Abstract
Creating, playing, listening are not ways of coping with an external object. Music only exists where it takes place: in the musical experience itself. In view of this, writing on music less consists in reporting on a performance than in making it exist differently, by prolongating, connecting, enhancing the experience. Reciprocally, to live such moments necessarily supports any writing on music, even indirectly—including the sociologist’s one. Drawing on authors ranging from Certeau and Marin to James and Souriau may help account for such constitutive relations between writing on music, and loving or practicing it, in modes other than ascetic distancing or poetic waxing. In hindsight, Hennion actually feels that he has less done a sociology of music than written a sociology from music. In a tentative way, here he proposes to connect closely a writing and the experience that it tries to translate, on two cases: learning to sing (a personal experience), and an interview with a jazz player. The latter’s original view of improvisation surprisingly echoes Souriau’s powerful concept of the “work-to-be-done”. The phrase does not banally recall that artworks are always born again, but that unaccomplished worlds call for our support. Far from the prevalent scientism, why would not such a demanding work also concern the sociology of art?
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Notes
- 1.
On his return from the United States, Certeau had no post either at a university or at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and was welcomed for a year by the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI). As a very new researcher at the CSI, I had to critique his article ‘Croire: une pratique de la différence’ in his presence, which I did by comparing it with the revival of baroque music.
- 2.
Shortly before his premature death, we invited him to the CSI seminar series to discuss his book L’Opacité de la peinture (1989). I will return to this exceptional work below.
- 3.
As commentators on Weber keep futilely reminding us, his famous warning does not demand that the sociologist stick to the facts and forswear value judgements. It maintains the opposite: since facts and values are inseparable, the sociologist’s duty is to make her values explicit and public, thus creating the possibility of choosing other values, rather than dissimulating them beneath neutral statements that claim to be factual. Thus, I. Kalinowski (2005) prefers to talk of the ‘non-imposition of values’ while J.-P. Grossein in his discussion of the French translation of Gesinnung as disposition rightly emphasizes the kinship between Weber and pragmatism.
- 4.
‘Treating art as not so very different from other kinds of work’ (Art Worlds 1982, pp. ix–x).
- 5.
L’œuvre de l’art—the ‘work of the art’, and not The Work of Art as the English title (1997) says—is the elegant title of G. Genette’s book in French, by which he means the ongoing work, the putting into motion, the ‘getting something done’ that can only be grasped in an infinite series of revisits and reworkings. I will come back to this theme with Souriau.
- 6.
To speak of involving objects without speaking of them, authors in the social sciences have become virtuoso preface writers in which they reveal their personal considerations before continuing, in the company of their anonymous reader, an equally anonymous work that is thus exempted from such considerations.
- 7.
The word is probably fitting, provided that we take it in James’ rehabilitated meaning of belief as a necessary and primal relationship with the world, including in the scientific method: see ‘The Will to Believe’ (1897).
- 8.
On the origins of sociology as a theory of belief, see Hennion (2015a, chap. 1, ‘Lasting Things’, pp. 15–38).
- 9.
This is the power of the [REP] mode proposed by Latour in his inquiry into modes of existence (2013).
- 10.
Callon defends the French term agencement, which he takes from Deleuze (Callon 2013, pp. 425–426), as being greatly preferable to the inert and undifferentiated assemblage used in English translations (and now used back in French!). Playing a sonata, running a 100-metre race, cooking, looking after the sick or making a park bloom is to endlessly sculpt myriad details, each of which enables the others to stand out more, and to serve in their turn as footholds—all of which is better suggested by the term agencement. Reciprocally, the precious English word ‘agency’ has no easy French translation.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
On this subject, see the critical review of the use of the term performance in Hennion (2014).
- 15.
‘The work’s complete trajectory, from its first appearance to its achievement (which is total alienation), cannot be considered an execution or expression or gradual manifestation of an original project: to believe that would be to be unaware of and abolish the efficacy of the acts of this dialectical progress by question-and-answers’ (Souriau 1955, p. 257).
- 16.
He is referencing Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew, which represents the saint as a stenographer busy writing down an angel’s dictation.
- 17.
‘The power to create oneself and the act of doing so exist even in beings who … seem to have been created by others, such as works of art’ (Souriau 1955, pp. 279–280).
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Hennion, A. (2019). Objects, Belief, and the Sociologist: The Sociology of Art as a Work-To-Be-Done. In: Smudits, A. (eds) Roads to Music Sociology. Musik und Gesellschaft. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_4
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