Objects, Belief, and the Sociologist: The Sociology of Art as a Work-To-Be-Done
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 di
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conference combining music and social sciences to celebrate the Vienna Institute’s fiftieth anniversary invites each of us to re-examine our own trajectories. In hindsight, I feel that I have not so much worked in music sociology as written a sociology from the perspective of music. I would like to use this occasion to explore that issue further and revisit the curious relationship that the sociology of art has with its object. Musical experiences (creating, playing, the amateur’s enjoyment) are not internal or personal but are the very site of music. Is it possible to recognize the constitutive relationship between writing about music and the practice of music by any other means than that of necessary distancing or personal outpouring? In tackling this difficult question, I would like to place myself under the benevolent gaze of the late and great authors who have shaped my work: Michel de Certeau1 and Louis Marin2 in my early days, and later William James and Étienne Souriau. Of course, putting experiences into
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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. 2Shortly 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.
A. Hennion (*) MINES Paris Tech, PSL Research University, Paris, Frankreich E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Smudits (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22279-6_4
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writing cannot summarize their process, which is constantly renewing. And yet it is true—as Certeau has shown for history and religion—that this writing contributes to making the experiences exist in other ways, to prolonging and augmenting them, just as such experiences have sustained the writings of the music sociologist that I have also been. I want to experiment by comparing a piece of writing to the experience that it aims to transcribe within two situations: learning to sing (based on my own case) and an interview with a jazz improviser. Astonishingly, the concept of improvisation provided by the jazz musician echoes Souriau’s powerful and original definition of the ‘work-to-be-done (oeuvre à faire)’, which I will discuss in my conclusion. By making such connections, I show the possibility and necessity of a sociology of art that is far removed from today’s reigning scientism—a sociology of art that ensures it is equal to the works produced, and especially to what those works call for: the worlds whose possibility they affirm. How could this appeal of the artwork not concern the sociology of art?
1 Mediation as
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