1. What the Book Is About
Hartmut Rosa’s new book strikes a nerve. Situation und Konstellation (Rosa 2026) diagnoses a transformation that many people sense but rarely manage to name: that acting is increasingly being replaced by executing, that life is administered rather than lived, that the scope for situated judgement is disappearing from one domain after another.
The book's opening scene makes this concrete. An eleven-year-old girl rushes into a fast-food outlet. She has been saving her pocket money and finally buys a Hyper Burger. But as she unwraps it, the burger falls to the floor and is trampled by a boot. The girl cries. The employee sees the scene, is moved, wants to help: "Here, little one, I'll give you a new one!" The girl stops crying, beams, takes the burger, and rushes off. For the employee it is the high point of his day, "die Tat, an die er sich am Abend erinnern wird" ("the act he will remember that evening").
But then comes the decisive sentence: "Nur leider: Sie ist so gut wie verboten" ("Only unfortunately: it is more or less forbidden").
And Rosa continues with a formulation that compresses the entire book into four sentences:
"Und Vorschrift ist Vorschrift. Gleichbehandlung fur alle. Keine Ausnahmen fur niemand. Schutzrichtlinien gegen Korruption und Missbrauch."
("And rules are rules. Equal treatment for all. No exceptions for anyone. Safeguarding guidelines against corruption and abuse.")
This is the core tension around which the book turns. The employee acts: he responds situationally to a concrete, felt suffering, mobilizes his judgement, improvises. But the constellation in which he finds himself no longer permits this kind of acting. The rules, the procedures, the equal-treatment principles have closed the space for exactly this kind of intervention.
Rosa develops from this a central thesis: "Eine Kernthese des Buches lautet daher, dass wir in zunehmendem Masse von Handelnden zu Vollziehenden werden (gemacht werden) oder vielmehr: dass wir uns selbst dazu machen" ("A core thesis of the book is therefore that we are increasingly becoming, or being made into, executors rather than actors, or rather: that we are making ourselves into executors"). Acting, in Rosa's sense, means "in einem komplexen und oft vieldeutigen Interaktionsgeschehen uber Spielraume zu verfugen, welche den Einsatz von Urteilskraft verlangen, die wiederum auf Erfahrung beruht" ("having scope for manoeuvre in a complex and often ambiguous process of interaction, scope that demands the deployment of judgement grounded in experience"), while executing means "das Ausfuhren von Regeln, das Befolgen von Vorgaben oder das Umsetzen von Entscheidungen, die andernorts (und immer ofter auf algorithmische Weise) getroffen wurden" ("carrying out rules, following specifications, or implementing decisions that were made elsewhere, and increasingly in algorithmic form").
This distinction is phenomenologically persuasive. It captures something real. And Rosa deepens it with a further image that compresses the whole transformation into a single perceptual shift. Imagine, he says, that one is attending an event, the school graduation of a daughter, the wedding of a friend, and reaches for the camera. "Schon in dem Moment, in dem uns die Kamera in den Sinn kommt, treten wir gleichsam aus der Situation heraus und betrachten die festliche Konstellation vor uns wie von aussen" ("Already in the moment when the camera comes to mind, we step as it were out of the situation and observe the festive constellation before us as if from outside"). Actors find themselves within a situation: "sie partizipieren daran, sie pragen und definieren sie mit und verandern sie fortwahrend" ("they participate in it, they shape and define it, and continually change it"), while executors experience themselves "als einer weitgehend fremdbestimmten Konstellation gegenubergestellt. Sie erleben sich eher wie Beobachter oder Bearbeiter eines Sachverhalts denn als wirkliche Akteure" ("as confronted by a largely externally determined constellation. They experience themselves more like observers or processors of a state of affairs than genuine agents").
This camera image is phenomenologically brilliant. It shows how even a mere shift of gaze, from participation to observation, from being-inside to looking-from-outside, transforms the entire quality of experience. The situation becomes a constellation at the same moment as the actor becomes an executor. And Rosa is right that this shift is increasingly becoming the normal case: not as a dramatic rupture but as a creeping reorientation that permeates every domain of life.
The question this article asks is whether this distinction is analytically differentiated enough to explain the phenomena Rosa describes. The argument is that Rosa correctly diagnoses an important phenomenon, but that his conceptual apparatus remains insufficiently differentiated at crucial points, and that Living Value Theory supplies the missing distinctions.
