Antoine Hennion

A sociology of attachment: music amateurs, drug users

After describing objects as networks, we attempt to describe ‘subject-networks’. Instead of focusing on capacities inherent in a subject, we attend instead to the tactics and techniques which make possible the emergence of a subject as it enters a ‘dispositif’. Opting for an optimistic analysis of Foucault, we consider ‘dispositifs’ and their constraints to be generative: they do not simply reduce but also reveal and multiply. The generative power of ‘dispositifs’ depends upon their capacity to create and make use of new capacities in the persons who pass through them. Drawing upon a diverse body of literature and upon fieldwork among drug addicts and music amateurs, we show how this point of entry into the question of the subject immediately and irredeemably undoes traditional dichotomies of sociology. It becomes impossible to continue to set up oppositions like those of agent/structure, subject/object, active/passive, free/determined. We also have to look beyond studies of ‘action’ and describe ‘events’. Through the words and trials of the music and drug lovers, it becomes clear that the subject can emerge as she actively submits herself to a collection of constraints. These actors describe necessary yet tentative techniques of preparation to produce this ‘active passion’, this form of ‘attachment’ which we attempt to describe as that which allows the subject to emerge—never alone, never a pristine individual, but rather always entangled with and generously gifted by a collective, by objects, techniques, constraints.

Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology

The idea of reflexivity has much to offer to the analysis of taste - but reflexivity in its ancient sense, a form neither active nor passive, pointing to an originary state where things, persons, and events have just arrived, with no action, subject or objects yet decided. Objects of taste are not present, inert, available and at our service.They give themselves up, they shy away, they impose themselves. ‘Amateurs’ do not believe things have taste. On the contrary, they make themselves detect them, through a continuous elaboration of procedures that put taste to the test. Understood as reflexive work performed on one’s own attachments, the amateur’s taste is no longer considered (as with so-called ‘critical’ sociology) an arbitrary election which has to be explained by hidden social causes. Rather, it is a collective technique, whose analysis helps us to understand the ways we make ourselves sensitized, to things, to ourselves, to situations and to moments, while simultaneously controlling how those feelings might be shared and discussed with others.

An Intermediary Between Production and Consumption: The Producer of Popular Music:

Trying to reduce the divide between culture and science, this article follows the producer of popular records, as an interface between music and its market. Like the innovator when he does not obey scientific, technical, and commercial reasons in succession, but reshapes them all together through a double task of giving its form to the product and the interesting people within it, the producer represents the public to the artist and the music to the media. First in a local scale, then in larger and larger ones, alone with the singer, in the studio, and into the media, this sociology of the intermediary shows the producer experimentally organizing, as in a laboratory, a complete production-consumption cycle. Success is then not the mysterious leap to the public, but the last extension of an equation into which the public has been incorporated in many forms from the very beginning.

Baroque and rock: Music, mediators and musical taste

Abstract Sociologists have focused on the human components of the art production system (professions, market, institutions) and have deliberately ignored the question of the aesthetic value of the works. The paper tries to show how sociology can talk of “music itself”, if not directly in terms of aesthetic content or social authenticity, in terms of the way in which, by rejecting some mediators and promoting others, both music and its social meaning are collectively constructed and “inscripted” into material devices. Focusing on the controversies concerning mediums gives an empirical insight into the principles actors adopt to define the “authenticity” of their music. I look at the impact such human and non-human intermediaries as the types of instruments used and the way performances are staged have on music produced in the field of the Baroque “revival” in France, with a comparison with rock and rap.

Authority as performance: the love of Bach in nineteenth-century France

Abstract Bach was not a ‘modern composer author of the BWV and of the Cantatas Complete Works’ before musicology, the record industry and the modern amateurs. This paper traces the long transformation of what became ‘music’ and how it produced our taste for Bach as a musician, giving him the strange ability of being both the object and the standard of our love for music. Through a study of the use of Bach in a country other than Germany, and from 1800, when Bachs work begins to be published in France, to 1885, the year of his birth Bicentennial, we follow Bachs grandeur as it originates in the zeal of a small circle of his ‘early adopters’, from Chopin to Alkan, from Gounod to Saint-Saens, from Liszt to Franck. We show how, all along the nineteenth century in France, Bach is becoming music: not only a reference, an ancient Master, the statue of the Commendatore in the shadow of whom we write the music of the present time, but a contemporary composer. We show also how the reverse is true: music is ‘becoming Bach’, it is reorganized around his figure (and Beethovens), resting on their production. Bach does not integrate an already made musical universe: he produces it, partially, through the invention of a new taste for music.

