Attending to the mediators

In the first empirical chapter of The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation, Antoine Hennion describes a longstanding controversy in the performance of Baroque music: How should it be played?

On one side, we find the ‘Moderns’, who represent an interpretive tradition descending from the nineteenth century Classical period. They have steadily updated their interpretations of seventeenth century music, moving it on to new instruments and adjusting rhythms and tunings for contemporary listeners. On the other side we find the ‘Baroques’, anachronistically the more recent group, who insist on recreating, as thoroughly as possible, the original conditions of performance. Because these conditions were abandoned by the Moderns of the past, they need to be recovered, and this recovery involves a lot of scholarly work with various sorts of documents: Baroques hunt for hints in pedagogical treatises, in old reviews, in conductors’ notes, in the history of instrument design, and so on. Hennion analogizes these camps to Catholics and Protestants: the Moderns are catholic, staying faithful to a long chain of interpretive tradition; the Baroques protest and return to the text(s) in an attempt to recover origins.

The Moderns and the Baroques fall into an epistemic tangle that will be familiar to anyone trained in humanistic disciplines: What should we do about the past? Historical reconstruction is challenging, and it is impossible to know if it has been done completely or accurately. But more challenging yet, this concern with historical fidelity is ironically contemporary. Hennion cites Michel de Certeau in an epigraph: ‘The “return to origins” is always a modernism as well’ (p. 165; de Certeau 1988, p. 136). By what standard, then, are we supposed to decide between the Moderns, who espouse a presentism with long historical precedent, and the Baroques, who espouse an historicism that is thoroughly modern?

Rather than weighing in on the controversy itself, Hennion takes the classic Science and Technology Studies approach of ‘controversy studies’, using the dispute as a case that demonstrates a broader point: music essentially depends on a host of ‘non-musical’ mediators to exist. The Baroques, in their tireless hunt for clues that will tell them how music should be played, have made it clear how all music is supported by a network of under-appreciated things. Moderns and Baroques alike work in ‘an intricate loom of threads’ composed of

the most diverse array of mediators of music imaginable […] starting with instruments and scores, of course, but also including its treatises, its traditions, the modes of transmission used in institutes or schools of music and in its formats of distribution, the formal and informal codes governing its composition, performance and aesthetic appreciation, and finally its training and disciplining of the body, through repeated exercises and habits. (p. 203)

Unlike sculptures or paintings, which in their material existence can support the fiction that they are autonomous objects, music ‘must always produce its object through a proliferation of intermediaries, interpreters, instruments, and media’ (p. 1). Hennion writes, ‘It is as though music had been designed with a theory of mediation in mind’ (p. 246). This makes it a useful domain for investigating mediation more generally, and that is what Hennion has set out to do, both in The Passion for Music and across his entire oeuvre.

Hennion’s discussion of early music performance provides a useful prism for making sense of the book in which it appears – not only because Baroque concerns occupy half of the empirical material. Rather, contemporary readers encountering this book are encountering something from the past, and this poses some interpretive challenges. Following Hennion’s lead, we will find our way by attending to the mediators.

The Passion for Music was originally published in 1993, in French, as La Passion Musicale, derived from Hennion’s 1991 doctoral dissertation. After several aborted attempts to translate the book into English and a revision of the French text in 2007, the book has finally made it to anglophone readers, 22 years after it was written. I say ‘finally’ advisedly, as many of the ideas contained within the book have already found their way into English via other publications and their translations, and through Hennion’s wide influence on sociologists of music who have read the work in the original. (Some notable examples include Born [2005] and DeNora [2000], also the book’s series editor.) Hennion’s scholarship has been significant and influential, turning the attention of sociologists of music to the everyday situations in which music happens – to the pragmatics of taste, and away from abstract social causes that leaves the objects, techniques, and experiences of music behind. It is thanks to this wide network of influence that the present translation has come into existence.

This book, Hennion declares in a new preface, is his ‘most original contribution to the field’ (p. x) and the origin point for most of his work since. Thus, he notes that he has intentionally resisted the temptation to update the book’s arguments: ‘a book belongs to its time. Its insights, arguments and conclusions, but also its blind spots and obsessions, are part of its baggage’ (p. ix). So he apologizes for the occasional clumsy argument and for the limited horizons of the bibliography, which has stayed mostly unaltered, like a modest time capsule buried in the early 1990s at the Paris School of Mines’ Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI), where he has long been affiliated. Thanks to the efforts of editor Tia DeNora and the translators Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier, this time capsule has been opened, translated across time and the boundary between anglophone and francophone social science.