2. The Strengths of the Diagnosis
Before the critique begins, what Rosa achieves must be acknowledged.
First, he captures a real phenomenological shift. The experience of being increasingly an executor rather than an actor is not an academic construction. It is immediately felt in hospitals, schools, administrative offices, the service sector, and academic teaching. Anyone who has ever tried to make a situationally appropriate but rule-violating decision within a bureaucratic system knows what Rosa is describing.
Second, Rosa describes the phenomenon of "konstellative Ohnmacht" ("constellative powerlessness") with impressive precision. The experience of filling in a form and discovering that complex life situations are reduced to binary options, "tick 'applies' or 'does not apply'", is recognizable to anyone who has dealt with modern administrative systems. Rosa aptly describes how this results in "einer geradezu physisch wahrnehmbaren Entfremdungserfahrung" ("an alienation experience that is almost physically perceptible"), "wenn das Gemeinte eben nur teilweise oder nur eingeschrankt 'zutrifft', wir das aber nicht angeben konnen" ("when what is meant only partly or only with qualification 'applies', but we cannot indicate this").
Third, Rosa recognizes the importance of scope for manoeuvre in child development. Drawing on George Herbert Mead, he emphasizes that children "am meisten lernen, wenn sie Spielregeln selbst aushandeln mussen und dabei Konflikte aushalten, bearbeiten und beilegen mussen" ("learn most when they must negotiate the rules of play themselves, and in doing so must endure, work through, and resolve conflicts"). In such situations children are "mit allen Sinnen und emotional (und daher auch mit grosser Handlungsenergie) in die Welt gestellt" ("placed in the world with all their senses and emotionally, and therefore with great energy for action"), and only through this do they develop judgement and become moral agents.
Fourth, Rosa draws on Jonathan Haidt's diagnosis of safetyism and connects it with his own thesis. He shows how the social obsession with safety, the fencing of playgrounds, the regulation of classroom materials, snowplough parenting, systematically curtails the scope of children's activity. "Wir bereiten den Weg unserer Kinder ins Leben, anstatt unsere Kinder auf den Weg ins Leben vorzubereiten" ("We prepare the path for our children rather than preparing our children for the path"). He connects this persuasively with a threefold loss of trust: a culturally widespread "Vertrauensverlust, beziehungsweise ein generelles Misstrauen in die Welt da draussen, ausserhalb der eigenen vier Wande" ("loss of trust, or a general distrust in the world out there, outside one's own four walls"), combined with the replacement of a "vitalen Grundvertrauens in das Leben, das davon ausgeht, dass offene Situationen, die unvorhersehbare Spielraume implizieren (etwa wenn Kinder anderen Kindern, Tieren, Pflanzen, Lebensmitteln, Wasserhahnen, Pfutzen etc. begegnen), eher dazu tendieren, gut oder wenigstens glimpflich auszugehen, als grosse (Gesundheits-)Schaden zu verursachen" ("vital basic trust in life that assumes that open situations implying unforeseeable scope, such as when children encounter other children, animals, plants, food, taps, puddles, tend to turn out well or at least without serious harm rather than causing major damage") by a generalized suspicion.
Fifth, Rosa identifies in Hermann Schmitz's concept of Situation a philosophically fertile starting point. Situations are, for Schmitz, characterized by "binnendiffuser Bedeutsamkeit" ("internally diffuse significance") that cannot be resolved into unambiguous, let alone factorial, determinations. Situations are "konstitutiv unscharf, insbesondere an den Randern" ("constitutively imprecise, especially at the edges"). This constitutive imprecision is what makes situated acting necessary in the first place, and what constellative executing cannot by definition capture.
All of this is correct, important, and persuasively formulated.
3. Where the Analysis Falls Short
The problem lies not in what Rosa sees. It lies in what his conceptual apparatus cannot distinguish.
Rosa works with a fundamental dichotomy: situation versus constellation, acting versus executing, openness versus closure. This dichotomy is phenomenologically productive: it makes a real tension visible. But it remains analytically underdifferentiated in several decisive respects.
3.1 The Missing Theory of Mediation
Rosa distinguishes three dimensions of world-relation: relation to the physically material world, social relation to other children and adults, and self-relation to one's own mind and body. This is already a step beyond purely social-theoretical approaches, but it remains insufficiently differentiated.
