Resources and resonance: Notes on patiency as world relation

Sociocultural psychology is now a firmly established approach to human meaning making (Bruner, 1990) and meaning construction (Valsiner, 2014). Its proponents rightly see culture not as a causal power but as a set of resources used by human agents (Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010). However, I argue in this article that this approach needs to be balanced by the phenomenological insight from Heidegger and others that meaning is not always “made” but can also be “found.” Following Rosa (2019), I argue that we should be careful not to reduce our relationship to the world to one of active agents that use passive resources as this easily mirrors the experiences of alienation in modernity. Humans display not only agency but also what I will call “patiency” in letting the world speak or resonate as we relate to it as more than a set of resources.