Fitting, then, that the book bears the palpable influence of the sociology of translation, the school of science and technology studies founded at the CSI by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, which would coalesce into actor-network theory (ANT). Emphasizing the book’s subtitle, A Sociology of Mediation can be read as an overlooked contribution to ANT in formation, perhaps sidelined for its focus on art over science, but demonstrating the wide aspirations of a school of thought that was in the process of assembling a great network of allies. Although explicit references to ANT are rare in the book, the theory haunts the text, and readers familiar with canonical stories about scallops and non-moderns will hear persistent echoes in Hennion’s treatments of the sociology and history of art.¹

The vague definition of the term ‘mediator’ is one such echo. To pay attention to the mediators is Hennion’s constant refrain, though it is never quite clear what a mediator is (or, perhaps, what a mediator is not). Instead of definitions, we get lists of examples, and this too is an echo of ANT: Latour does the same with ‘actants’, using heterogeneous lists of entities to demonstrate the diversity and hybridity of characters in the world, across scales and domains. Hennion’s lists of mediators fit right in, like ‘well-ordered desks, a dividing instrument, a swivelling teacher’ (p. 225).² This is not necessarily a problem: maybe everything is a mediator, or could be, in the right situation or under the right kind of attention. Mediation, after all, is a process – a relational unfolding that in the hands of theorists like Hennion precedes the objects mediated.³

Hennion’s concern for mediation – for a kind of betweenness that is irreducible to the objects it is between – also echoes the broader concerns of the CSI. In a festschrift paper for Michel Callon, Geoffrey Bowker, who was a contemporary of Hennion’s at the CSI in the 1980s, reflects on the concern for the ‘ontological priority of mediation’ the center inculcated in him (Bowker 2010). And the kind of passions described in the book, which Hennion would come to talk about as ‘attachments’ (Gomart & Hennion 1999; Hennion 2017), resemble what Callon calls interessement, the way that various entities become tied up in each other, like scallops fastened to a rope that has been dropped into a bay by scientists who then become fascinated by the scallops. Interessement draws together interest and interposition (Callon 1986, p. 208), emphasizing the relatedness of attachment and mediation. Hennion’s music lovers do their music loving amidst mediators, and both music and loving provide perfect cases for studying mediation, existing as they do in the in-between.

The Passion for Music comprises nine chapters with a scattering of intermediary ‘Transitions’, a fictionalized auto-ethnographic ‘Intermezzo’ (in which our protagonist abandons his sociological cynicism at a rock show performed by ‘The Mediators’), a theoretical Introduction and Conclusion, and an Epilogue, which dramatically closes the book at Bach’s deathbed, where the great composer dictates his final chorale from the ultimate liminal zone (‘On the frontier of death, he shows how music is born’ [p. 301]). The empirical chapters range over Bach, a children’s solfège lesson, and a set of interviews with music lovers. These are not quite the chapters of the original. Hennion has dispensed with many of the original case studies (and added two that were previously published elsewhere). So, this is not quite the time capsule it was made out to be, and indeed, Hennion says that the book has been ‘comprehensively revised and rewritten’ (p. ix) – a claim which, given his statements about the book’s baggage, is difficult to parse.

The first half of the book is an extensive literature review, in which Hennion works to locate himself amidst sociologists and historians of art and music, clearing a suitably in-between place for his sociology of mediation. On the back cover, Howard Becker describes this as a ‘comprehensive analysis of the bewildering variety of sociological approaches to music that contemporary students of the subject have to choose from’, and one suspects that Becker occupies a peculiar vantage point from which to see it (Hennion’s treatment of Becker’s famous work on art worlds occupies pages 85–89). To this reader, an anthropologist of taste and technique with arm’s-length familiarity with the sociology of art and music, Hennion’s review is comprehensive and bewildering in turn. His writing evinces a dissertation level of familiarity with his theoretical interlocutors, relying on a network of associations not readily available to readers located in other places and times. Whether these are distinctively personal, French, 1990s, or sociology of art, it is difficult to say, but Hennion’s writing often presumes that you already know what it is talking about, which poses interpretive challenges if you do not.

The first chapter, on Durkheim and the evolution of ‘belief’ as a keystone of the sociology of culture, should be readily accessible to anyone with introductory training in the social sciences. The following chapters, on art history, the social history of art, and the sociology of art, would appeal more to specialists already well familiar with the issues in question (pace Becker, who suggests in his blurb that the book serves as an introduction to the field). Their titles, which variously permute the words ‘social’, ‘art’, ‘work’, and ‘history’ are indicative of the style of argument, which we might call ‘geometrical’.⁴ That is to say, Hennion’s argument proceeds through a series of operations on an argumentative field figured as geometrical space. This style is another echo of ANT: readers may recall Latour’s fondness for diagrams that chart out scholarly space, like the linear ‘modern dimension’ in We Have Never Been Modern, from which Latour’s ‘non-modern’ philosophy juts out at 90° (Latour 1993, p. 58).

Hennion regularly makes a similar move in this book, posing sociology on one side, history on another, and his sociology of mediations as a departure from the middle. The text is full of sides and hands, extremes and trends, between which the mediators mediate. For the reader not immediately familiar with the art historians and sociologists in question, it can prove challenging to keep track of the kaleidoscopic progression of reflections, reversals, oppositions, and inversions. Hennion’s diagrams are not always clarifying, though many of their titles draw out the geometrical quality of the argument: ‘linear causalities’, ‘the circle of causalities’, ‘the square of belief’, and ‘a triangle enclosing mediations’. Where the book shines is in the clarity of its transitions and empirical chapters, which are effectively short variations on a simple theme: music lives in mediation and thus provides a model for the social sciences, which should learn to attend to mediators and their processes as fundamental features of social life.