Living Value Theory identifies five irreducible mediations through which all mesocosmic coordination runs: embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multimateriality, and multisymbolization. None of these can be reduced to another. Each operates according to its own logic. And each has a specific relationship to the question of whether it is "constellatable" or not.
Rosa treats environments, playgrounds, forests, classrooms, as contexts of action rather than as independently structuring conditions. He describes the loss of scope for manoeuvre without conceptualizing the specific role of dwelling as a mediation. How space itself enables or prevents acting, how the openness of a landscape, the enclosure of a building, the accessibility of a path structure coordination, remains underexamined. Even more significantly, Rosa does not isolate symbolization as an independent mediation. He speaks of rules, systems, formalizations, algorithms, but he does not ask systematically what exactly happens when a symbolic system is applied to a domain. He does not ask what Living Value Theory calls ontological fit: whether the structure of a symbolic system corresponds to the structure of the domain it attempts to capture. Without this question, Rosa can describe that constellations restrict the scope of acting, but he cannot explain why some domains can be constellated and others cannot, where the limit runs, and what exactly is lost in constellating.
3.2 The Missing Distinction: Non-Recursive, Self-Recursive, and Interrecursive Domains
This is the most important gap in Rosa's analysis, and it is one that Living Value Theory's concept of interrecursivity supplies directly.
LVT distinguishes three ontologically distinct registers of coordination. Non-recursive domains are those in which phenomena do not respond to being described, measured, or regulated. A property boundary does not move because it has been surveyed. A kidney stone does not reorganize itself because it has been diagnosed. The full value of a monetary exchange is completely realized at the point of transaction: there is no residual uncertainty, no possibility that the recipient will return later and say the ten euros were not worth ten euros. In these domains, symbolic governance achieves excellent ontological fit, because the domain holds still while being governed. This is why accounting, logistics, and standardized manufacturing can be successfully constellated: the structure of the symbolic system and the structure of the domain match.
Self-recursive domains are those in which an agent responds to its own states, descriptions, and self-monitoring. The body regulated through diet, exercise, and medical surveillance; the worker disciplined through productivity metrics and performance review; the child whose behaviour is shaped through internalized norms. The feedback loop is internal: the agent adjusts to its own monitoring. Rules achieve moderate ontological fit here: they can guide and structure self-regulation with some success, but they also transform what they regulate, because the agent responds to being measured. A person who tracks their mood begins to experience their mood through the categories of the tracking system.
Interrecursive domains are those in which multiple recursive agents respond to each other's responses, each one reading, interpreting, anticipating, and strategically adjusting to the others in real time. Conversation, negotiation, intimacy, parenting, friendship, care, teaching, play, and conflict are all interrecursive domains. In them, the dynamics are generated by the mutual opacity and mutual responsiveness of the agents involved. Neither party can fully predict the other. Each party's behaviour depends on what it expects the other to do, and those expectations shift continuously. In these domains, rules achieve poor ontological fit, not because the rules are badly designed, but because the domain's structure ensures that any rule introduced into it becomes part of the dynamics it was meant to govern. A rule about how to conduct a conversation changes the conversation before it begins. A protocol for expressing care transforms the care into performance.
Rosa's book handles two of these three registers implicitly but never names the tripartite distinction explicitly. When he describes the playground, the wedding, the classroom, and the fast-food outlet as situations requiring judgement, he is primarily describing interrecursive domains. When he describes accounting procedures, equal-treatment regulations, and algorithmic decision systems as constellations, he is implicitly noting that non-recursive governance logic is being applied to interrecursive domains. And when he discusses children's development through free play, he is tracking the formation of what LVT calls recursive fluidity through practice in interrecursive situations. But because he lacks the explicit tripartite distinction, he cannot specify why some domains resist constellating while others do not, and he cannot identify the precise mechanism by which the transfer of non-recursive governance logic into interrecursive domains produces the distortions he describes.
Rosa also does not distinguish not-yet-constellatable domains from already-constellated ones. Organized sport is his own example. Football is a rule-complete game. The rules of play fully define what is permissible and what is not. Technologies like VAR do not transform sport; they refine its execution. The referee who "nicht mehr auf 'gleiche Hohe' entscheiden kann, sondern beim Abseits auf die Millimeterentscheidung des VAR warten muss" ("can no longer decide on 'equal height' but must wait for the VAR's millimetre decision on offside") is not undergoing the transition from situation to constellation. Football was always constellated. This is a shift within an already-constellated domain. Rosa's framework does not register the difference.
