Below is my answer to Frequently Unasked Question (FUQ) #2: What is the Age of Resonance?
How is this post different from all my other posts? In all my other posts, I either know what I’m writing about, or I pretend that I know. In this post, I start by acknowledging that I don't know.
The subtitle of this post might suggest that I'm writing about “The Age of Resonance”, but the phrase merely points toward something I can't describe. So, instead of a description, I simply share what I heard.
“Ours Is an Age of Resonance, Not Reason.”
I heard that the future is already here, but unevenly distributed and unreliably perceived. The message has also been resonating through my digital media, which is where I partly crowdsourced the main image for this post.
I posed a question in response to a Tweet in which Andrew McLuhan, the third-generation exponent of understanding media, wrote: “ours is an age of resonance, not reason.”
I asked: “Curious if there's a particularly evocative image that you associate with the age of resonance. Andrew responded: “I think of a crowd immersed in a collective experience, musical, spiritual, political even.”
I chose a photograph of a large crowd in Times Square, New York City, celebrating the surrender of Nazi Germany. The date of the celebration was May 7th, 1945.
What Is Resonance?
In a future post, I might explore the chasm separating resonance from reason. Here, I'll start with the basics. I turned to a trusted source with the question: “What does the word ‘resonance’ mean to you as a physicist and as a musician?” Here’s the response:
It has a very similar meaning in physics and music. After all, resonance phenomena is when two processes are simultaneous and at the same frequency. They combine in such a way that the first enhances the second, then the stronger second enhances the first even more, etc. So in the infinite feedback loop the intensity grows exponentially, until the system cannot sustain itself.
In music, this would only concern sound waves. But in physics, more generally, any kind of wavy phenomenon can experience resonance.
For me, resonance just means “in sync”, for whatever two processes are considered.
In a related sense, resonance of a system is its ability to react to some external influence, when such influence matched some specific criteria. For example, a tuning fork will start to vibrate by itself when nearby sound matched its natural frequency. A bridge will swing when the wind frequency matched its internal frequency. Humans resonate with like-minded humans, etc.
However, one very specific characteristic for resonance is that the process can be “close” to critical value, when the reinforcement is manageable. When the match is exact, it results in a singularity: the reinforcement becomes infinite…A dangerous situation when two humans start resonating together.
The mitigating factor to avoid such a singularity is, not surprizingly, the ever-present noise. In physics and music, it’s friction in the environment that lessens resonance and avoids a blowup. But for more complex networks (human and non-human), it’s the irrationality, self-defeating behavior, and ultimately, entropy.
It takes a lot of effort to always vibrate at the same frequency. Even if it’s to our advantage.
That’s what you get when you resonate with beautiful minds. In this case, I received:
A resonant statement about the ubiquity of resonance: “Any kind of wavy phenomenon can experience resonance.”
A scientific explanation for why, as I proclaimed in True Sound, “the noise is part of the story.”
I like the way my source views noise as a mitigating factor — in this case, a good thing. The insight has helped me find peace in my daily exposure to noisy media. As a mitigating factor, noise helps reveal the shape of the encompassing silence and the rhythm of its punctuations. As we become aware of this rhythm, we prepare for the dance party at the end of time, which is the subject of my next FUQ.
Through the Looking Glass
Next, I turned to Marshall McLuhan, who spoke about the Age of Resonance as the acoustic age. He related the advent of this age to the shift from the eye to the ear, and he compared it to the adventure that began when Alice stepped through the looking glass. The adventure is marked by transitions from:
Writing to orality.
Image to sound.
Private identity to collective identity.
Monotheism to polytheism.
Structure to fluidity.
The masculine to the feminine.
Specialism to generalism.
Agriculture to hunting and gathering.
Unidirectionality to multi-directionality.
Goal-seeking to role-playing.
Transparency to secrecy.
The Left Brain to the Right Brain.
Living in the past and the future to living in the present moment.
No doubt, the transition is jarring, destabilizing. However, I'd like to offer a hypothesis to every water lily stuck in the story of its exile into desert sand. The hypothesis is that the transition from the visual to the acoustic world isn't the beginning of our exile, but rather its end, marking our return to the culture that had first cast us into consciousness.
As Marshall McLuhan put it: “The unconscious is a store of everything at once. When you begin to move information electrically, you begin to create a subconscious outside. Until recently, the conscious was our environment; now the subconscious has become the environment.”
It's All in ‘The Wake’
Finally, as an example of the world McLuhan describes, we can conclude this introduction to the Age of Resonance with Terence McKenna's or Joseph introduction to Finnegans Wake.
The Age of Dissonance
One way to think about the Age of Resonance is to juxtapose it with related concepts such The Age of Dissonance. Naming an age is a tricky art form. Ultimately, the nomenclature merely points to phenomena and states of cultural consciousness discontinuously evolving and confounding our epistemic agility.
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