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 At the end, this makes the book look like old stuff covertly using an outdated theory!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 science and technology studies (STS). The issue in La Passion musicale was not to use notions designed in relation to the particular problems of science, technology, and markets: translation (on translation vs. mediation, see Hennion 2016), allies, problematization, obligatory passage points, intéressement, enrolment (Callon 1986). It was to offer a specific analysis that, starting from the same emergent approach (namely, how to build a sociology able to take into account people’s objects of concern, while respecting their plurality) would help provide new insights on art and culture—and in particular, in the case of music, better comprehend mediation.

In 300 pages of my book, one will not really find a clear definition of mediation (William James mocked the illusory ‘definitional obsession’): if I say that it is any sort of means, reducible neither to its causes nor to its effects, would that help? It is something on which to lean, that makes something happen; it is also something that stops the course of things, that makes a difference, by resisting, forcing to go beyond, without being determining. In a wide range of specific forms (from performance to teaching, from history to the love for music), this is what is developed throughout the book.

Why mediation, and why music, then? After Sudnow’s wonderful little book (1978), the least musician among sociologists knows what playing the piano is about. Fingers, body, scores and instruments, learning and training, scales and chords, previous performances and recordings, styles and history; but also the situation, feeling the audience, following an emerging idea … : everything counts, in its minute details; at the same time, nothing guarantees a result. Playing music is making it; music is nowhere else than in its own means. It is thus an excellent case to get out of the devastating binary choice that we inherit from the social sciences: it proves impossible to take music either for a mere support to social rites (of distinction, power, identity …), as if there were no object there; but neither is it possible to analyse it as a world of autonomous works that performers would only play and media only record.

The very existence of music depends on the attention and support it will receive from an audience. This dramatically highlights its very peculiar ontology, as a work ‘to be done’. This formula means, first, that it must each time be played again, but more profoundly, it means that each time, it has to be heard again: this ‘to be done’ is not a necessity, but a call for being performed, addressed to virtual beings (Souriau 1956). What I underline here is that it is by being as specific as possible that an analysis of music, art, or culture may build bridges with STS, or other kind of studies. Living an experience together; elaborating bodily and sensory abilities that in return make works more present, and that produce common feelings; sharing attachments both during an immediate performance and across a history of forging collectives by amateurs or fans: for thinking our relations to objects, does not all this at once raise issues and provide resources that are quite different from the case of science in-the-making? Contrasting cases is more enlightening than confusing them. To say it another way, my book is deeply Latourian, not because it would use the codes of ANT. It is Latourian, instead, because it could have inspired, in part at least, Latour’s subsequent work to differentiate enunciation regimes and, in particular, to forge the ‘mode of existence’ that, in order to restate fiction and art, he later spelled [FIC] (Latour 2013).

Part 1 of the book is a substantial re-reading of social historians, art historians, and sociologists of art and culture. But it is not a mandatory bibliography for specialists. Those pages are central to the argument: I did not mean to oppose a new, abstract theory of mediation to my forerunners. Rather, quite like an ethnomethodologist might do, I tried to outline the many contradictory ethnotheories that such erudite writers were forced to elaborate, willy-nilly, in order to connect art and society. Far from simply summarizing the work of the authors that I reviewed, this made me show in my own terms the practical use of mediation that they had to implement, most often far away from their explicit claims. I am not so sure, for example, that every student in sociology already realizes that Durkheim’s semiotic conception of ‘cultural mediators’ is self-contradictory—thousands of signifiers for the same signified: society! Nor that his last book on religion opened the way to a completely different, nearly performative view of mediation—and quickly closed it … Nor—another example—would a reader expect this first part of the book to end on a 20-page paradoxical homage to Adorno, the pope of the radical refusal of mediation in art, which reinterprets his book on Mahler not (as Adorno claims) as a rich meditation on the ‘Work Itself’, in all its negative autonomy, but as an amateur’s rare and brilliant account of himself, filled with subtle and convincing mediations—that is, the very approach Adorno fought against throughout his life!

Finally, the ‘empirical’ chapters that follow the first part of the book are not autonomous case studies. They systematically unfold various aspects of the mediation perspective: history, teaching, the media, genres, scenes, and so on. For instance, the two chapters on Bach and amateurs, added for this edition, are not hidden actualizations of the book. Issued from inquiries made just after the Passion (and then published elsewhere in French), they are much closer to its problematics than early materials left in the 1993 version. More importantly, they address two especially thorny issues in the sociology of culture: first, how can we deal with ‘big names’, and second, how can we address the active role of publics, without simply being content with showing that genius is a ‘social construction’ and that audiences are determined by their social origins? Still today, such developments are quite unexplored ones, far from ideas that since have become widely shared in STS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Antoine Hennion is a Professor at Mines ParisTech and the former Director of the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI, 1994–2002). His research in the sociology of music and culture focuses on the cultural industries, advertising and design, mediators, services, and users. At the CSI, he promoted a problematization of mediation crossing cultural sociology and science and technology studies (STS). He is now developing a pragmatist approach to diverse forms of attachment, from taste and amateurs’ practices to issues about care, aging and disability, and migrants.

ORCID

Antoine Hennion http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9602-3746