3.3 Trust and the Confusion of Risk Types
A further problem appears in Rosa's concept of trust.
Rosa proposes countering the advance of constellations with a renewed trust: trust in the world, in other people, in the resilience of children. He describes the loss of a vital basic trust in life, and he calls for its restoration as an alternative to the risk-elimination logic that drives constellating. This is an important observation. But it contains an implicit assumption that is problematic: that uncertainty is always of the same kind and can therefore always be addressed in the same way.
Non-recursive risks are real and do not respond to trust. One cannot trust gravity in the sense that the trust influences what gravity does. One cannot trust electricity. One cannot trust a wild animal in the sense that the trust changes its behaviour. In these domains, safety requires material precaution, design, and sometimes physical barriers. A child can be hit by a car. The car does not respond to the child's trust. The fence, in this case, is not constellative overreach but an appropriate response to a non-recursive risk.
Interrecursive risks, by contrast, can often be addressed through trust, experience, and social competence. The risk of social exclusion, of conflict, of misreading a social situation, of being deceived: these are risks whose management can be trained precisely through exposure to interrecursive situations under manageable conditions. Fencing them out, by over-supervising children's social interaction and eliminating conflict, does not make children safer from interrecursive risks. It prevents them from developing the interrecursive competence to navigate such risks when they inevitably appear.
Rosa's own book provides the material for this distinction without drawing it. When he describes dangers lurking everywhere, "auf Schulwegen, in Einkaufszentren ebenso wie im Wald oder auf dem freien Feld (wo es ebenso wie von Zecken und Fuchsbandwurmern, giftigen Pilzen, umstiirzenden Baumen und neuerdings sogar Wolfen nur so wimmelt)" ("on the way to school, in shopping centres as well as in the forest or open field, which are swarming with ticks and fox tapeworms, poisonous mushrooms, falling trees, and recently even wolves"), he conflates two fundamentally different categories. Ticks and fox tapeworms are non-recursive risks: they do not respond to children's interpretations. A wolf in the forest is categorically different from a bullying incident in the playground. Both are risks, but one requires material precaution, the other requires interrecursive competence. When both are compressed under the same concept of risk minimization, the answer becomes inevitably undifferentiated: either fence everything or trust everything.
The decisive question is more differentiated than Rosa poses it: where is the risk interrecursive, such that it can be addressed through trust, experience, and social competence? Where is it non-recursive, requiring material precaution? And where is non-recursive risk being falsely used as justification for constellating interrecursive domains? This last question is the crucial one, because it names the mechanism by which constellating spreads beyond its legitimate range: the existence of real non-recursive risks (traffic, disease, physical danger) is used as a pretext to constallate also interrecursive domains (social interaction, free play, independent exploration), domains where constellating is not only unnecessary but actively prevents the development of exactly the capacities that navigating interrecursive dynamics requires.
3.4 The Development Paradox
Rosa sees that children need situations in order to develop. He sees also that the reduction of scope for manoeuvre endangers this development. But he does not fully grasp the depth of the paradox.
The paradox is this: constellations eliminate the conditions under which the capacities required for situated acting can emerge. Systems that depend on human judgement systematically reduce the opportunities to develop that judgement. This is not a gradual loss. It is a structural contradiction. And it has a specific mechanism that Rosa describes but does not fully theorize.
What children learn in free play is not simply "judgement" in a general sense. What they learn, in LVT terms, is interrecursive fluidity: the capacity to move flexibly between recursivity levels, to escalate when threatened, and to return to rest when the threat has resolved. The child playing on an unregulated playground is cycling through the regulatory arc that LVT identifies as the basic structure of healthy coordination: calm L1 baseline, threat or challenge, escalation of attention and strategy, resolution, return to calm. Each pass through this cycle trains the capacity to complete it more quickly, more precisely, and more appropriately the next time.
When this cycle is suppressed through constellating, when play becomes rule-governed, supervised, and risk-free, what is eliminated is not simply a risk. What is eliminated is the opportunity to develop the capacity to manage risk. Systems that remove interrecursive challenge from childhood do not produce safer adults. They produce adults who have less interrecursive competence and who therefore find the interrecursive demands of adult life more overwhelming, and who consequently demand more rules, which further reduces interrecursive challenge for the next generation. The self-reinforcing nature of this loop is the development paradox in its full structural form.
