pathways to the same end, namely transcending the self or the ego, and as a consequence, a dissolution of the subject. In the following two sections, I will describe these variants in more detail.

Dark resonance as reunion

The first variant of dark resonance, as reunion, will be exemplified through the music genre black metal, particularly its relationship to suicide.

In no part of modern culture is death more cherished than in black metal. This music genre was born in the 1980s through bands such as Venom, Bathory and Celtic Frost, but reached maturity and notoriety in the 1990s through a second wave, mainly in Norway, with bands such as Mayhem, Darkthrone and Burzum. In black metal, drums play blastbeats (fast snare hits) at extreme tempos, guitars play intense tremolos combined with sweeping harmonies and slow melodies, and the vocals consist of otherworldly screams. From its inception, the genre has not only incorporated frightening imagery but also transgressed from merely representing such themes in their lyrics to living them: the Norwegian scene spawned infamous characters who self-harmed on stage, burned churches, and, in the end, committed murder (Moynihan and Søderlind, 2003). Today, the genre is somewhat tamed and contains a multitude of expressions, but at heart, a blackened outlook remains as a foundational element. The iconic records from the 1990s, for example, Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger, has been described as having a ‘necro’ sound, being sonically as ‘cold’ and ‘dead’ as possible, with repetitive patterns and non-traditional song structures. The frequent use of stage names and corpse paint further strengthens not only the aesthetic qualities but also an anti-anthropological stance: the performers are not quite human.

A spontaneous response to black metal as a phenomenon could be to deny that it has anything to do with resonance, since it is based on a misanthropic worldview and a strongly alienated relationship to the world. However, this style of music is a source for deep resonance through an uncompromising aesthetic and an often mesmerizing sonic experience, in the sense discussed by Rosa in his book on heavy metal (Rosa, 2023b), or the ‘mutual escalation’ of resonance and alienation discussed in Resonance (Rosa, 2019a: 287). Since the social relationships between black metal artists or fans and the broader public are antagonistic, it balances on the verge of ‘negative resonance’, which according to Rosa would disqualify it from being labelled as resonant at all. There are certainly examples in the scene of when this balancing act has failed miserably (e.g., Burzum, whose sole member Varg Vikernes has extreme far-right views and was sentenced to jail after committing murder on a previous bandmate), as there are examples of the opposite (e.g., Liturgy, aiming for transcendent black metal through a specific sonic approach combined with progressive political stances).

For this article, I will focus primarily on the potential for resonance with death that can be found in the scene, a cultural milieu where death is considered neither as an ending nor as a failure. An example of the first variant of dark resonance is therefore that of Per Yngve ‘Dead’ Ohlin, former vocalist of the black metal band Mayhem. Carey (2023) argues that Dead's joining Mayhem was a key event for the establishment of black metal's aesthetics and expression, both the corpse painted stage persona and the introduction of self-harm and violence to the live act. Dead's purported habits of breathing putrefied air from bags containing dead animals and burying his stage clothes prior to the show to make them smell like a grave adds to the performance as a balancing act between the living and the dead. His lyrics and his later suicide further strengthen the point that the border between life and death was one that could be breached, and which was not absolute. Rather, Dead considered death as an act of transgression from one state to another.

Dead writes about his relationship to life and death in the lyrics for Life Eternal – written prior to his suicide and mentioned in his suicide note as a ‘final greeting’ (Johannesson and Klingberg, 2018: 94). In the lyrics, he clearly associates death with transcendence rather than with an ending:

A dream of another existence

You wish to die

A dream of another world

You pray for death

To release the soul one must die

To find peace inside you must get eternal

I am a mortal, but am I human?

How beautiful life is now when my time has come

A human destiny, but nothing human inside

What will be left of me when I'm dead?

