The revival of “resonance” in cultural sociology: Uses and abuses of a metaphor

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of “resonance” in sociology, assessing its strengths and limitations across several theoretical traditions, including American pragmatism, Hartmut Rosa's critical theory, and Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology. It argues that the overreliance on resonance as the central metaphor for cultural reception reveals a lack of understanding of the interplay between morality and emotion in audience engagement with cultural objects and performances. Rather than discarding the concept, the paper proposes a more modest yet analytically precise reformulation: resonance as moral alignment, stripped of its emotional dimension. This pared-down version allows the concept to be situated within a broader, multidimensional framework of reception, offering sharper tools for analyzing the dynamics of cultural continuity and transformation.