4. What a More Differentiated Framework Reveals
4.1 Situations as Multi-Mediated Interrecursive Configurations
Rosa's concept of situation, inspired by Schmitz, is phenomenologically correct: situations are open, unclosable, internally diffuse. But it can be made more precise. A situation is a configuration in which several mediations, embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multimateriality, multisymbolization, operate simultaneously, and in which coordination proceeds through living interrecursive attunement among the participants. The openness of the situation does not derive from a lack of determinacy but from the fact that multi-mediated coordination cannot be fully predetermined. Too many dimensions interact simultaneously, and the interaction is interrecursive: the participants respond to one another, interpret one another, and continuously adjust. The constitutive imprecision that Schmitz identifies at the edges of situations is the surface appearance of this deeper structure.
4.2 Constellations as Symbolic Stabilizations
Constellations, correspondingly, are not simply rule systems. They are domains in which coordination has been stabilized through symbolic systems that displace the need for living interrecursive mediation. This happens through what LVT calls demedialization: the progressive stripping of mediations at increasing levels of symbolic abstraction. When an administrative system processes a case, the applicant's embodiment is reduced to a file number, their being-with to a family status, their dwelling to an address, their multimateriality to an income. What remains is a symbolic configuration that is internally coherent but has lost most of its mesocosmic reality.
Rosa describes this loss vividly with the form-filling example. But he cannot name the mechanism. LVT can: it is differential demedialization, the uneven loss of mediations at rising levels of abstraction. Numerical relations survive abstraction relatively well. Embodiment and being-with collapse early. Dwelling is partially preserved. The pattern is predictable, but only if one has a differentiated theory of mediation.
4.3 Ontological Fit as the Criterion
The decisive question then becomes structural: where can symbolic stabilization replace living interrecursive mediation, and where can it not?
The answer is not a question of degree. It is a question of ontological fit. In non-recursive, materially stable domains with isolable variables, constellating can achieve high ontological fit. Accounting, logistics, standardized production: here the structure of the symbolic system and the structure of the domain correspond. The compression loses little that is relevant to coordination. In interrecursive, multi-mediated domains with genuine mutual responsiveness, the ontological fit of constellating is low. The compression loses not only detail: it loses the dimensions that constitute the domain. A care act reduced to a protocol is not a compressed care act. It is something different in kind. The person providing care according to a strict protocol has become an executor. The person receiving care according to a strict protocol has become a case. What was an interrecursive encounter has become a non-recursive transaction. Rosa senses this limit everywhere in the book. He cannot draw it sharply because he lacks the concept of ontological fit.
5. Transactive Dualism and the Modern Demand for Rules
There is a structural explanation for why the direct rule-governance of interrecursive domains has become so pervasive in precisely those societies that formally value individual autonomy most highly. LVT calls this structure transactive dualism, and it connects Rosa's diagnosis to a much longer historical arc.
In hierarchical social orders, feudalism, caste systems, rigidly stratified societies, interrecursivity is managed through asymmetric role-assignment. The lord and the serf do not face each other as symmetrical recursive agents. Their interaction is pre-structured by a symbolic hierarchy that specifies who defers to whom, who speaks first, who has authority. The interrecursivity is real, but its management is built into the social structure before the encounter begins. The hierarchy orders the interrecursive field in advance.
Transactive dualism, the Enlightenment principle that all agents are formally equal and should engage through symmetrical, rule-governed exchange, removes this hierarchical ordering. Two formally equal agents face each other with no pre-assigned roles, no built-in deference, no prior symbolic framework to manage the interaction. The interrecursivity is fully exposed. Each agent must read the other from scratch. Each is simultaneously reader and read, interpreter and interpreted, with no asymmetry to simplify the dynamics. This condition is extraordinarily demanding. And in the absence of sufficient interrecursive competence, explicit rules rush in to fill the vacuum.
This is why Rosa's problem emerges specifically in modern liberal societies and not in feudal ones. Feudal societies had interrecursivity too, but it was ordered hierarchically. The lord did not need a consent framework for interactions with the serf: not because consent did not matter, but because the hierarchical structure pre-assigned the terms of the encounter. It is precisely the principle of equality and fairness, the insistence that no prior hierarchy should determine the terms of encounter, that exposes interrecursivity in its full, unmanaged form. And it is this exposure that produces the demand for rules.