There was nothing when I lived

What you found was eternal death

No one will ever miss you

(Mayhem, 1994)

Dead's lyrics describe suicide as an act that will set his soul free, and it is in the presence of his coming death that his life finally becomes beautiful. The act of dying transcends humanity, with death as the gateway from one state to another. His denying of humanity implies a radical doubting of the self, and to attain resonance, he needs to connect to another plane of existence. Only as non-human, a non-subject, can he reach and remain in eternity. Life, he writes in his suicide note, was just a dream, and he will soon wake up.

It is warranted to point out that Dead suffered from mental illness and that it may be ethically dubious to place too much attention to (and glorifying) his longing for death and his self-harm. He was heavily bullied as a child and was at one point beaten to the point where his spleen was ruptured, leading to a near death-experience (Johannesson and Klingberg, 2018). It is however relevant to discuss his death as an example of dark resonance, by being a transcendence from a tormented and alienated life. Carey (2023) argues that his suicide ultimately describes a failure of managing depressive and self-violent feelings through artistic expression. Another line of argument could be that his suicide is a logical conclusion of his outlook on life and as a crescendo of his artistic identity. He recurrently expressed strong misanthropic views and often reflected on the beauty of death. He also recognized his mental illness, but ‘did not label it as such’ (Carey, 2023: 109), rather, he identified himself as non-human. From a sociological perspective, mental illness can be seen as representing what society deems as deviations or unnormal actions (Smith, 1982). That Dead suffered seems obvious, but whether it should be labelled according to the definitions from a society he loathed is a question of standpoint. If we accept his own description, he was deeply troubled, but awaited relief from the anguish of being amongst the living.

The inwards movement born from a deep alienation from the (social) world and the self as it appears in relation to this world involves a flight into depression. But in the end, when this movement reaches its limit, there is transcendence, since life itself is challenged, and the mind enters something primordial. This fuzziness of the subject implies a final dissolution into the world, into ‘eternity’. Dead's example illustrates a form of deep self-reflection from cutting oneself off from the social world, but the goal is not to renounce the world but to come in closer connection to it. Renouncing the world is just a means to an end.

A part of Dead's legacy is the subsequent development of a subgenre, suicidal black metal, which focuses on suicide as an attempt at transforming the soul. Silk (2013) makes an exposé of various forms of voluntary and potentially meaningful suicides, ranging from suicide bombers to religious martyrs. The argument is that death is not necessarily seen as the ‘ultimate humiliation of reason’ (Bauman, 1992: 15), since it in many cultures and religions is a political or a spiritual tool, to achieve certain ends or to connect fundamentally to the world. In Buddhism, the body is seen as temporary and life is considered as suffering, while death is the point where we come in contact with the eternal. She adds: ‘Self-destruction or self-harm opposes the ego's natural inclination for self-preservation (physically and experientially) and serves as a testament to a person's non-attachment to illusory life’ (Silk, 2013: 10). Suicide is hence a transgression that dissolves being, and suicidal black metal is a genre devoted to the transformative possibilities in such an act.

In summary, this example illustrates how resonance is the result of a dialectic with alienation. For Dead, life was all alienation, while death represented resonance. This variant of dark resonance thus demands a radical dialectic between alienation and resonance, as well as between life and death, which results in their mutual escalation, not least through the active infliction of harm, resulting in a balancing act between pleasure and pain, resulting in the final act of suicide and the potentially resonant experience of his passing. Death is in this example not fully uncontrollable; it is what in Rosa (2020) terminology could be called something semi-controllable, or medio-passive. Dead did not know what the other state would be, but he was fully attuned to the transcendence. In Dead's life, all sources of resonance were depleted, perhaps also his role as an artist, so death took the role of the final refuge. He had contemplated it for a long time, and his perspective on death was neither fearful nor negative – it was transcendence into a beautiful state, a homecoming. Resonance therefore is an implosion of the self, a reunion with the eternity we once were a part of.