L'attività riflessiva dell'amatore: Un approccio pragmatico al gusto

The paper offers a perspective on taste which tries to overcome what is now the hegemonic view within the social sciences and which conceives of taste as social distinction or differentiation. It ultimately aims to show the limits of a detached and ascetic reading of taste wherein objects loose their specificity and merely become an excuse for the reproduction of standardized forms of social distinction. To do so it concentrates on the case of wine, focussing on the way the amateur develops his or her relationship with this historically and culturally rich drink. If some amateurs use blind tasting in order to ensure their taste is the only result of the wine expression emptied of any social influence, most of them do not try to disentangle the experience of wine drinking from its «social context», nor to control the experience itself in order to provide appreciation by detachment from the object. On the contrary, the «context» provides them a lot of resources to arrange specifically each various drinking opportunity. Other amateurs engage their subjectivity in the experience of wine drinking by forms of self-government which entail self-reflexivity and a thematization of their own amateurship. At the end, wine loving appears as a reflexive and equipped activity which admits many formats selectively grounded on the object, the drinker and collectives. Trying to escape both critical indifference and objective difference, the paper argues that sociologists have much to learn on taste from the forms of knowledge and activity displayed by the amateur.

Musiques, présentez-vous ! Une comparaison entre le rap et la techno

Les musiques nouvelles sont déjà très fortement accompagnées de discours sociaux – jeunesse, révolte, immigration, banlieue, violence, fête, drogue, etc. Au lieu de critiquer et de reformuler pour notre compte ces commentaires, nous avons tenté de mettre en scène leur efficace, en montant une experience collective, destinée à comparer en situation la façon dont le rap et la techno pouvaient ‘se’ présenter: au lieu de prétendre déterminer depuis telle ou telle discipline le sens et le contenu d’une musique, il s’agissait, sur un mode pragmatique, de voir se combiner et se co-construire les éléments divers – discursifs et gestuels, corporels et musicaux, scéniques et idéologiques (en particulier sur le plan du genre, de la violence, des médias) – qui ‘font’ le rap ou la techno.

Restoring the mediators: a response to Nick Seaver

Under the title ‘Attending to the Mediators’, Nick had a witty idea (Seaver 2017). He proposes to read my book using its own argument: by rendering explicit the mediations that give the book its meaning. There are two ways of conceiving such a task. One is positive, ‘constitutive’: ‘things are what mediations make them be’, full stop. The other more or less explicitly implies a follow-up: ‘things are what mediations make them be ... so they are not what they pretend to be’. The second, critical perspective leads to unveil hidden mediations; it strips the king to show what he really is. The first perspective ‘only’ tracks an always-open, infinite series of heterogeneous mediations. Despite appearances, to me this conception of mediation is ontologically more radical: there is nowhere else to look for any sound objectivity of things. To write his criticism, quite naturally Nick uses the critical perspective. Knowing of Latour and aware of my relation to him, he analyses The Passion for Music as an application of actor-network theory (ANT) to the case of music. This provides many fruitful insights, showing, for instance, how the notion of mediation helps in the analysis of music, using the method that Nick brilliantly summarizes on the new/old baroque case. Such a reading also provides criticism with a two-sided racket: on one side, Nick can consider the book in the light of the many criticisms ANT has received since then, most notably from its founders (Law and Hassard 1999, Latour 2005); on the other side, since ANT is not widely referenced in the book, one can also regret that my problematics are not made explicit. At the end, this makes the book look like old stuff covertly using an outdated theory! But there is a twist here. In my response, I will also play the game of ‘restoring the mediators’, but in my own way. By doing so, I would like to prevent a possible misleading bias. I will give some examples of what may be overlooked by focusing on searching for similarities or differences with ANT. With the benefit of hindsight, I even think that the fact that La Passion did not use ANT is precisely what makes its interest and relevance still today. Let there be no misunderstanding. To say this is not to distance myself from ANT: quite the contrary! I am an early member of the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI). I was very close to ANT. I still am. The book draws heavily on the analytical approach we were exploring during that period. It just does not mean that I applied to music what Callon, Latour, Law, and others have to science and technology. First, this is not historically accurate. In the early 1990s at the CSI, we were collectively forging our arguments, whether about law, science and technology, or culture—our main issues at that time. As early as 1991, Latour even wrote that Nous n’avons jamais été modernes was entirely based on my work on mediation (1991, pp. 106–107). This is excessive, of course: reciprocally he inspired me a lot, and for sure I owe him more than the reverse. I mention this to better picture the state of affairs then. ANT was not the stabilized model it became. It was still in the process of making. All this was contemporary. We shared a deep hostility to the way sociology cancelled all objects by considering them to be either, in the case of science and technology, pure things left to natural scientists or, in the case of law or culture, pure artefacts reduced by social scientists to the status of stakes, signs, or beliefs. Music is not science. To take objects seriously did not lead to the same challenges in all cases. The very technical aspect of ANT is often overlooked now that it has spread to many other fields beyond