The irony is exact: the same civilisational principle that liberated interrecursivity from hierarchical ordering also created the conditions under which its direct rule-governance became felt as necessary. The fast-food employee's problem is not that the institution is malicious. It is that formal equal treatment, which is a genuine moral achievement, eliminates the discretionary space within which situated interrecursive judgement could previously operate. The safeguarding protocol that prevents the employee from giving the girl a new burger is the egalitarian answer to a problem that informal managerial discretion once handled, unjustly but effectively. Rosa is right that something important is lost. LVT specifies what it is: the scope for interrecursive fluidity within a symmetrical encounter that is formally governed by non-recursive rules.
6. The Gruffalo and the Pedagogy of the Situation
At this point a seemingly oblique comparison becomes illuminating. Rosa's concern is with the disappearance of situations in which children can learn to coordinate interrecursively. He describes how the scope for manoeuvre is shrinking, how playgrounds are regulated, interactions supervised, and risks eliminated. He sees that children must learn in situations, not constellations. Living Value Theory has analysed exactly this pedagogy through an unexpected object: Julia Donaldson's and Axel Scheffer's The Gruffalo.
The book constructs a mesocosm, the deep dark wood, organized entirely around paths, encounters, and eating. Every encounter is metabolically charged: who eats whom? The five irreducible mediations are fully shared: all animals have comparable bodies, inhabit the same forest, speak the same language. The only variable that distinguishes the agents from one another is their level of interrecursive competence.
The mouse operates a recursive loop above its antagonists. It invents the Gruffalo: a symbolic entity assembled from mesocosmically plausible elements, claws for catching, teeth for eating, size for dominance. But the Gruffalo is not an arbitrary invention. Every detail is constrained by metabolic necessity and mesocosmic plausibility: eyes for seeing, a mouth for eating, legs for chasing. The mouse does not invent outside the world. It recombines and amplifies what the shared world already contains.
The mouse reads each predator's intention correctly, but crucially does not articulate this recognition. This is a point of decisive importance for which Rosa's framework has no equivalent. The mouse does not say "you want to eat me." It responds within the surface frame: "It is terribly kind of you, Fox, but no: I am meeting a Gruffalo." This strategic non-articulation, the deliberate separation between what one understands and what one shows, is one of the most demanding interrecursive competences available. And a three-year-old follows this dynamic with ease.
The story stages an entire deception ecology. Every predator in the deep dark wood conceals lethal intent behind hospitable language. The fox says "come and have lunch in my underground house" while intending to eat the mouse. Deception is not exceptional in this world: it is the baseline communicative strategy of the mesocosm. And the mouse demonstrates something more sophisticated still: it reads the deception correctly while maintaining the fiction of ordinary social encounter. This separation between what one knows and what one shows is a uniquely interrecursive competence. It has no counterpart in non-recursive domains, where there is nothing to conceal, and only a limited counterpart in self-recursive domains. It is precisely the kind of competence that explicit rules are designed to eliminate, by demanding transparency and the closure of the gap between understanding and expression.
The mouse also maintains its composure throughout, which is not simply a psychological achievement but an embodied strategic intervention in the interrecursive field. If the mouse were to tremble, stammer, or flee, the entire construction would collapse. The predators would immediately detect the discrepancy between words and body. The composure is not a character trait. It is a coherence requirement: embodiment and symbolization must remain consistent across all mediations simultaneously. This is what Rosa means when he speaks of the whole person being engaged in a situation: all mediations are active and must be coordinated in real time.
After the threat resolves, the mouse sits down and eats a nut. This final image is not decorative. It is structurally decisive. The mouse does not remain vigilant. It does not continue strategizing. It returns to calm embodied L1 coordination. The interrecursive escalation was temporally bounded, purposeful, and metabolically expensive, and once its purpose was served, the costly higher-level processing was released. This is the regulatory arc that LVT identifies as the basic structure of healthy interrecursive functioning: calm baseline, threat, escalation, resolution, return to calm. The pathologies are failures of cycling. Under-escalation: failing to detect interrecursive dynamics, taking language at face value, the Gruffalo's condition. Over-escalation: chronic vigilance, inability to return to baseline, persistent strategic monitoring even when the situation has resolved, the condition of chronic stress analysed elsewhere in this body of work. Maladaptive escalation: going too high, to meta-meta-recursive analysis, in a situation that demands immediate action, producing paralysis rather than survival.