Dark resonance as release

The second variant of dark resonance, as release, will be exemplified through spiritual or natural experiences, which have in common their transcendental quality, leading to a sense of disembodied existence or unity with a greater whole. While the spiritual is a religious experience, the natural involves a deep connection to the natural world and acknowledging our biological interconnectedness with other beings. The specific examples are the use of psilocybin in palliative care, and near-death experiences.

The idea of displacing the self from our bodily existence is used to reduce anxiety and fear of death in palliative care through the use of psychedelic mushrooms. Studies where psilocybin (the active ingredient in said mushrooms) is used as a drug to treat cancer patients for anxiety or depression has showed that one or a few psychedelic experiences is enough to make a person have a lasting effect over more than six months (White et al., 2023). Psilocybin effectively disrupts our sense of self and the border between our own existence and our surroundings (Sheldrake, 2020). In a case study, the psilocybin session ‘occasioned an experience of a mystical nature that the patient would later describe as the single-most personally meaningful experience of her life. This experience led to immediate, substantial, and sustained improvements in her distress and quality of life’ (Patchett-Marble et al., 2022: 823). This ‘mystical’ experience made the patient feel ‘present, connected, joyous, and free’ (p. 824), an experience of being at one with the universe, radically ameliorating the existential fear of dying. Similar effects of self-transcendence have been found in terminal cancer patients using religious coping mechanisms (Bovero et al., 2023).

The mystical experience of being one with the universe is not merely a drug effect: it is closely related to how fungi connect life and death, efficiently being a link between the two. Whenever an animal or a plant dies, fungi will step in to disintegrate the body and make it a source for new life. Fungi has over the last decades been tested to this effect as a way of managing oil spills and contaminated soils (Saravanan et al., 2023), effectively making what was a source or death into a source of life. The workings of fungi lead us to understand how the border between life and death is all but sharp: the decomposition of one individual is the birth of others (Sheldrake, 2020).

This questions the whole idea of ‘individuals’. We tend to consider humans and other animals as such, although we are constantly interacting through a complex symbiosis with bacteria, microbes and fungi. The point where a person ends and these life forms begin is fluent, and they will continue living once the person's mind comes to a halt. Sheldrake (2020) suggests that the microbial populations within us shake our views of ourselves: ‘We are ecosystems, composed of – and decomposed by – an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light’ (Sheldrake, 2020: 18). We cannot even be defined on anatomical grounds since we are not the sole owners of our bodies. Rather, we may be called ‘holobionts’ (Gilbert et al., 2012), assemblages of organisms into superorganisms that behave as units. Current evidence does not allow to talk of individuals ‘in any sense of classical biology: anatomical, developmental, physiological, immunological, genetic, or evolutionary’ (Gilbert et al., 2012: 334). Microbes, viruses and imprinted genes we carry in our bodies have the ability to change our behavior and personalities (Kramer and Bressan, 2015). This fundamentally questions Western dichotomies such as self/non-self, human/nature and subject/object and is in line with Morton's dark ecology in the sense that an ecological awareness should be built on the coexistence and symbiosis between humans and the ecological system.

Still, we may argue that subjectivity and a sense of self exists in the sense that we experience ourselves as physical wholes; we have a sense of self, regardless of whether we biologically should be considered as independent entities or merely a consciousness within an internal society of entities. Since the self is the result of embodied practices and memory, it is of lesser importance whether this body is an entity or a holobiont, as long as it manages to produce a sense of self. This leads to the question of what consciousness really is, since this is a prerequisite for experiencing anything at all. Studies of near-death experiences have questioned materialist notions of the self as based in neural processes in the brain, since people with such experiences actually perceive things consciously, with a retained sense of self-identity, even when clinically dead (Van Lommel, 2011). Such experiences are almost exclusively positive and tend to lead to an immediate self-transformation, where fear of death disappears and the perspective on life is altered (Zingmark and Granberg-Axèll, 2022).