But back to the Baroques: academic research, like music, is constituted by mediators, suspended in webs of interest and attachment, translation and mediation. Following Hennion, we can learn to look at academic work not as the production of relatively autonomous objects – books, dissertations, articles – but as something sustained between and through these mediators and others. Past scholarship, like any scholarship, only reaches its readers thanks to editors, interpretive traditions, libraries, journal subscription packages, and PDF readers. And like Hennion’s Bach lovers, academics are known to form intense attachments to canonical great men – attachments supported by vast networks of persons and things, edited volumes and conferences.

In the preface, Hennion encourages us to the read the book as though it has been gently prised from its historical context and brought across time and language intact, to be considered as an artifact from another time. But the rest of the book suggests that we should not do that, providing analytical equipment to question such claims – to complicate the supposed autonomy of the object, not by revealing that social forces are entirely responsible for its appearance, but by reinstalling it in the web of mediators that sustain it. Thus in this review I’ve tried to locate the work with recourse to its origins, in the scene where its sense was originally made. But this is only half of the story: what kinds of mediators sustain this book now?

We can return to ANT one last time for theoretical assistance: to Latour’s Science in Action and its analysis of citational practice (1987, p. 21–62). Academics consciously build networks of allies in their references, and through these networks, their careers are strengthened and grow. Feminist critics of ANT (e.g. Martin 1998) have noted and critiqued the mercenary qualities of these network-builders, who work like inveterate capitalists or generals, asking whether other goals might be possible. Having established the social quality of citation, scholars such as Ahmed (2013) and Strathern (2005) have raised the figure of citational politics – of the choices involved in making citational relations (or, we might say, in amassing mediators) and the variety of criteria by which one might choose.

Thus it is disappointing to see that the book’s references did not receive the ‘comprehensive revision’ (p. ix) granted to the arrangement of empirical chapters. This was a missed opportunity to locate Hennion’s work in the body of relevant scholarship that has grown over the past 25 years, and which has contributed to Hennion’s present stature. Work by scholars such as DeNora, whose projects, as Hennion notes, ‘chime so well with the premise of the book’ (p. x) constitutes a hidden network of allies that could have been made explicit here. Applying a lesson from Latour, we can think of this submerged network not as the beneficiaries of Hennion’s theoretical prowess, but rather as its distributed creators.

Regarding more material mediations, The Passion for Music is a tremendously expensive Ashgate hardcover, destined not for newcomers to Hennion’s work, but for libraries. There, it may interest scholars curious about the evolution of Hennion’s thought and how he has posed himself in relation to sociology and the history of art; however, the ambiguous extent of the revision makes it an unreliable source for such study. Most readers will be better served by Hennion’s later articles which are more economical and already translated (e.g. Hennion 2007, brought into English by Martha Poon).

Hennion’s work remains of great value to scholars of music, taste, and valuation. His pragmatic approach to attachment helps direct our attention toward the heterogeneity and flux of the scenes in which taste happens, and away from idealized typologies that smother actors’ actions. Yet, while Hennion is sensitive to the networks of mediators that sustain music and art, this sensitivity does not extend to the mediators that sustain the present book. As Hennion does with his Baroques and Moderns, perhaps we can use this shortcoming as a lesson, a reminder to pay attention to the middle, to dedicate our interpretations to tracing the entanglements that hold our objects (and our selves) together. As Hennion (almost) closes his book:

An interpretation should not be an explanation that regresses back towards the single, external, causes that actors seek as much as we do. It should emphasize the irreversible, hybrid constructs which are interspersed between human beings, between things, and between human beings and things: and what [are books] if not that? (p. 294)

Notes

1. Hennion calls this ‘neighbourly and intellectual sympathy’ (p. 10, fn 3; cf. Callon 1986; Latour 1993).

2. Ian Bogost has dubbed these lists ‘Latour Litanies’ (2012) and written a program that uses Wikipedia to generate them randomly (‘Latour Litanizer’). An example output: ‘Walnut Hills Cemetery, Olu Maintain, Spilarctia todara, Derrick Verner, Harburg, Rock Dove Cave, James Marjoribanks, List of Lepidoptera that feed on pines’. Geoffrey Bowker has noted that such lists are also a signature of cybernetic theory, drawing attention to ANT's debt to cybernetic visions of social ontology (Bowker 1993).

3. This is like Karen Barad's ‘intra-action’, a term invented to solve the same problem: how to talk about interaction without having to rely on pre-existing objects as a ground (Barad 2007). Elsewhere, Hennion has made this point grammatically, longing for the Ancient Greek middle voice, which offers an alternative to active and passive voices that does not presuppose subjects and objects (Hennion 2007, p. 106).

4. To wit: ‘Before Mediation: Social Readings of Art’, ‘Sociology and the Art Object: Belief, Illusion, Artefacts’, ‘The Social History of Art: Reinserting the Works into Society’, and ‘The New History of Art: The Social in the Art Work’.