The book trains this arc under controlled conditions. The child is in what LVT calls the safe engagement band: a zone in which the learner is in a fundamentally low-threat baseline state while being confronted with simulated challenges that produce manageable misalignments. Not too much threat, or survival strategy overwhelms everything. Not too little, or there is no engagement. Exactly in between, interrecursive fluidity is trained. And the child must be in an L1 baseline state to enjoy the story at all. The care of the reading, the holding, the familiar voice, the protected space, is not incidental. It is a structural precondition of the learning. Rosa is right that children learn in situations. LVT specifies the architecture of the situation that permits this learning: a secure baseline, a controlled deviation, an interrecursive challenge, and a return to calm.
The story teaches through enactment rather than explanation. The child does not receive a lecture on interrecursivity and metabolic limits. It learns by being the mouse: by identifying with the most vulnerable agent and experiencing how symbolic competence can temporarily reverse embodied asymmetry. And this is exactly what constellations cannot achieve. They can transmit rules. They cannot simulate the living interrecursive coordination that Rosa calls acting. For that, one needs situations. Or, in the protected space of the shared imagination, stories.
7. What Rosa Sees and What He Does Not
Rosa's book succeeds as a phenomenological diagnosis, as a sociological warning, and as a conceptual provocation. It falls short as a fully articulated theory of coordination, as a differentiated analysis of mediation, and as a determination of the limits of symbolization.
What he sees: that acting is disappearing, that scope for manoeuvre is shrinking, that the capacity for situated judgement is under threat.
What he does not see, or does not differentiate sufficiently: that different domains have categorically different relationships to constellating. Some domains can and should be constellated, because constellating genuinely improves coordination within them. Accounting, financial regulation, standardized procedures for non-recursive processes: here symbolic governance achieves high ontological fit. Other domains structurally cannot be fully constellated, not because the rules are not yet good enough, but because their structure does not support the kind of stability that constellating presupposes. Care, teaching, play, therapeutic encounter: these are interrecursive domains whose value is constituted precisely by the mutual responsiveness that constellating displaces.
The limit between these does not run along a continuum from more situation to more constellation. It runs along the question of whether the ontological fit between symbolic system and domain is adequate. And this question cannot be asked without a differentiated theory of the three recursive registers.
What Rosa also does not see, despite providing all the material for it: that not all risk is of the same kind, and not all risk can be addressed through the same means. Non-recursive risks require material precaution. Interrecursive risks require the development of interrecursive competence. When the existence of genuine non-recursive risk, traffic, disease, physical danger, is used as justification for constellating interrecursive domains, the result is not greater safety but the systematic prevention of the competence development that managing interrecursive risk requires.
There is also a hierarchy inversion that Rosa's framework cannot name. High-status symbolic systems tend to eliminate interrecursivity. Mathematics, formal logic, legal code, algorithmic decision-making: the systems that carry the greatest epistemic and institutional prestige are precisely those that have achieved generality by suppressing the interrecursive dimension. They achieve their authority by making the domain hold still. Low-status symbolic forms tend to preserve interrecursivity. Children's stories, folk wisdom, proverbs, gossip, unstructured play, everyday conversation: the forms that carry least epistemic prestige are precisely those that maintain the full interrecursive structure of lived coordination. Proverbs already encode the ontology, "grant me the wisdom to know the things I can change and the things I cannot" already contains the distinction between non-recursive and recursive domains, but they do so at a level that carries no institutional authority. This inversion is itself a product of the same epistemological bias that drives constellating: if the most valuable knowledge is the kind that can be stated as a rule, then domains that resist rule-governance appear deficient, pre-modern, in need of formalization.
8. From Executing Back to Acting?
Rosa's normative intention is clear: he wants to defend and expand the space of acting. Against the tendency to constellate, he calls for the rediscovery of situations, the cultivation of trust, the appreciation of ambiguity and indeterminacy. This is sympathetic. But it remains programmatic as long as the analytical distinctions are missing.
With the conceptual apparatus of LVT, Rosa's programme can be translated into more concrete questions.