In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism argues that consciousness is not limited to humans but is a ubiquitous feature in all living things, from plants, to microbes, fungi and animals (Goff, 2019). This view is largely compatible with dark ecology and the idea of humans as holobionts, where consciousnesses are connected through networks forming larger wholes. If we consider consciousness as something inherent in all living things, it will also have radical implications for our understanding of resonance: this ceases to be a uniquely human ability, but must be thought to exist in animals, trees and mushrooms. It would be a sense of thriving or living in the world in a state of connectedness. In this sense, it is not unthinkable that resonance may also be an ability of a system, such as a holobiont, and that consciousness in this system appears on different levels – from the human sense of self to the consciousness of its integrated entities. Panpsychism, combined with the narrative sense of self in Rosa's thinking, bids the question whether such an emergent sense of self may also dissolve, that is, that it is reversable, for example, through dementia or physical trauma, or if it can be transcended, for example, through a spiritual awakening with or without mind-altering drugs. The next question is whether death can be a pathway to such dissolution or transcendence. To answer these questions in the affirmative, we may need to embrace a non-Western view on the self, as found in the non-substantialist or non-self- traditions.

In summary, the second variant of dark resonance connects our consciousness to a larger whole, an interconnectedness of all living things, while also broadening the notion of life from the individual to the ecosystem. This type of ecological awareness is a deep sense of resonance based on belonging, occurring through a transcended consciousness via the dispersal of the self: an explosion of the subject and a release into the world.

Conclusions

I have presented the idea of dark resonance as a pathway towards resonance with death and presented examples of two variants. These variants are not entirely distinct; the example of suicidal black metal (after Dead) and its ideas of spiritual transformation is close to Buddhist ideas. Combined with the blackened worldview of black metal it occupies a space somewhere between these variants; for instance, the lines from the Mayhem song Chimera, ‘you are not dead, you never existed’, denote a radical denial of the self. Similarly, Liturgy's ‘transcendental black metal’ certainly involves elements that are close to the second variant of dark resonance. The examples of psilocybin could likewise be interpreted both as release and reunion. Still, the variants do represent different causes or impulses for developing dark resonance.

The resonance discussed in this article is ‘dark’ because it verges on the unknowable, such as the experience of dying or the fleeing notion of consciousness. Its cultural representations may be dark in the sense of affirming the suicidal and destructive, or bright in the sense of affirming a cosmic connectedness. But conceptually, it remains in the epistemological shadows. In the following, I will outline how the examples correspond to Rosa's criteria for resonance and discuss some theoretical implications of my argument in relation to resonance theory.

Rosa (2023a) argues that while resonance is often described as an experience, it is fundamentally a relationship with specific and objectively observable qualities, which make it possible to assess whether it has occurred or not. It is present only when four criteria are satisfied: affection, transformation, self-efficacy and uncontrollability. In all the examples I have given, affection is certainly present. Transformation is present in the first variant if we accept Dead's idea of death as a point of transcendence. For the second variant, near-death experiences are described as fundamentally transformative. Self-efficacy is present in Dead's case, since death in this example was the endpoint to a radical dialectic between alienation and resonance, and this dialectic was brought to an end, self-efficaciously, in a process of mutual escalation concluded through a final resonant experience. Near-death experiences and the use of psilocybin describe more passive pathways to resonance where self-efficacy is less pronounced. By way of Rosa's idea of medio-passivity, the self-efficacy criteria could perhaps be interpreted more or less strictly in regards to the existence of an active subject. For the fourth criteria, uncontrollability, Rosa (2020) describes resonance as semi-controllable, but maintains that death remains fundamentally uncontrollable. I would however argue that Dead's suicide is an example of semi-controllability, illustrated by his active practicing for death, not through philosophy but by seeking and living through the experience of almost passing the border. As such, the practice did not represent an attempt at aggressively controlling death, but exploring it, and possibly resonating with death's ‘voice’. Thereby, he also renounced some of his own subjectivity by actively trying to surpass it, to overcome being human. It is also an exploration of pain as a way towards resonance, where self-harm becomes a way of disassociating oneself from the alienating social world and finding recourse in the brute nature of one's being and the presence of the moment. The second example considers death as something integrated with life, and not completely outside the scope of perception: we mighty actually live through it. Whether this imply actually experiencing the passing, as a conscious self or subject, is impossible to say: the jury is still out and will die trying. But the gradual dissolving or transcendence of the self may make that transition into a slope we can slide down, rather than a wall we crash into.

