Beyond Connection: Paradoxes of Psychedelic Resonance in Late Modernity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores the enduring suspicion that psychedelic experiences are antithetical to the structural dynamic of modern societies through Hartmut Rosa's concepts of ‘resonance’ and ‘social acceleration’. Rosa's theoretical framework is particularly generative for studying the social meaning of contemporary psychedelia because it enables a link between forms of personal experience to social structures. Moreover, because Rosa argues that resonance describes a ‘successful’ mode of relating to the world, it acts as a normative standard through which to critique modern social formations. Thus, Rosa's sociophenomenological vocabulary offers an important corrective to the uncritical thematic of ‘dis/connection’ pervading psychedelic discourse, whereby ‘connection’ is one‐sidedly celebrated as a self‐evident good and ‘disconnection’ is framed as the central pathology of modernity. Transcending the dis/connection binary, Rosa's sociological perspective shifts the critical focus onto the social relations that support or disable resonance—a crucial move that enables a view of psychedelic connection as belonging to, rather than opposing, modern society. The first part of the essay argues that psychedelic experience is exemplary of resonance by contrasting it to depression. The second part outlines the three motors of modern acceleration and how they compel subjects to adopt alienated—rather than resonant—modes of relationship. While the previous sections clarify the intuitive opposition between modernity and psychedelics, the final section considers a series of paradoxes of psychedelic resonance in ‘late’ modernity, which unsettles this binary and the benevolent view of psychedelic connection. In today's context of ‘connectionist capitalism’, the danger is clear—psychedelic connection may abet rather than counteract the dynamic of acceleration that produces alienation in the first place.