In which domains does constellating achieve high ontological fit, and should be maintained because it genuinely improves coordination? Standardized procedures for financially non-recursive transactions, medical protocols for reproducible interventions, administrative frameworks for distributing non-recursive entitlements: these are domains where the compression loses little that matters, and where the alternative to constellating is not situated wisdom but arbitrary inconsistency.
In which domains does it achieve low ontological fit, and should be rolled back because it destroys the dimensions that constitute the domain? Care, therapeutic encounter, teaching, free play, friendship, parenting, political deliberation: these are interrecursive domains where the introduction of protocols and scripts does not support coordination but displaces it. Here the appropriate response is not better protocols but the restoration of scope for interrecursive fluidity.
Where are non-recursive risks being used as a pretext for constellating interrecursive domains? The identification of this mechanism is analytically prior to any normative response, because without it one cannot distinguish legitimate safety precaution from constellative overreach. The fence that protects children from traffic is appropriate. The supervision protocol that prevents children from negotiating the rules of their own game is constellative overreach masquerading as safety.
And how can situations be consciously designed that train interrecursive fluidity? Not by abolishing all rules, but by creating safe engagement bands with controlled deviations: situations that provide a secure baseline while introducing manageable interrecursive challenges and allowing the regulatory arc, escalation and return to calm, to complete. The Gruffalo is a model of exactly this architecture. Free play in unregulated environments is another. The teaching situation at its best is a third, when the teacher introduces a genuine problem that exceeds the student's current capacity, holds the space safely enough for the student to engage with it, and allows the engagement to reach its own resolution.
These questions cannot be answered with Rosa's own conceptual apparatus. But they are the questions that must be answered if the diagnosis is to become action-guiding.
9. Conclusion
Hartmut Rosa's Situation und Konstellation asks the right question: what is lost when acting is replaced by executing?
The answer the book gives is phenomenologically persuasive and sociologically instructive. But it remains underdifferentiated, because Rosa lacks the conceptual tools to determine where the limit between constellatable and non-constellatable domains runs, what exactly is lost in constellating, and why some forms of loss are inevitable and others avoidable.
What Living Value Theory adds is not an alternative diagnosis but a deepening of the existing one. It supplies the mediational theory that Rosa lacks. It supplies the distinction between non-recursive, self-recursive, and interrecursive domains. It supplies the concept of ontological fit that makes the limit of constellating determinable. It supplies, through the analysis of the Gruffalo, a concrete model of how the pedagogy of the situation actually works: not through abstract openness but through controlled deviation, interrecursive challenge, and return to calm. And it supplies, through the concept of transactive dualism, a structural explanation of why modern liberal societies specifically produce the demand for direct rule-governance of interrecursive domains: because formal equality, which is a genuine moral achievement, exposes interrecursivity in its full, unmanaged form, and explicit rules are the symmetrical substitute for the hierarchical ordering that equality rightly dismantled.
Rosa is right that the disappearance of situations is a problem. But to understand this problem, one must distinguish: what can be replaced, what is currently being replaced, and what can never be replaced. Without these distinctions, the critique, as Rosa himself might put it, remains more constellative than situative: a rule-governed diagnosis that cannot, from its own resources, repair what it describes.
With them it becomes visible that modernity does not simply eliminate situations. It redistributes them: stabilizing some domains and leaving others irreducibly open. And it is precisely in these remaining domains, in care, in teaching, in play, in narrative, in the encounter between persons who face each other as genuine agents, that what no constellation can ever fully supply continues to be needed.
That something has a name. It is interrecursive fluidity. And it begins where a mouse walks through a deep dark wood.
References
Donaldson, Julia, and Axel Scheffer. 1999. The Gruffalo. London: Macmillan.
Ecks, Stefan. 2022. Living Worth: Value and Values in Global Pharmaceutical Markets. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ecks, Stefan. 2026. Interrecursivity: Social Theory's Missing Concept. livingvaluetheory.org.
Haidt, Jonathan, and Greg Lukianoff. 2018. The Coddling of the American Mind. New York: Penguin.
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rosa, Hartmut. 2005. Beschleunigung: Die Veranderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Rosa, Hartmut. 2016. Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Rosa, Hartmut. 2026. Situation und Konstellation. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Schmitz, Hermann. 2011. Der Leib. Berlin: De Gruyter.