One theoretical implication from the above is related to the notions of consciousness, subject and self, which would need to be rethought, not only in light of non-Western through traditions but also Western natural science. For resonance theory, and for sociology, this line of thought leads to new questions related to subjective experience, and if it matters if the entities we call ‘individuals’ are biologically distinct or to be seen as ecosystems. If we accept the latter, a response to the argument that a subject is a condition for the experience of resonance could be that it is more important that we can speak of a consciousness, and that consciousness (and possibly our sense of self) may very well be an aggregated property of a system. If so, we may meet resonance theory's need for a subject halfway, by making its borders a bit fuzzier. This also implies that the border between life and death becomes fuzzy, and we can therefore allow ourselves to extend the vertical axis of resonance just a little bit across that border. In Dead's case, it is possible that he did meet death consciously, if we interpret the research on near death-experiences (Van Lommel, 2011) in light of Rosa's idea of medio-passivity, that is, a voice between the active and the passive. If consciousness can remain past clinical death in near-death experiences, it is possible to assume that it lingers on for a while also when we die, medio-passively, which opens for having a resonant experience of dying. We can hope that this happened to Dead, but we can never know.

Given this less absolute understanding of death, a second implication is concerned with whether or not death should be seen as an end, or as a part of a larger process involving not only the self, but the entire holobiont or ecosystem we make up. It raises questions about how to approach death and our co-existence with other living entities. Common to the examples presented in this article is a more positive – or at least meaningful – approach to one's own death. In the first variant, death is met as a reunion and a homecoming and represents a new beginning. In the second, death is less of a major event since it is based on a deep belongingness to the world. What is actually resonating in these examples therefore differs; in the first, it is overcoming the dialectic between resonance and alienation by a radical, final act. In the second, the dialectic is overcome through ecological connectedness, which is a more passive stance. The subject's voice is correspondingly different in the two variants; while it is never mute, it differs in whether it is separate from the world or simply an element of it. Resonating with death may very well be a final conscious experience, at which point resonance is elevated from the individual to the larger whole, or it may be a starting point for transformation, as in the example of near-death experiences. In the latter case, death ceases to be seen as an end or as a threat, which allows for a different approach to life.

A third implication of dark resonance is therefore its consequences for the notion of the good life, which Rosa describes as one aim of resonance theory. While a near-death experience may lead to a more resonant attunement to life and the world, and thereby a better life than before the experience, the first variant offers a darker route to what could be seen as a good life. It touches on the attraction of fear and danger, embracing the ‘dark awe’ that is a sublime quality of threatening experiences (Gordon et al., 2017). The promise of dark resonance is that we, by embracing the fluidity of the borders between life, death and the subject, can become differently related to the world, and to even find meaning in pain. Rosa pathologizes depression and sees it as representing alienation, while dark ecology embraces depression and melancholy as a form of deeper ecological awareness. To retain the normative dimension of resonance, we would therefore need to broaden the scope of what can be seen as desirable ways of connecting to the world. If ‘good’ and ‘positive’ are defined as ‘meaningful’, rather than ‘happy’ or ‘content’, there may be potential for resonance also in dark thoughts, or, in some cases, even in death. Dark resonance then becomes a path towards meaning. In the end, by denying the finality and horror of dying, this may be a step not just towards a good life but also towards a good and meaningful death.